Interview with Bill Kopp about Mad Jack

By Steve Fritz and Mania Magazine

(Copied in its entirety without permission)

"Bridget!" Bill Kopp yells into the phone line to the PR person who we both know is listening in. "I just got two new half-hours from Asia. You know we haven't gotten our air dates and we're facing WEEK THREE without a new Mad Jack episode. So when we go back on the air you got to help me with some promo stuff."

Bridget snickers and gives a quick Okey-Dokey on the phone line, like she's used to this from Kopp. Then again, the Fox flack probably shouldn't mind helping Kopp to begin with.

The early Nielsens report that Bill Kopp's latest production, Mad Jack, is another hit for the Fox Kids network. As far as animation fans are concerned, this should be nothing new. Kopp made a name for himself while over at Disney, where he created the series Shnookums and Meat. Then he and Savage Steve Holland found lightning in a bottle in the form of Eek! The Cat.

What, you don't think Eek! was a good show? Hand in your 'toon appreciation license, you amateur. Let me put it to you this way, when it's time for me to pick my top ten animated television programs of the 1990's, Eek WILL be one of them. The tale of the fat, friendly purple cat and his equally very strange friends was cartoon slapstick at it's best. It ticked on its own internal clockwork and logic and was damn funny to boot. It probably went miles towards establishing Kopp as one of the better animators in the business.

In fact, after Eek!, Kopp went on to work for Steven Spielberg, where he was instrumental in the launch of Toonsylvania. You'll read what happened to Kopp there shortly, but it did have it's side benefit. As Kopp will tell you, it gave him time to sit down and really refine Mad Jack.

Along with Oggy & The Cockroaches and Secret Files of the SpyDogs, Mad Jack is instrumental in putting Fox Kids back in contention in the Saturday morning wars. What's truly nice about all these shows is not only are they NOT based on any licensed property like some lame-ass superhero title (and aren't you just getting bored to death with them?), but all are proper mixes of slapstick and more cutting edge, contemporary humor.

Mad Jack is a truly slimy pirate who sails the seas of a totally flat planet called the Slab. On the Slab, it really is possible to sail off the edge. Mad Jack, and his faithful sidekick/first officer rat Snuck did it. In fact, all kinds of awful things tend to happen to Jack every episode.

Not that he doesn't deserve it. Jack's a craven, greedy, lying, two-faced, sycophantic, lust-ridden, scurvy and whatever-else you want to call him cad. Like all true Kopp leads, awful things happen to Jack all the time. The main difference is this time one feels he deserves every anvil that falls on his head, every cannon blast that goes through his middle and every other awfully hilarious thing he suffers for all his sins. To top it, it's all done with Kopp's incredibly blazing fast speed and screwball logic.

No wonder when a new episode of Mad Jack DOES air, it's ending up in the top ten of every Nielsen report.

So, here I am on the phone with Bill Kopp. After he finished harassing poor Bridget--who's really a nice person for a PR director--turned his attention to me:

Q: One thing I noticed, whether it's Mad Jack, Eek or the Thunder Lizards, you do incredibly painful stuff to your leading characters.

BK: Well, that's what they're there for! They are there to experience the full brutality of raw, slapstick comedy. I'm not going to say that I was a child who pulled wings off of flies, but I challenge any person out there to deny that one time they found a bug and had to do it. Actually, I'm real good with animals, real ones anyway. Cartoon animals is a totally different story.

Q: What are the origins of Mad Jack? I mean you had a really good run with Steve Holland and Eek! there.

BK: Yeah. Actually, I've been talking to Steve and we're trying to get him back over here. It was supposed to be a secret but I figure I ought to start leaking it out so Holland feels kind of obligated. He's really busy on his Sabrina thing, but our contracts run out at about the same time at our respective studios. So, hopefully, we will both end up negotiating another project we can do together.

Q: So you two actually get along together very well.

BK: Oh! We are like best friends. He was the best man at my wedding. I've known him 18 years. That's almost a little too long, and it feels like it's getting longer every year.

Q: Still, with Mad Jack, we get to see something that's a pure Bill Kopp cartoon.

BK: Not true! Not true! Don't forget about Shnookums & Meat. It's back on Toon Disney, Shnookums, Meat, Tex Tinstar and the rest. That was my first solo effort.

Q: What was the origins of Mad Jack?

BK: I've always loved pirates, but I was trying to find a way to make it different. To give a cartoon the longest life possible, you've got to find all kinds of situations that a character can encounter. After Eek I just didn't want to turn around and do a fat dog thing. I wanted to come up with a situation that could change with every cartoon. So we needed a fantasy kind of landscape.

Q: So you came up with the Slab.

BK: So I came up with the Slab. It's like Earth but it's not Earth. Because it's another world I could also invent its own history. Also, I could draw on Earth history and come up with characters like Angus Dagnabbit and other references to Earth-like things.

In fact, I was originally going to call it Red Hook The Pirate, but as it turns out there's already a beer called that. It's made in Seattle, which is where I'm from. Even thought that's an INCREDIBLE COINCIDENCE (sarcastically), we thought it would not be a good idea to use a beer as my pirate's name. I ended up liking Mad Jack better.

Q: Mad Jack seems to be Errol Flynn gone exceedingly wrong.

BK: Yeah. There's also quite a bit of Rowan Atkinson's Black Adder in him as well. I'm really a huge fan of all British comedy. That's one of my biggest influences. I was watching Monty Python since I was seven. I have a lot of friends in London who send me tapes. They're just really funny comedians over there.

So Mad Jack is an anti-hero. I hate to admit, but there's also a lot of myself in him.

Q: Aren't you the voice of Mad Jack?

BK: Yeah, but also in the writing of Mad Jack, there's a lot of me there. For instance, when we did the episode where we discuss Jack's feelings about birthdays. You have Snuck, who sees birthdays as a great thing and the time to feel wonderful and reflective. Then you have Jack, who feels that birthdays are a time to regret and dread. That's very me.

You see, Jack's a wonderfully cynical character. That's why you have to have Snuck in there.

Q: Kind of like Eek and Sharky.

BK: There's a lot of Eek in Snuck. He's a pure, innocent mouse who just always thinks the best and can't say anything bad about anything.

Q: Well, you always seem to have those kinds of characters pairing off against each other. You shows seem to always be made up of teams of incredibly opposite characters. Now, in a way, that's classic comedy.

BK: That's right, but you still have to make them talk. You still have to put the words in their mouths. The big difference with this one though is it's incredibly thought out.

You see, just after I sold the show, I went over to do Toonsylvania for Spielberg and Dreamworks. We all put Mad Jack on hold while I got Toonsylvania up and running. That gave me an extra year to think Mad Jack out. It was like an extra year of development, basically. That really helped.

Q: That's another thing. I have to admit that Toonsylvania wasn't like any other Spielberg production I've ever seen before. There wasn't the usual overly-saccharine cuteness factor running through it.

BK: That was a very difficult show to do. It wasn't all mine. There was a lot of cooks in the kitchen and a lot of people to make happy. We had to fight really hard for a lot of that stuff. Now that we're out of there I think it's really changed. It's funny still, but it's just different.

Q: You really do a great job of mining genres. Eek and Thunder Lizards on its own had a lot of pop references all over the place.

BK: A lot of that was Steve. We worked a lot of it together, but he did have the original idea for the show.

Q: One of my favorite Eek episodes was the one where he's kidnapped by aliens and ends up crashing in FBI Headquarters. One thing I couldn't help but notice was you had Captain Kirk, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully actually appearing in the episode. Was that really the voices of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson?

BK: Yeah, it was. Well, they were on Fox and it was the fourth season of Eek and it was their first season of X-Files. So we had an established reputation and actually already had a lot of stars on the series. So, we had no problem calling them up on the phone and acting like idiots saying, 'Hey! We'd like you to do Mulder and Scully on our cartoon!" We actually had William Shatner on that episode as well. I think a lot of those guys really felt sorry for us. Actually, Duchovny said when we called his agent he just thought 'What the hell...why not?"

Q: Another thing I noticed is you don't go for the standard superhero fare or any other cliches that populate animation.

BK: I hate superheroes. I have a hard time playing with others. In a way Toonsylvania was a good experience because I enjoyed it but it was really hard. There was a lot of bureaucracy. It's just easier for me to develop my own show. I like less interference.

That's one of the reasons why I really enjoy working with Fox. They know what's up with cartoons. They know when it comes to me, they say 'let's steer clear of this one and let him do his thing.' The only time they give me feedback is when it's really important. Only when it's necessary. With Toonsylvania I felt very under the microscope. Being micro-managed is tough.

Q: One of my crew's pet lines is "it never hurts to help.'

BK: (laughs sinisterly) Ahh...but we know it does.

Q: Still, Eek lives on. It's now enjoying an amazing second life on Fox Family.

BK: Isn't it amazing?

Q: You started that show like six or seven years ago...

BK: It was even longer than that. Eek first aired in 1990. What's amazing is even airs twice a day. It's great. I hope the same thing happens to Mad Jack, because I think that Mad Jack is the best thing I've ever done. It's just such a thorough world, I feel really good about it. I can keep going on the thing for years.