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Eric Towner is an American producer, writer, director and animator best known for his work on Adult Swim's Robot Chicken and Netflix's Buddy Thunderstruck. Career [ edit ] In 2005, Towner founded a studio named Stoopid Monkey with Seth Green , John Harvatine IV and Matthew Senreich .
Mar 6, 2017 · He’s one of the founders of Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, the minds behind the wildly popular and Emmy-winning Robot Chicken.I recently flagged-down Eric Towner to discuss the ‘Buddies’ latest show – Buddy Thunderstruck – which stars a cool dog who races hot trucks and, unlike all their previous creations, is actually for kids.
Sep 22, 2018 · Stoopid Buddy Stoodios co-founders Eric Towner, John Harvatine, Matthew Senreich and Seth Green CBS News The final product may be silly, but the production work is serious business.
- 7 min
- Marvel's next adventure comes to Hulu on May 21, with a hilarious new adult animated series featuring Patton Oswalt as the voice of M.O.D.O.K.
- Which Marvel TV show in 2021 is your favorite so far?
- Marvel's MODOK
- Verdict
By Siddhant Adlakha
Updated: Nov 4, 2022 12:31 am
Posted: May 17, 2021 4:00 pm
This is an advanced spoiler-free review for Season 1 of Marvel's M.O.D.O.K. The adult-animated series will be available to stream on Hulu on Friday, May 21, 2021.
M.O.D.O.K. is Marvel by way of Robot Chicken. It’s filled with wall-to-wall jokes and visual gags, brought to life through innovative stop-motion techniques and by an all-star comedy cast. The 10-part series is MCU and comics-adjacent when it wants to rope in a few big Marvel names, but for the most part, it’s an original take on the iconic villain, voiced by comedian Patton Oswalt. The show, co-created by Oswalt and Jordan Blum (American Dad), discards the character’s bizarre comic baggage in favor of a brand-new origin and setting. It also ends up being a surprisingly effective character drama too. WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier may have been more straightforward, but M.O.D.O.K. is quite easily the best Marvel series of 2021 so far.
The new streamlined origin leaves no room for George Tarleton, M.O.D.O.K.’s regular-shaped human identity before he was experimented on and turned into a huge-headed, tiny-limbed murder machine in a floating chair (the character’s name stands for Mental Organism Designed Only For Killing). This M.O.D.O.K. has always been M.O.D.O.K. The show opens with a fable-like flashback to his childhood home, with the character’s mother comforting her unusually proportioned son after he’s bullied at school. It’s a sweet little scene that also sets the stage for M.O.D.O.K.’s supervillainous future. “One day, that big, beautiful, womb-wrecking head of yours is going to change the world,” his mother assures him, but he internalizes this soothing advice with mustache-twirling ambition.
WandaVision
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier
Fast-forward 35 years, and M.O.D.O.K. is the leader of A.I.M (Advanced Idea Mechanics), the brainchild of Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) in Iron Man 3. Here, the organization retains its comic incarnation: a factory of supervillainy populated by henchmen in yellow hazmat suits. M.O.D.O.K. leads their villainous plots by day — which often include battles with Iron Man (Jon Hamm) — but by night, he returns from A.I.M.’s mountainous lair to his home in the suburbs, where he lives with his wife Jodie (Aimee Garcia), a Mexican-American author and lifestyle vlogger, his tween son Lou (Ben Schwartz), a ball of energy and creativity, and his aloof teenage daughter Melissa (Melissa Fumero), who’s inherited her father’s unusual shape, and floats around in a bedazzled pink chair of her own.
The tug-of-war between these two settings, the classic domestic sitcom, and the more modern workplace comedy, is the perfect launching pad for the plot. At work, M.O.D.O.K. juggles a long-standing rivalry with fellow inventor Monica Rappaccini (Wendi McLendon-Covey) and the sweeping changes instituted by A.I.M.’s new corporate owners, the all-encompassing social media giant GRUMBL, who send their pestering, scarf-wearing Silicon Valley envoy Austin Van Der Sleet (Beck Bennett) to oversee the transition. At home, M.O.D.O.K. remains consumed by his career ambitions, and his desire to turn the world into a M.O.D.O.K.-themed utopia. He has little time for family, and the cracks in his home life have begun to show.
Oswalt is a delight as M.O.D.O.K., who speaks with the Shakespearean, fist-shaking cadence of a character from Jack Kirby’s Fourth World
Oswalt is a delight as M.O.D.O.K., who speaks with the Shakespearean, fist-shaking cadence of a character from Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, no matter the occasion. He may be a genius inventor, but he’s incredibly oblivious as a father and husband, and his narcissism has led him to ignore the needs of his wife and kids. And so, despite all the workplace shenanigans and the show’s timey-wimey, dimension-hopping comic book plots, the season’s overarching story is about whether or not M.O.D.O.K. can finally learn to be there for Jodie, Lou, and Mellissa in the way that each of them truly needs. Even at its most “comic book-y,” the show’s sci-fi conceits all result in poignant character moments, like M.O.D.O.K. gazing upon important events from his past, or quite literally seeing the world through another character’s eyes.
Admittedly, the show doesn’t exactly feel like appointment-viewing, since the episodes are largely self-contained except for the last two or three. This works in the favor of viewers in the U.S. who’ll have access to all ten episodes simultaneously on Hulu, and can pace themselves accordingly. However, audiences elsewhere will have to catch the show week-to-week via the Star hub on Disney Plus, but the mere 25-minute runtime shouldn’t be too much of a hurdle for weekly digestion.
Although, what is perhaps most enticing about the series is the way it’s brought to life by Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, the animators responsible for Robot Chicken. There’s not only a stunning amount of detail in every frame — from real costume fabrics, to candy-colored blood, to a multitude of expressions on M.O.D.O.K.’s enormous face — but the framing itself has a hand-held quality that you don’t often see in stop-motion productions. That’s because the studio invented a programmable camera rig that combines frame-by-frame photography with the fluid motions of shooting on an iPhone. The result is classic Adult Swim, with its janky action-figure movements, as if it were shot in the cinéma verité documentary style of NBC’s The Office.
Admittedly, the show doesn’t exactly feel like appointment-viewing, since the episodes are largely self-contained
A farce with a beating heart, M.O.D.O.K. pulls from some ridiculous corners of Marvel lore, and feels like a deflation of the MCU’s increasingly self-serious cultural omnipresence. It’s Marvel parodying Marvel without the shared-universe oversight or the need to stick closely to established material, resulting in a focused family story that leaves off in a surprisingly emotional place.
With the stop-motion stylings of Robot Chicken, Marvel’s farcical M.O.D.O.K. series is a refreshing, mile-a-minute comic self-parody. Every line is a laugh, and Patton Oswalt is pitch-perfect as the iconic supervillain, whose Frankenstein origins are traded in for a streamlined saga of ego and ambition, blended with both a modern workplace comedy a...
- Siddhant Adlakha
Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, LLC. Stoopid Buddy Stoodios (formerly known as Stoopid Monkey and stylized as Stoop!d Monkey) is an American production company and animation studio, formed by Seth Green, Matthew Senreich, John Harvatine IV, and Eric Towner. It was established in 2011 following the partnership of Stoopid Monkey, which had been founded ...
- 2005; 18 years ago
- Burbank, California, U.S.
Eric Towner is known for Robot Chicken (2001), Sunday Paper p.2B (2003) and Buddy Thunderstruck (2017). IMDbPro Starmeter See rank Add photos, demo reels Add to list
Eric Towner and Alex Kramer: Jordan Blum and Patton Oswalt: May 21, 2021 () George Tarleton, a.k.a. MODOK, is the leader of A.I.M. who is constantly ...
