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JUDD WINICK TALKS JUNIPER LEE
On Monday, Judd Winick’s latest creative endeavor becomes a fully-realized project with the debut of The Life & Times of Juniper Lee on Cartoon Network. This isn’t a situation where Winick was slotted into a team already working on a project - Juniper Lee is all his. Soup to nuts, Winick is the creator, co-executive producer, and boss. We sat down with Winick to talk about how someone like him gets his own animated series at Cartoon Network. Newsarama: First off Judd, how did this all get rolling? I’m sure, like most television or film; it wasn’t something that was very quick… Judd Winick: Not at all. When you get down to it, Juniper was years in development, but not exactly what you think. I’ve been developing stuff for animation for a number of years. In about ’92-’93, I developed a show for Nickelodeon that didn’t get picked up, and in ’94, I had a couple of things worked through development that again, didn’t get picked up, and I lost my taste for it for a while. But I knew – and know – a lot of people in animation. It’s actually where I had more experience, other than comics when I first started. I had been doing comic strips and animation, and then comic books came along, and that’s where I ended up landing – happily – for these last few years. But on and off, it’s been the same thing with animation with these people I know at various places – they’d ask me for ideas or if there was anything I was working on, and it was usually a “Not really” from me. The only thing that really caught everyone’s attention was Barry Ween… NRAMA: I’d imagine, given the bent animation has taken with things like Ren and Stimpy, South Park and more…less kid-feeling stuff… JW: Yeah – there’d been a number of nibbles on Barry, but no one that I felt really strongly about asked, and when it came down to it, the bottom line was that I would have to end up changing the show so much that there was no point in it. It would pretty much have to be on cable, and off the beaten path where I could get a little raunchy. I did have an offer from Disney on it, and we kicked it around for a little while and that evaporated, mostly on my end, because I really wasn’t satisfied with the deal they were offering. It was a little rough. The upside of working with Disney is that you get a small piece of a huge pie, and you can make lots and lots of money, but you lose everything else. There’s always that feeling in taking something you made to animation, since animation isn’t a one-person gig – you’ll be giving up a lot, or some, and coming from creator-owned comics, the thought of giving up that much of something like Barry just struck me as not the best I could do. Anyway – about three years ago, I got a call from Noggin, which is Nickelodeon’s education channel. They of course, were approaching me about Barry Ween, and we had a really quick conversation. We all ended up laughing at the end, but when they called and made their pitch, my first words were “Are you guys kidding me? You’re the educational branch of Nick. Have you seen Barry Ween? I make my science up. It’s Star Trek style bad science on purpose.” They understood, but said they’d love to do something else with me. This was beyond all my friends saying to me, “If you think of something, give me a call.” Noggin was the first one to say, “We want you to do a show for us.” They opened the door, and invited me in, rather than asking me to stop by if I was in the neighborhood. Their offer came at the right time, and I was in the right place for it, so I figured, the hell with it – I’ll give it a shot. JW: True story – my wife and I went out, got hamburgers and got drunk, and kicked around what would be the most fun. We just asked ourselves, what would make for the best show; keeping in mind there would have to be some educational component…somehow. I love magic, I love monsters. I love Hellboy, I love Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, so my first thought as to do something like that. My wife, who’s Asian, came in with the idea that we should have Asian protagonists. She said it should be about sisters, about Asian girls, and Asian family that are actual Asian-Americans. None of this ninja crap. No woodwind instruments and no stereotypical Asian nonsense. They’re American kids of Asian descent, just like my wife, who was born in St. Louis and raised in L.A. That was the show we wanted to do with Noggin. They loved it, and wanted to do it as well, so we started. NRAMA: As simple as that? JW: Well, I was starting to get cold feet, because the educational aspects were starting to bother me. Educational television is hard. Really good educational television is some of the most brilliant stuff around when they make it work – it’s not all message-based, it’s not all sing-song, and it’s not irritating. We were trying to put this together as an action-adventure show, and trying to get the education stuff in there was really hard. It had to include more things like play-along, talking out loud and problem-solving, and that was just terrifying me. Luckily, they passed. NRAMA: So you spent all the time developing something again, only not to sell it...again? JW: Yup. And then I headed over to Cartoon Network. Well, not like they said no and I walked over to the other studios. I had a lot of friends and mentors there, and I think actually it was the next day that I sent the bible for the show over, told them to take out all the educational stuff that I reached for, and let me know what they thought. I even did a 14-page comic book as part of the presentation. NRAMA: And the deal was done? And then they called, and said they liked it, and wanted to option it. The least effort I’d put into a pitch, and Cartoon Network took it. So, we went into development really quickly, which was because a lot of the heavy lifting had been done already when it was looking like this was going to be something for Noggin. It was basically just a retooling, and removing my clunky attempts at putting in educational aspects, which was just fine by me. The end result was about six months of development, with everyone feeling so strongly about it that they decided to go straight to a series, rather than going to a pilot first. NRAMA: Wow…that’s…wow… JW: Yeah, it almost never happens. So yeah – no pressure there. I felt I needed to point out to someone that I had never actually done a show before, but in the end, I know enough about animation –I know the process, but had I actually even executive produced a television show before? Well, no. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard, but I’ve got great help. I’ve got a really great show runner who does a lot of my heavily lifting named Frank Squillace who spent five years doing Jackie Chan Adventures, which is more of an action comedy, while we’re more of a comedy adventure show. We’re more like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Simpsons - we’re a comedy at the end of the day. Real jokes, not an action show that’s clever now and then. From there, it was a slow build. It was over a year ago that we started doing the show. We’re in Burbank – I fly out about three weeks out of the month for about three days at a time to go down and work on the show. NRAMA: With you being the creator and Executive Producer, that pretty much means you’re the boss, right? NRAMA: So it’s your show – you do all the hiring and firing, and all the rest of the things involved with being the boss? JW: Yeah. But still, this is art by committee – we’ve got 45 people working in studio at Cartoon Network, and there are another 100 or so animators working overseas. Does every single thing the show does pass across my desk? No, because the minutia would make me want to kill myself. Some things I have to leave up to other people, obviously. A lot of it is about hiring great people, and making sure they’ll do great work. If you’ve got any smarts about you, you’re going to hire people who are smarter and more talented than you are. You can then let them go off and do their thing, so when it comes back to you, you can suggest a few tweaks, rather than a full reworking. I get to make important decisions like no more pink monsters, because we already have 20 pink monster so far, and if that means we have to change the background for a scene, then we change the background. But seriously – it’s all about storyboards, character designs, and about a jillion other hats. I do a ton of the writing, I work on the storyboards, I design characters. That being said, I also have two writers on staff, eight storyboard artists, and two character designers. Things start with me, go to them, then back to me, then back to them, and then back to me until we get it right. It’s like ironing a short – you keep smoothing over the fabric and smoothing over the fabric… NRAMA: Until you wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen wearing it. JW: Exactly. NRAMA: In terms of what you said of hiring the best people you can find, lest people think Juniper looks like Barry Ween as a girl, she has some other comic book lineage that people may find familiar…something Herobear-esque, right? JW: Yeah – you bet. We’ve got Mike Kunkel on as our lead character designer. Basically, almost all the characters have Mike’s touch on them. We were looking for designers, and I had a couple of looks in mind, and one I kept coming back to was just that – something like what Mike Kunkel does. I was showing people some of Mike’s Herobear stuff early on when we were running with a skeleton crew, and lo and behold, Mike was actually in-studio, visiting Geoff Johns’ wife, who works in development. He’d heard I was doing a show, and left a note on my desk, saying that we should get together and do lunch. Well, that was obviously a sign from above… NRAMA: And you had more than lunch in mind… JW: Right. I was within days of just going out and hunting him down. As I’d been showing his stuff around, one of the people in the studio asked me, while pointing to my title on the show, why I just didn’t go and hire him myself. So, I did just that, and hired him. So yeah, Kunkel was into it, he came in, did a pass at the models and produced designs that were more in the ballpark than we’d even been thinking we were. Behind his back, we were talking about if he could come on full-time, knowing that he was pretty busy with comics and other irons in his fire. I finally brought it up with him, just joking about it, and he said he wouldn’t be opposed to it at all, so he joined up, and came in to the crew working in the studio. NRAMA: So, with Mike, the team was set? JW: Almost. We needed an art director, and as it turned out, one of the people we were talking about was Alan Bodner, who was the art director on Kim Possible and also on Iron Giant. He came in; actually wanting to work on the show, so signing him on was a no-brainer. Again, if you’ve got smarts or talent, you find people to surround yourself with who are smarter or have greater talent. So I’ve got Mike Kunkel, who draws the cutest, most engaging characters alive, and Alan Bodner, who’s one of the best art directors in the business as far as I’m concerned. My approach with both of them – I just let them go. Mike has hundreds and hundreds of creatures designed – an amazing library of stuff. He’s got this way with things we give him that…well, we call it Kunkelization. I’ll take a pass at something new just to get it in the ballpark, and then he’ll take it from there. Once he’s done, my only response it, “Yep, that’s it, except it’s cuter and prettier now than when I did it.” Alan too, he’s so intuitive. He knows color and shape and form better than anyone. He’s telling us stuff about color and how things should be shaded and lit that none of us even knew or considered that make things look a hundred times better. With the two of these guys and the full team, it looks like feature animation on television. NRAMA: Before we leave this vein of questions, you mentioned music – any name there that people would be familiar with? JW: Stewart Copeland. NRAMA: From The Police? JW: The same. NRAMA: I’m betting there are still people out there who think he went homeless after The Police broke up… Now, we’ve got all this eclectic percussion coming in and out, and the best upside in it is that when a lot of television music guys start going for guitars, it sounds like bad ‘80s pop. I’m not going to name names or point out shows, but there are a number of shows out there where the guitar riffs and music sounds like really bad ‘80s pop music. Needless to say, we don’t have that problem. We have an honest to God rock start who knows how to orchestrate symphonic music. On top of that, when he goes for the tougher stuff, it sounds real. We have a moment when June runs through a punk rock concert, and it sounds like a real concert. Again, I’m just trying to surround myself with very talent people, and so far, I’ve been very, very lucky. NRAMA: We’ve touched on just about everything else, so hit us with the high concept. Sum up the show for us… JW: I’m sounding like a broken record, but it’s kind of like Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets The Simpsons. That’s the simplest way to put it. At the end of the day, it’s about a little girl who fights monsters. There’s a rather massive backstory to the whole thing, which really provides a spine to build from. I’ve only tapped into it a little in the show, but for me, knowing its there is important. The show needs a spine, and needs a place to work from. So – Juniper is an 11 year old normal girl. She goes to school, plays guitar in a band with her brothers, she likes comic books – she’s a regular kid. She also is responsible for maintaining the balance between the world of magic, and the world of humanity. All that, and she has to take piano lessons as well. NRAMA: That’s all? JW: What, she needs more? She is the Te Xuan Ze. It’s been the job for one member of her family to fulfill this role for generations. Her grandmother, Ah-Mah did this for decades, and her great grandfather did it, and it goes back and back. They all live in Orchid Bay City, which does not look unlike San Francisco, and is the center of the magical world, coincidentally enough. June wears a bracelet that acts like a pager and goes off whenever there’s an imbalance between magic and humanity. That can be anything from some magic creature is in trouble to some magical creature is causing trouble, and June goes off and takes care of it. The downside of it is that it’s a secret…so it’s a superhero show in disguise. NRAMA: So, even though this is in her family, they don’t know about it? So – Ray Ray – he’s insane. He thinks June’s job is the greatest thing in the whole world. He’s eight years old, and completely hyperactive. And there’s Monroe, who’s a pug that plays the role of the obligatory talking dog of any children’s show, except our dog isn’t chipper, he sounds like he’s 45 years old and Scottish, and has absolutely no interest in being involved in any of this. He mostly complains. We find out early on, that he’s the advisor to the Te Xuan Ze, and has been for generations, but is getting older, and really just wants to lie down. “I weigh four and a half pounds – I’m not exactly equipped to fight monsters.” Yeah, Monroe’s going to be a big hit. NRAMA: So Ray Ray likes it, Monroe would rather not be doing it, what about June? JW: June would rather not be doing it at all, if it were up to her. She’d rather be a regular kid and hang out with her friends, instead of always having to skip off and fight a monster, take care of some freaky things, or go to the underworld to fight Loki. So,. We’re borrowing from all of the classic, reluctant hero stories, from Superman to Spider-Man and everyone in between. Of course, she has to deal with Ray Ray, who thinks it’s the greatest job in the whole world, and would like nothing better than to do it himself. But he doesn’t have the juice. June does – she has incredible powers and is quite strong. She’s adept in magic as well, and carries her own bag of tricks in her knapsack. NRAMA: Given what you said about the backstory and the comparisons to Buffy, are you going to have “canon” shows that lead to a larger overarching plot? JW: Nah – this is a comedy without any of the soap opera elements that Buffy had. That’s not knocking Buffy, it’s just that this is a kids’ show – one that we’re aiming pretty with. We’re writing over the kids a little… NRAMA: And that’s what they respond to… JW: Yeah, they do, and I like to give kids a lot of credit for getting our high-end humor. I think this is something that college kids and grown-ups, as well as grown-ups kids will also enjoy. Our boilerplate for comedy on this show goes back to Bugs Bunny and the early Warner Brothers cartoons that were not created for kids, but were shorts in front of movies that would be seen by adults. Still enjoyed by kids, but they worked for kids as well because…they worked. I mean, I didn’t know Bugs Bunny was doing an imitation of Edward G. Robinson until I was 25, but it was still funny to me as a kid because it was a funny voice. That’s what we’re aiming for with Juniper - there are a lot of jokes that kids won’t get on one level, but at the same time, are just inherently funny. There will be, in the sense of how Barry Ween ran – every few shows, there will be a dramatic beat. Again, it’s not really something that seen often in kids’ television, unless they’re trying to make a point, but I like including it, and again, like to give kids credit for picking up meaning of those types of scenes, that sometimes things are hard. Childhood isn’t some idealized world where nothing hurts you and you never feel hurt. It’s not quite as goofy as other shows – I try to avoid cheap jokes that you can sometimes find in children’s television. We don’t have thirty–five fart jokes all in a row. We do have fart jokes though; it’s just that they have an air of sophistication. NRAMA: So, wrapping up - Juniper is good to go for a whole season? JW: Yup – 26 episodes. Technically, that’s two seasons, since one “season” is 13 episodes. We’ve recorded them all, and have about six or eight fully animated and they look great, but we’ve got many miles to go before we can put the entire season to bed. And hopefully, it won’t suck. The Life & Times of Juniper Lee debuts on Cartoon Network Monday, May 31st, as part of the network’s summer programming preview. Airtimes are: 12:00 pm, 7:00 pm, and 10:00 pm. Other airdates are: May 31st – 7:00 am, and June 1st – 7:00 pm. The series is slated to begun its run on June 5th. |
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#2 |
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Congrats Judd Winick! The show sounds really fun! Thanks a lot for sharing the conception and the behinds the scenes work that went into it all... it's really cool knowing how things work within animation.
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#3 |
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Keen. I've been rather disgruntled with Judd's DC work the past few months, but the stuff he originates is almost always great. And Mike Kunkel's involved? That's just fantastic.
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#4 |
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Glad this was covered here at Newsarama...sounds like a great show and the design style looks cool too. Hope its a hit for you Judd!
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#5 | |
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Re: JUDD WINICK TALKS JUNIPER LEE
Quote:
I really like the concept...very unique. Great job, Winick. I really hope this does well in the long run. |
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#6 |
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I will be informing my Tivo when I get home. Good luck!
~t |
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#7 |
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Hey what the......where the hell is herobear huh?
all i have is to get my fix is that little animated thing on his website....and that damn flip book... HEROBEAR!!!!!! I need herobear crack now! Oh...yeah....just as long as juniper lee doesn't catch aids I am fine with everything Judd Winick creates. |
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#8 |
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Finally a reason to be sorry I no longer have cable TV.
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#9 |
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I love Barry Ween with the heat of a thousand suns. This looks like it's got several common elements, so it's definitely worth a shot or two. (Probably less swearing though.)
--Cliffy |
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#10 |
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So, if Juniper Lee got into a fight with American Dragon Jake Long, I wonder who would win.
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#11 | |
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Quote:
This is actually very refreshing to hear. A lot of educational television can tend to be overly preachy and having somebody who isn't terribly used to the genre could could prove to be very interesting. The fact Winnick recognizes what also makes *bad* educational television is promising because hopefully he'll avoid the cliche's and try to keep it more true to experience rather than just message. I look forward to seeing what kinds of spins this show will take. Looks promising! (: |
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#12 | |
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Quote:
You are optimistic about Winick staying away from messages and preachiness? You haven't read much of his stuff, have you? I give 3 episodes before she's hugging a tree. |
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#13 |
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Well I know what I'll be watching whenever this thing comes out! Judd Rules
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#14 | |
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Quote:
THAT I'll have to see! *lol* And you're right, I haven't read *any* of his stuff. Now I'm curious, though. |
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#15 |
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Sounds interesting. Saw some reviews at toonzone.net as well...
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#16 |
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Juniper Lee
Interesting show.
Last edited by Hey_yu : 05-27-2005 at 11:33 PM. |
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#17 |
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Barry Ween belongs in animation. He should be on that lousy craphouse, MTV, or someplace nicer like HBO. That way, Ween could still be ween.
Still, I'm looking forward to seeing this new show from Winnick. It could be fun. |
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#18 |
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Lemme summarise the similiarities between Juniper Lee & Jake Long:
You have two Asian Americans with initials J.L. protecting the supernatural forces from a danger while in secret. That and Judd Winick once visits Disney to pitch in Barry Ween. Hmmmm..... |
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#19 |
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Jake Long:
http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet.../showid-26513/ Juniper Lee: http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet.../showid-35244/ (check out the news section below...this site is quoted, and referred to as "News Drama"...ha!) Other than some superficial similarities, I don't see much in common here to support any libelous allegations of plagerism, as implied by Altercator... For one thing, I'm pretty sure Juniper Lee (not having yet seen an episode, of course) does not transform into a flying dragon. I'm also fairly certain that math will not be taught in each episode, as it is in the Jake Long edutainment animation series. |
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#20 |
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jake long and juniper lee are both asian americans. Their respective grandparents both did what they do now. They both have talking dogs that help them around. They both have an incredibly annoying sibling. and, math is not taught in single episode of jake long american dragon.
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