INTERVIEW: ‘Apollo Gauntlet’ is new Adult Swim show from self-taught animator

Adult Swim is set to premiere its newest animated series, Apollo Gauntlet, Sunday, July 9 at 12:15 a.m. The 15-minute show centers on Paul Cassidy, a police officer who is transported to another world by Dr. Benign (cue the evil music). As an intergalactic crime fighter, newly dubbed Apollo Gauntlet, this everyday police officer becomes a superhero with his own magical suit.

The show is the brainchild of Myles Langlois, who started the series on YouTube, using his own self-taught animation skills. That series caught the attention of production company Six Point Harness and director Greg Franklin, and now the Adult Swim series is ready to premiere.

“I didn’t know anything,” Langlois said of his early animation days. “Like, it was so hard to film a movie. I mean, I did it one time — but just gathering all the actors and things. So I just decided doing an animated show would be easier, so I can do everything myself. So I just sat down, and learned animation, and tried out different programs and everything, and eventually came up with Apollo Gauntlet.”

Franklin found out about Langlois’ YouTube work from a mutual friend who passed around links to the web series. “I and all my colleagues at Six Point just immediately fell in love with it,” Franklin said. “It was a totally unique voice, really strong point of view, really funny and just really different.”

The Six Point team tracked down Langlois, who wasn’t “an easy guy to find” in Canada. The team helped him develop Apollo Gauntlet into a show for the company’s YouTube channel, and Adult Swim came onboard shortly thereafter.

Besides Six Point’s love for the project, there was another deciding factor to confirm this professional marriage. “We also connected through our mutual interest in old-school wrestling,” Langlois said with a laugh. “It’s surprising how many people are into wrestling at the studio actually.”

Franklin added: “It is true. We all share that, and it strengthened our creative bond.”

Langlois: “Our love of Randy ‘Macho Man’ Savage.”

Old-style professional wrestling is only one of the influences of Apollo Gauntlet, which also pulls lovingly from B-movies in the middle of the 20th century and local television. Adult Swim bills the series as being inspired by He-Man, Mystery Science Theater 3000 and David Lynch. That’s an animated gumbo that’s probably never seen the TV airwaves before.

On the development front, the character of Apollo Gauntlet / Cassidy came much later in the process for Langlois. “I started in the middle of the series almost where Apollo Gauntlet had been wandering around in this weird world, and then I later went back and told the origin story of it,” he said. “So, yeah, Paul Cassidy came much later, about halfway through the series. I just wanted to establish this guy from Earth trapped in this other world that was hostile and strange, and then at some point, I thought, oh, it would be neat to go back now and explain it. So I ended up doing the origin about halfway through the series.”

THE JUMP TO TV

Transitioning to Adult Swim has been somewhat easy for the web project. For starters, Langlois’ original running time almost perfectly matches the 15-minute duration needed for the network. Truth be told, Langlois’ writing style sometimes drifts longer than what is needed, but during the editing process, he’s able to cut the content and only include the “prime stuff.”

“I think it’s worth saying, too, that those original episodes,” Franklin said, “the only reason they were 10 minutes long really was because that was the maximum length that was allowed on YouTube.”

Langlois added: “Once in a while, I’d have to split an episode into two episodes, but for the most part, my brain was kind of working at that 10-minute level anyway.”

For Franklin and Six Point Harness, the greatest challenge was maintaining Langlois’ drawing style and sense of humor. That’s a difficult obstacle when there’s a team of creative people working on a series. Consistency is key.

“Our most important challenge was maintaining Miles’ voice, and sense of humor and drawing style spread out over a large crew, and keeping it as authentic as we could in every step to what Miles would have done if he was making the show all by himself,” Franklin said. “That is inherently what initially attracted us, was that really unique point of view, the very unique drawing style.”

For Langlois, the Adult Swim incarnation of his project is a “good, high-quality version” of what he was previously creating. “They’re so much better at their jobs than I was when I was making it,” he said of the animators.

It’s a balancing act, though. The show cannot be presented in the same way it was on YouTube. This is cable television, after all, and there’s a certain expectation for animation to fill the TV screen. “There’s a kind of homespun quality to it that we want to maintain, but at the same time, we also have to balance that with making a show that is elevated in a way visually for television,” Franklin said.

Langlois added: “That’s all I ever wanted; I just wanted my show to be better. I always bring this up, but one detail is the backgrounds. That was my weakest, weakest point, was making backgrounds, and just seeing pros make these backgrounds makes me happy.”

Franklin said: “That’s the kind of choice that really ultimately makes the show even funnier because Apollo is an outsider in this world, and I felt like one of our jobs was to make the world around Apollo as kind of lush and frankly dangerous as possible because it makes it funnier when Apollo is surrounded by bad guys.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Apollo Gauntlet premieres Sunday, July 9 at 12:15 a.m. on Adult Swim. Click here for more information.