CRANSTON’S NO PG HERO IN ‘SUPERMANSION’
Star is animated about his senior citizen crime fighter in the new Crackle series
BURBANK, CALIF. Bryan Cranston can’t get no respect. At least not on SuperMan
sion, the new stop-motion animated comedy premiering Thursday on Sony’s Crackle streaming service.
Over 13 episodes, the weathered Titanium Rex (Cranston) steers the League of Freedom, a gaggle of deeply flawed heroes (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key, Jillian Bell, Tucker Gilmore and Tom Root, among others) as they bunk together in one sprawling abode with their slightly vicious SuperPets.
Rex’s real fear is being put out to pasture. “His superpowers have diminished with age,” says Cranston, heading into a sound booth for a recording session. “He’s feeling irrelevant, and he has to rekindle that kind of spirit and energy within himself to prove to himself and the government that he’s still a viable asset to fighting crime.”
With SuperMansion, Seth Green, Matthew Senreich and Zeb Wells ( Robot Chicken) are determined to turn the comicbook world on its head.
The profanity-laced script “made me laugh,” says Cranston, also an executive producer.
“We like to take things that are outrageous, like Thor and Iron Man and Captain America, and then say, ‘ What’s it like when those guys eat shawarma?’ ” says Green, who worked with Cranston a decade ago on
Fox’s Malcolm in the Middle.
“This is the mundane in an absurd world,” says Senreich. “We’re dealing with the fact that they have to make dinner.”
Walk around the production offices with Cranston and you find a fanboy’s paradise: 34,500 square feet of space fashioned as tiki bars and pink-striped candy shops.
Veer down a staircase and you pass a veritable arcade of games, from Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles to Donkey Kong. Cranston eyes a Winnebago-turned-office parked inside the log cabin-decorated entryway. “We could make millions!” he growls, in his best Heisenberg.
Irreverence is born here, crafted with 3-D printers, expensive cameras and frame-by-frame motion capture. The result is one of upstart Crackle’s starriest original projects since Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
Senreich says that, exempt of broadcast restrictions, Crackle has given the creative team free rein over Super Mansion’s bawdy content. How deep does SuperMan
sion’s fearless leader’s love of comics go?
“It’s really shallow,” says Cranston, the self-proclaimed “elder statesman” of this crew. His comic-book passions were “Archie and the Green Hornet and Batman and things like that. I’ve been away from it for a long time, whereas these guys never left it. They’re still in the midst of their nerdism.”