The Paloni Show Interview: Justin Roiland, Zach Hadel, & Ben Bayouth

ComingSoon Senior Editor Spencer Legacy spoke with Justin Roiland, Zach Hadel, and Ben Bayouth about Hulu’s animated short anthology special, The Paloni Show! Halloween Special! and the way in which it highlights new talent. The Paloni Show! Halloween Special! is now available for streaming on Hulu.

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“In this special, Leroy, Reggie, and Cheruce Paloni have been given the opportunity of a lifetime to be the hosts of an unforgettable Halloween Special full of ‘spooky’ shorts from a group of up-and-coming animators,” reads the special’s synopsis.

Spencer Legacy: Justin, what about the Paloni Show pitch you made years back made it stand out as a concept you wanted to revisit for the Halloween special?

Justin Roiland: I had all these episode ideas for that show. Obviously, that show was quite different, but the core of it was the same, which is just this family trying to host a variety show with fun sketches and guest stars and stuff. But then the wheels fall off, and chaos pulls them in some crazy direction, or they have to deal with a mess or whatever — just chaos. I just always really loved that idea and I had a bunch of ideas for stories. I’ve got an idea for a camping episode … just so many different episodes with them, you know? Where it starts out at home base, whatever that might be, and then it just goes insane. But they still have to host the show; that part is just happening. So they have no choice. They would really rather just pause and come back later and figure out the mess, but they can’t. They have to keep hosting.

Ben Bayouth: Isn’t there a System of a Down episode in your brain somewhere, Justin?

Justin Roiland: Yeah, I have a System of a Down episode where … it’s so absurd. There’s a lot of layers, but it’s really absurd. Without getting into the details, there’s a lot of stories that I’d love to do with these characters because they’re so dumb in the best way. Then Zach and I had a lot of fun. We obviously had a script — a really solid script — but we had a lot of fun running the scenes, you know? Just improv-ing and making it feel more natural.

Zach Hadel: We would look at the script, and obviously, what was there was great, but we would do short versions. Some of those things, we’d talk for like a minute or two, and I don’t think a lot of that got used, but I think some of it did. We had a lot of freedom to just have fun.

Ben Bayouth: The nature of the way that Justin and Zach talk to each other is something that is very difficult to script at the outset, but we eventually re-script it after it’s recorded so that we have a draft that we can always reference. If you look at that script after recording and it’s translated, it’s madness. How they talk over each other, and it’s just … it’s crazy to look at on script format, but when you hear it, it’s really genius and hilarious.

Justin Roiland: In some sections, yeah. We definitely leaned in that direction as we continued forward. And then when we got Pam [Adlon], we went back and recorded more with the three of us. So we did a whole record with her where we infused her into that energy and did some stuff with her, which was really fun. It’s interesting because that original … it’s like a different family, and I feel like this family’s actually way better. This is just a better … there’s more meat on the bone for me here with these characters. There’s just more to do with them and they just pop more, for me. But the core concept has always been the same, which is just “they’re hosts and they’re excited and they want to do the best job they can, but then just the fucking wheels fall off every time.”

Zach, this special has a ton of great animators like David Firth, Lee Hardcastle, Michael Cusack — a lot of whom got their start online. Do you think that networks and streamers are finally starting to see the potential of online independent animators like yourself and them?

Zach Hadel: I definitely think so, and I think it’s thanks to guys like Justin. I understand why it’s taken so long. It’s like, a one-minute long cartoon might look amazing. It might be a great short film, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to television or film or whatever. But I think it’s definitely happening more and I think we’re going to get some great stuff — especially this decade — out of it. I think people are realizing there’s a lot of artists and animators out there who can do it all, who’ve learned to write and voice act and draw it and do everything. That’s what Justin was doing before all these shows got picked up. So I think that’s a really special ingredient, absolutely. I think the shorts by these people are great.

Justin Roiland: Yeah. Part of the thinking for this was, at least to a certain extent, is [that] this is kind of an incubator, in a way. There’s a lot of people we love that we want to get more eyes on. A great one, for me, was Simon Hanselmann who does Megg, Mogg, and Owl comics. Early on, that was like, “Oh my God,” that was the holy grail for the special for me, early on, was getting Simon involved and getting to be the person who helps produce the first animated incarnation of this, of this world that he’s created. It’s really incredible that we managed to do that.

Justin Roiland: We managed to navigate all the choppy waters to make that happen in a way that was creator-friendly and safe for him to do it and retain the ownership of his IP and all that stuff. But the fact that we did that is a testament to a big part of the philosophy of this show, which is just people that we love people, people that we really think are amazing and talented and funny, and getting them plugged into this thing in a way that might bring more eyeballs to their stuff. We don’t know what’s going to come out of this. It’s going to be really exciting to see if there are any of these shorts that … like with with Liquid Television, like with Beavis and Butthead or Aeon Flux or any of those ones that had some kind of impact.

I’m curious to see if anything we’ve done in this will end up like that. I don’t know. It’s hard to say, you know? You just never know. But that’s also a fun component to it. To Zach’s point, there’s so many amazing people, It’s exciting. Some of them are can do everything, like Zach said. Some of them, they’re incredibly talented and they probably will be able to.

Zach Hadel: They’re very good partnerships too. I mean, that’s the exciting thing. It’s all the shorts bring their own flavor to it.

Justin Roiland: Yeah, it’s really exciting. We definitely had as much fun with that side of it as we did with Paloni‘s part, just working with all these really cool people.

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