Pimping Our Stuff: Twilight of the Midnight Sons

So the new Marvel Super Heroes: What The--?! stop animation extravaganza went up today, and I must say that while I have a special place in my heart for all eight of the little shorts we've produced so far, certainly "Twilight of the Midnight Sons: Twi Harder" makes me beam with pride a bit more than any other.

As always, the real star of the show (besides the toys) is boy genius Alex Kropinak, who spends hours building the sets, customizing the figures, shooting what he needs and then meticulously editing it until you get the incredible final product. Alex is truly a wunderkind and a perfectionist who excels at a very unique job; I stand by my claim that nobody does this better than him and What The--?! is as good as it is primarily because of him.

All that aside (and it's a lot to put aside--seriously, 90-95% of the show is Alex), you may notice myself and Sean T. Collins listed as the primary writers for this episode, and I am quite pleased with the work we did.

I have been campaigning for months, probably nearly since we started What The--?! to do a Twilight parody as it seemed like (to borrow a phrase from my boss, John Cerilli) the lowest hanging fruit around and just itching for a send-up in the style I knew we could do it. I pitched it on numerous occasions in numerous forms, usually to decent response but not enough to get it made. All I knew was that there was comedy to be had in one of Marvel's vampires becoming the object of Twilight-esque female affection, I just didn't know how I wanted to get there (my earliest draft involved Blade becoming a teen idol--I'm glad we didn't go with that).

However, when the entire What The--?! team met recently to map out our next few months worth of episodes, I brought up a skeleton pitch I had refined a bit with Alex's help, noted we had a few weeks until the new Twilight flick, and with the help of my peers, things quickly came together. Morbius became the new lead and we were off to the races (he's such a gross-looking figure there could really be no other choice).

I turned around a plot with the basic dialogue and fired it off to Sean; he tweaked the lines and made sure it all synched up with the source material (since he's actually seen the movie), making it ten times better in the process (credit Sean for the "Twi Harder" portion of the name as well). Me and Alex did some quick voice casting (mad props to Margarita Vaisman for nailing Kitty Pryde--in the "she got the voice of the character" sense, pervs), he worked his magic, and here we are.

I do hope you check out this new episode and enjoy, whether you're a Twilight fan, a hater, or have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm proud of the work and proud of the dudes I worked with; looking very much forward to our next collaboration.