MORE Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot - Production Design

 


Here is some more of my work from the series "Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot". The series never aired all of the episodes created for both seasons. It's run was cut short because Fox executives deemed the series to be too violent! I guess they had never seen the comic book on which this series was based. Some of the designs here are from the "lost" second season. All of the episodes can be found on on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U6yvbgtVm0). As the series progressed, the writers penned episodes that took our characters to locations never seen in the comics created by Geoff Darrow and Frank Miller. The comic series originally took place entirely in a futuristic version of Tokyo. The animated series took place in a fictitious metropolis called, New Tronic City which was a stylized merging of Tokyo, New York and Chicago of the future. It was a challenge to continue this detail-heavy production design in a primordial jungle or underground volcano complex, but I think we succeeded.

Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot - Production Design

After my work on "The Iron Giant", I was hired to work on a new show at Sony Television, "Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot" (1999). To this day, it remains the most challenging and painstaking production I have worked on.

The show was based on the comic, "Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot" by Geoff Darrow. My job was to design the animated series to directly reflect the look and style of Geoff Darrow's incredible drawings from the comic series. I had been a fan of Darrows for years and was excited at the prospect of bringing this great comic to tv... WITHOUT watering it down!

As you can see from some of my designs, I was also heavily influenced by "Hard Boiled". I used elements of both in the show and lots of 1940s and 50s car parts. Each background designer on the show had to design and rough out his own background. After it was approved by me and the director, the designs were inked! This is a departure from Geoff Darrow's comics which are finished in a very soft pencil. Inking the designs allowed us to maintain a continuity in the overall look.

Sadly, the show was canceled before all 24 episodes were aired due to the extreme violence portrayed. Go figure?