Animated Tron Spoof Coming to UPN

Gudlyf writes "Sci Fi Wire is reporting that executive producers of 'That 70's Show,' Marcy Carsey, Tom Werner and Caryn Mandabach, are doing a CGI-animated midseason replacement show for UPN called 'Game Over,' which is best described as a sitcom spoofing 'Tron.' The show centers on the Smashenburns, an ordinary suburban family who live in an alternate video-game universe inhabited by action heroes, monsters and cartoon characters. Patrick Warburton and Marisa Tomei will be voicing the husband Rip and wife Raquel respectively."

Comments

Cast Details

[henbane]

CHARACTER VOICES
Marisa Tomei/Raquel
Patrick Warburton/Rip
D.L.Hughley/Turbo
Rachel Dratch/Alice
James Sie/Sam Chang
Marie Matiko/Vox
E.G.Dailey/Billy

WRITERS
David Sacks ("The Simpsons"), Ross Venokur,Jason Venokur and David Goetsch

And some pictures here (pdf)

Re:Cast Details

[Leffe]

Ok, that's nice and all, but.. Who will play the bit?

Huh?

[rampant mac]

"...an ordinary suburban family who live in an alternate video-game universe..."

"Hi honey, what's on TV tonight?"

*Rail Gun*

OMG wtf l4m3r, sh0uld4 |)uck3d f4gg0t!

Re:Huh?

[Mart]

"Hi honey, what's on TV tonight?"

*Rail Gun*

I once saw a short film that was pretty much like that. The characters lived in an alternate video game universe in which daily life involved the usual violence of a FPS and dodging death in various forms. The main character was a boy who was playing a video game in which he had to be nice in order to succeed (e.g. helping an old lady across the street instead of shooting her).

I won't give away the ending. I can't remember the title of the film but it was made in England.

In case of /.

[n1nj4k3n]

UPN All Over Game

UPN announced that it has picked up the computer-animated SF comedy pilot Game Over as a series. The network has given a six-episode midseason order to the Carsey-Werner-Mandabach show, which features the voices of Marisa Tomei and Patrick Warburton.

Written and executive produced by David Sacks, David Goestch, Jason Venokur and Ross Venokur, Game Over centers on the Smashenburns, an ordinary suburban family who live in an alternate video-game universe inhabited by action heroes, monsters and cartoon characters. Also executive producing are CWM's Marcy Carsey, Tom Werner and Caryn Mandabach. In addition to Tomei and Warburton, who will voice Mrs. and Mr. Smashenburn, the voice cast also includes E.G. Daily and Rachel Dratch, who portray their teen kids, and Artie Lange as the family's 300-pound pet creature.

Horay for Animation

[luzrek]

Didn't see any screenshots, but it sounds like it might be fun to watch.

More seriously, perhaps the people in th US are finally realizing that animation isn't just for children. TNN (I think) has also just started airing three new animated shows Ren & Stimpy's Adult Party Cartoon, Gerry the Rat (spelling?), and Stan Lee's Striperella (spelling?). While I'm not a huge Ren & Stimpy fan, all three seem pretty good. Kelsey Grammar's voice acting as a bitter and sarcastic giant rat is pretty good, and there seem to be quite a few running jokes (in just the first two episodes). Additionally, the show is able to deal with issues of race/class/ethanticity/whatever with species standing in for the politically untouchable subject (much as robots do in Futurama). Stripperella is obviously intended to be much more comical, and suceeds in at least two areas. First, the general atmosphere is a throwback to the 1960's batman series (campy villans, secret identities, etc., but no "Biff" or "Baff"). Second, the degree of normalcy that the public persona and the other exotic dancers enjoy is stressed to the point of being funny (or perhaps I'm not ready for porn to be mainstreamed).

Anyway, horay for more animation (that isn't aimed at kids).

Re:Horay for Animation

[golgotha007]

More seriously, perhaps the people in th US are finally realizing that animation isn't just for children.

perhaps you meant that people in the world are finally realizing this. the US has been responsible for shows like The Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy and Beavis and Butthead (and more i am sure).

i don't know what country you're from, but it seems the US makes the best adult oriented animated shows. why do i think this? why, here in Russia i can see all the shows mentioned above. of course, the voice overdubs in Russian are sometimes lame, but oh well.

Re:Horay for Animation

[G-funk]

How on earth could you group beavis and butthead in with the simpsons and futurama (haven't seen much family guy since i'm in .au without cable). Beavis and butthead was nothing but a massive "fuck you" to audiences all over the world, it's just not funny at all. I always thought it was a joke down at mtv to prove to some executives that enough self-generated hype can sell even the absolute worst product.

</rant>

Re:Horay for Animation

[Babbster]

I've only seen one of the new cartoons on the TNN Thursday, and that's "Gary The Rat." Stan Lee has been a hack since almost before I was BORN [1972], and combining him with Pamela "Social Disease" Anderson doesn't do anything for me; Ren & Stimpy was over years ago.

Anyway, I watched the first episode and I didn't laugh once. I've been a Kelsey Grammer fan for a long, long time but I found his performance just as wooden and painful to listen to as everyone else's in that episode. The story and script were just dreck (concept great, execution pitiful - see "Enterprise"). The only redeeming quality was the art style which I thought was excellent.

Usually, I give new shows three or four episodes (my time permitting) to get a head of steam but I didn't even see potential in Gary The Rat.

If this is where "cartoons for adults" are heading they're going to go away again, sooner rather than later.

Re:Horay for Animation

[luzrek]

The shows that you listed (especially the Simpsons and Futurama) are all very good. However, there are only a handfull of adult-oriented (in a clean way) animated shows on in the US (mostly on Fox). Let's see if I can name them all, think Sunday night, ok. King of the Hill and the Simpsons. I'm pretty sure that Fox has canceled Futurama (at least in my city).

In the early days of cinema (1920's and 1930's) Walt Disney, and others, made a concerted effort to portray animated features as "only for children." This label has stuck, and to some extent has been re-enforced by recent actions of the Walt Disney Corporation. For example, when Disney got the US distribution rights for Princess Mononoke, they showed previews for it before children's movies such as Winnie the Pooh. When the movie actually played in theaters, the dominate audience was mothers with young children, who left after the first decapitation. Surely those mothers now view all adult-oriented animation as extremely dangerous.

Re:Horay for Animation

[k0de]

Didn't see any screenshots, but it sounds like it might be fun to watch.

There's one at vidiot. (PDF link)

reboot

[tonyt]

i liked this show when it was called reboot

(slowly counts to 20)

Obligatory Simpsons Reference

[MalleusEBHC]

Homer: Uh...it's like...did anyone see the movie "Tron"?
Hibbert: No.
Lisa: No.
Marge: No.
Wiggum: No.
Bart: No.
Patty: No.
Wiggum: No.
Ned: No.
Selma: No.
Frink: No.
Lovejoy: No.
Wiggum: Yes. I mean -- um, I mean, no. No, heh.

Has it come to this

[panurge]

Did anyone else read an ordinary suburban family who live in an alternate video-game universe and think "So that's what all those ordinary suburban families do nowadays. That's why I never see them about anymore" ?

My vote goes for

[Phekko]

we don't get UPN you insensitive clod!

Typecasting!

[Ridge]

"...and Artie Lange as the family's 300-pound pet creature."

Poor Artie.

Re:Dude, where's my batmobile?

[iainl]

Yeah, apparently producer Guber (fuckwit to the stars, and the man responsible for the amount of neon in the last two Batman films) really wanys Kutcher, having failed to get him into the Superman job.

Nolan, rightly, thinks this is a fecking horrible idea, and wants his Memento star Guy Pearce for the role. Personally, I think Pearce would make a great Batman - he's got the chin for the suit, while at the same time being able to play a convincing Wayne when out of it. Getting both right at the same time has been a problem with all of the films so far, to some degree.

Dilbert instead?

[DarkHelmet]

Maybe I'm the only one thinking this, but since Buffy is no longer on TV, taking up the nerd demographic, shouldn't they instead focus on bringing Dilbert back on the air?

For the most part, the stations get it. Do NOT align your shows with other stations so that you're vying for the same demographic. This was dilbert's failure, and this is why it tanked.

If / when this Tron-clone show fails, I hope it's not because of their poor choice on where to have it.

Even More Timely than SpaceBalls

[nightsweat]

A parody of "Tron"? That's a little out of date, isn't it? What's next, a sizzling indictment of shark movies?

Mel Brooks must be kicking himself.

Like Tron - Not

[Chasuk]

This show is like Tron? How?

In Tron, a video game programmer gets sucked into a virtual world by something called the MCP (forget what that stands for, after all these years), and is forced into gladiatorial games...

And because they both involve video games, this show about the Smashenburns is like Tron?

Is Beevis and Butthead like the Flintstones because they are both cartoons?

Re:Like Tron - Not

[Anonymous Coward]

Master Control Program

I thought the original Tron ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... was an animated spoof.

Sims - Animation as a mass tool Re:Horay for Anim

[leoaugust]

Anyway, horay for more animation (that isn't aimed at kids).

Just before I got to slashdot, I finished reading an article on the way people are using Sims to create their own sitcoms. http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,59461,00.ht ml This is truly a way in which animation can be used by the masses for expression. I am sure other products using this concept will soon come in the market and make it a legitimate market.

What is interesting in the Sim's story is how many people are using the characters to deal with many deep issues. Right now it is being done using the Album feature, but for his part, "Wright hopes to incorporate the storytelling as a more prescribed feature in next year's The Sims 2, and would like to find a way to let players use motion in order to make movies. " The unintended use of the album feature as what Wright terms "a tool of self-expression" is an example of a phenomenon known as emergence. Eric Zimmerman, the CEO of gameLab and designer of the Web-based game Sissyfight, says emergent play is among the best parts of game designing.

Players "go to a lot of trouble to get the Sims to do things they don't want to do," Wright says, explaining that players must keep their would-be actors fed, clean, rested and happy before they will even consider playing their parts. "So in that sense, it's almost like they're a director.... It's almost like a real movie shoot." Initially, it was all superheroes all the time. But users quickly began making the albums richer, with multilayered characters and multiple episodes. "It went way beyond my expectations," Wright said. "They were sort of like small novels."

What no one imagined -- least of all The Sims' designers -- was that thousands of players would quickly bypass the album's intended use and instead use it to create dozens of staged snapshots, crafting what can be complex, scripted, multi-episode social commentaries, graphic novels or even movies, as it were, with the Sims starring in the lead roles.

• Service, known in the Sims community as nsknight, has created several albums that are highly ranked by her peers. Among them is her six-part Vanderbilt series, which took her months to write and stage and which revolves around the story of three sisters separated by the murder of their mother.
• Other users have conjured up such storylines as a young woman's drug addiction and recovery;
• an African-American girl's adoption by a white family;
• and, naturally, poor girls falling in love with rich guys.
• Andrea Davis, known as VioletKitty, uses the albums to build narrative Sims tutorials. "Since my Sims weren't 'acting,'" she explained, "it (is) more like reality TV."
• This month Maxis is preparing to announce the creation of the 100,000th album.

Users' sophistication in the current version continues to impress him, [Wright] particularly given the difficulties of getting Sims to perform the roles required of them.

I wonder how UPN will react to Spy Kids 3?

[Artifex]

I saw a trailer for Spy Kids 3 recently, and it revolves around some evil virtual reality game called Game Over.

Re:These are the shows that must be remade:

[tekrat]

Somebody tried to do a Star Blazers movie but that got tanked before it ever got to production. I guess not enough people remember it. But then again, they probably would have screwed it up. Just got to http://www.anime.com to get your junkie fix on Star Blazers and BotP.

Google found this information

[Lumpish Scholar]

GAME OVER is UPN's new family comedy series featuring the adventures of the suburban Smashenburn family, who just happen to live in an alternate video-game universe. Comprised of offbeat characters who face everyday familial issues, the Smashenburns find unconventional ways to fight, survive and love within this 3-D CGI-animated world of action heroes, monsters and cartoon characters, inspired by the popular genre of video games.

As head of the Smashenburn household, Rip is a hotshot Grand Prix racecar driver who rides and wrecks daily. His feisty and attractive wife, Raquel, is a modern working woman, juggling family and her exhilarating job as gun-toting, monster-fighting Agent Smashenburn. Their son, Billy, is a 13-year-old shallow, but trendy, wannabe hip-hopster, who often argues with his 14-year-old sister, Alice, a cynical yet socially conscious teen. In the family's master plan to form a stronger bond, the Smashenburns attempt to find the perfect pet. Yet they end up with Turbo, a 300-pound talking creature [looks like a carnivorous purple rabbit], whose favorite past times are robbing pawn shops, smoking stogies and creating mayhem -- all with an attitude. The friendly next-door neighbors are the Changs, a family of Kung Fu fighting Shaolin monks, including the attractive Dark Princess, a.k.a. "Mom," and her husband, Sam.

CHARACTER VOICES
Marisa Tomei/Raquel
Patrick Warburton/Rip
D.L.Hughley/Turbo
Rachel Dratch/Alice
James Sie/Sam Chang
Marie Matiko/Vox
E.G.Dailey/Billy

WRITERS
David Sacks ("The Simpsons"), Ross Venokur, Jason Venokur and David Goetsch

EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS
Marcy Carsey, Tom Werner, Caryn Mandabach ("That 70s Show," "Grounded for Life, "3rd Rock From the Sun"), David Sacks ("The Tick"), Jason Venokur ("3rd Rock From the Sun "), David Goetsch, Ross Venokur ("The Tick")

PRODUCTION COMPANY
Carsey-Werner-Mandabach Productions, LLC.