Far-Fetched: The Animated Pilot That Wouldn't Die - "Hanna-Barbera, but Taken on Nitrous and Cocaine."

We chat with Dave Capdevielle and Ashley Nichols about unshakable ideas and forcing them into existence.

Welcome to Creator Corner, our recurring interview series in which we chat with the industry's coolest and most thought-provoking creators. In this entry, we're discussing Far-Fetched with writer Dave Capdevielle and animator Ashley Nichols. Listen to the unedited audio HERE.

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Some ideas, for some people, don't die. Animator Ashley Nichols has had some version of Far-Fetched rattling around their imagination since childhood. No matter what projects have come and gone, this weird collection of wannabe rock legends refused to be left behind. Nichols then found a creative partner in writer Dave Capdevielle, and together, they're finally realizing the Far-Fetched pilot.

Far-Fetched, of course, could not rest merely as a cartoon. In preparation for its release, the concept has grown into a legitimate band, Sesamoid, and you can even read about their exploits in comic book form. However, as cool as those stories are, and as rad as the merch and music are, the dream has always been the animated pilot that wouldn't die. Currently, Far-Fetched is seeking funding via Kickstarter, and it has already achieved its goal in eight hours.

We pulled Ashley Nichols and David Capdevielle into our Zoom room for a conversation about all things Far-Fetched. We discuss why this idea refused to go the way of many childhood fantasies. We also talk about the challenges of adding legit music to your already tricky animated series and how Hanna-Barbera and the Scooby Gang influenced this show.

This conversation has been edited for time and clarity.

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A Far-Fetched Childhood Fantasy

Brad: In the press release, you talk about how the two of you immediately connected over ideas and personality. Can you talk a little bit about how you two came to be collaborators?

Ashley Nichols: Oh, gosh, which of us is going first, Dave?

Dave Capdevielle: I guess I'll take this. It was definitely a thing where there was a big team/work group. We didn't associate much at first because I was doing stuff with writing and Ashley was doing stuff with animation and cleanup. But I think we crossed over more in the latter half of the production, when I think Ashley had asked me to be on an episode of their HuniCast podcast. Through that, I think we became closer and realized we enjoyed many of the same things: this fun and spooky aesthetic for different things.

Ashley Nichols: I was just like, "Oh, this guy's funny and clever. Wait a minute, I want to work on a thing."

Dave Capdevielle: And yeah, it was a thing where they had originally brought to me a little proof of concept for Far-Fetched, which at the time was called Hell Puppy. And they were like, "Hey, I had this idea, but I'm having trouble with writing a script. You do that." And I'm like, "Yeah, okay." And that's how we joined forces on that and started working more together.

Brad: Ashley, can you talk a little bit about what this story was like when you imagined parts of it - when you were in sixth grade? Is that what the press release said?

Ashley Nichols: Yeah. Yeah, eons and eons ago, a hundred years ago. Initially the two main characters Rue and Kira were Danny Phantom OCs. If you know that cartoon from way back in the day. I was very obsessed with it. And what it was initially was that Kira was Rue's quote-unquote guardian angel. But she was a little demonic puppy dog that was meant to protect her and keep her safe because Rue, who was known as Vicky at the time, was the target of all this supernatural stuff because she was big and important as all of your childhood original characters are when you're making your first original characters. And it's like, "Oh, she needs protection." So she would carry around Kira's little stuffed animal. And from there, it just evolved and evolved and evolved a million different ways.

Brad: When I was in sixth grade, I was obsessed with Aliens, the James Cameron movie, and-

Ashley Nichols: Oh heck, yeah.

Brad: I wrote my first story called Space Fight. It was 50 pages and it was just like a riff on Aliens, but I didn't hold onto that riff into my adulthood. I'm really interested in why you held onto this story.

Ashley Nichols: It's hard to say exactly why I held onto these two characters so, so long because I've made hundreds of characters and stories and things since I was very, very little. I started out making my own version of Pokémon when I was like seven, but for whatever reason, whenever I would get kind of nostalgic, whenever I would go back and be like, "I want to make something. I want to revisit something that's mine, that's comforting," I would always go back to Kira in particular.

Brad: So you've been working on Far-Fetched now for a little while and you've developed so much content around the concept of Far-Fetched. What is now driving you both, I guess, to hang on to this idea and push it into a reality?

Dave Capdevielle: I think it's a combination of actually having that original strong interest and then also taking what this concept has become. It's transformed into a larger-than-life sort of thing. And anything like that that's just ambitious is what interests me personally. And I don't know, it was just this thing where making an original show like this, you basically create your own playground with an infinite sandbox within reason. But in this case too, it's the sort of thing where it was just so much fun after we did the proof of concept, being like, "Okay, we have these ideas for smatterings of expansion on this thing."

But once we figured out the whole idea about, oh, Rue and Kira have this very real psychological and big connection that goes into everything and then expanding on the rest of the characters like Quinn, Piper, Griffin Warren, and figuring out this whole aspect of wouldn't it be fun to do this sort of supernatural town and the gang's in a band. And we basically drop this group of losers into a situation where it seems mundane at first, but then there's just so much else going on, and that kind of thing always interests me. One of my big story trope things I'm a huge fan of is ordinary people going up against extraordinary force. It's funny enough that Ashley says Danny Phantom was their big thing, because for me, it was Ghostbusters, ironically, which I would love to see that crossover.

Ashley Nichols: We're both baby ghost nerds. And also at this point, these characters have lived in our brains for so long, mine in particular. You can hear them in the back of your mind yelling like, "I need my story to be told. You can't give up yet."

Dave Capdevielle: Yeah, that's very true. And they will hammer at your cranium until it either explodes or they get out.

A Far-Fetched Scooby Gang

Brad: So what's the core compulsion? What do these characters allow you to say creatively and maybe even beyond creatively?

Ashley Nichols: I know in particular, Rue is very much a vessel for a lot of my personal experiences and a lot of things that I've wanted to say about growing up and figuring out how to be a human being on this supernatural, yet not supernatural, rock hurling through space. And I think we've put a lot of ourselves into each of the characters. For me, Rue is my anxiety, my inexperience with life and the world, my kind of dumb hubris at times with trying to mark my own path, but going about it in slightly the wrong way. And Quinn is also very much that. Quinn is very much a representation of all of these stupid decisions that I've made as a leader through the years, trying to make my own dreams come to fruition.

Dave Capdevielle: Piper is so full of gremlin mad science energy, and Griff is so gold-hearted and humorous. Those are the things I enjoy being, just very fun and jokative. But then I feel like a large actual part of myself is just Warren, who's just an old man and is, well, I know thirties is not so old, but feeling like your late twenties, you're an old man and everything's just like, ugh. So it's like those two conflicting parts of my brain.

Brad: I love a Scooby gang. There's just something about getting a bunch of quirky individuals into a van on the road. You've also made them musicians, and you've really delved into creating music around the group. That's another layer of challenge that you've given yourself that I would never give myself.

Dave Capdevielle: Smart. Smart.

Brad: Well, can you talk about not being smart and making that choice?

Ashley Nichols: I mean, making an animated show already is not smart. It's a terrible, terrible idea. Don't recommend it unless you're just as crazy as we are.

Dave Capdevielle: Part of the thing is that with the whole Scooby-Doo aesthetic, we wanted to do a thing that both paid homage to that formula but also parodied it in a way. With the Scooby gang, it's about going out together. And the Mystery Machine, for example, at least has a decent amount of legroom. And we just thought, "Wouldn't it be really funny if it was the most inconvenient thing where they're musicians with full band equipment inside of an old ice cream truck that already has food equipment, so you can't even move anywhere and it's the most uncomfortable, inconvenient piece of crap. And to me, that's just funny. It's putting your characters in a situation where they're walled up just by pure inconvenience.

They have to deal with so much because Quinn sees this band as his big way to, "Oh, I could finally be somebody and make it." And listen, they're good. We've made them so that the music is good, hopefully. Hopefully, people like it. But the funniest thing to me is that trying to take this group, who is like, "Oh yeah, they're pretty good," but nobody is going to care about them because every single inconvenience is in the way for them to ever progress and grow bigger. And that's, I think, a big challenge. Also, with the group's ages being 22 to 26, that age - I think it's also a big metaphor for, "Yeah, everything in the world is going to get in your way and you're going to have to fight your way through it to progress." And I think we've tried to mirror that.

Ashley Nichols: And also, listen, if that format of a bunch of kids and their animal companion is good enough for Hanna-Barbera to make a hundred versions of, it's good enough for us.

Dave Capdevielle: It's crazy, too. The whole formula for this show is a more modern spin on Hanna-Barbera, but taken on nitrous and cocaine, because they couldn't do the stuff we're doing back then.

Brad: Or even the animation.

Dave Capdevielle: Yes.

A Far-Fetched Band Grants Entrance into a Sub-Genre

Brad: I just hosted a screening of Josie and the Pussycats at the Alamo Drafthouse in Winchester, Virginia. It's a great movie - a great adaptation, and it has great music. Your band has legitimate music and offers it to the audience. That's a lot of extra work, but it adds you to this subgenre of fake bands like Josie and the Pussycats. I love Streets of Fire, that's another one with a great fake band.

Dave Capdevielle: Oh yeah, yeah.

Brad: Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers. If you pull it off, you enter a pantheon of stories that people adore, but again, it's not smart to enter that realm with so much extra work.

Dave Capdevielle: I appreciate that acknowledgement because it is a lot of work.

Ashley Nichols: Yeah, I was going to say, honestly, it isn't horribly too much more work because if we're being real, the creative genius behind the music is our buddy, Hunter [Bass]. That is mainly his cross to bear, and we are so unbelievably lucky to have him.

Dave Capdevielle: I've always imagined Quinn to work in a music store, and then he would have some kind of band. And I was like, "Well, what if we made the side characters the rest of his band?" And then we just became obsessed with this idea because I love Metalocalypse, Gorillaz, Josie, and everything. And we're just like, "Man, it would be cool to do something like that. Let's just try it out." The funny thing is that because we've been working on the show for so long and for the Kickstarter, now the band is an established thing. It's like, "Oh, there's a cartoon?" That's kind of how it is now.

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Check out the Far-Fetched Kickstarter page. And don't forget, you can hear the whole conversation unedited on our Patreon.