Michael Jai White, Byron Minns & Carl Jones Talk ‘Black Dynamite’ Blu-rayBy Max Evry
July 15, 2014
“He’s super cool and he know kung-fu! Drives a $5000-dollar car and wears a $100-dollar suit! And when it comes to the ladies he’s outta sight… BLACK DYNAMITE!”
In 2009 bigscreen tough guy Michal Jai White (“Spawn,” “The Dark Knight”) proved he had comedy chops in addition to his usual –literal- martial arts chops with the righteous Blaxploitation parody “Black Dynamite”. After word-of-mouth turned the Sundance crowd pleaser into a cult sensation, [Adult Swim] launched an animated series chronicling the continued exploits of this ex-CIA black belt sex machine as he rids the community of crime and drugs.
With a second season debuting later this year, a comic book from IDW currently on the stands, and the first season hitting stores on DVD/Blu-ray the “Black Dynamite” phenomenon is in full force, so we sat down with Jai White and his co-creator/co-star Byron Minns (a.k.a. “Bullhorn”) as well as series director Carl Jones to talk up their badass hero. Our exclusive interview includes Jai White detailing the difference between kicking butt onscreen and in animation, Minns dishes on the creation of “Black Dynamite” and veteran “The Boondocks” animator Jones lays down why some cartoon adaptations work and some don’t.
So much of the charm of the movie came from aping the shoddy camerawork and recycled footage of the classic Blaxploitation movies. Now that you’ve translated it into this pretty DYNAMIC animated world, how do you retain the hallmarks of the genre?
CARL JONES: You see the pimps? (laughs) The great thing is we had a lot to work from. Looking at the movie they did such a great job of defining these characters. Really likable characters is always a starting place for me, because if you have likeable characters you have everything. The other stuff becomes trimming, it’s decoration. The difference between the show and the film is we put Honey Bee, Cream Corn, Bullhorn and Black Dynamite together as almost a nuclear family, whereas in the movie they didn’t all hang together necessarily. We just brought them closer together.
MICHAEL JAI WHITE: The stuff you’re talking about, the shaky camera and faulty zooms and stuff, that’s just one element. It’s quite different to do that in a cartoon, it would kind of fall flat because you’d be parodying a cartoon that would do that. What we miss in that we make up for in just being able to go to the moon and do all the things you can do in the cartoon world. Like Carl mentioned we have all the cartoon characters existing as a cartoon family which is something that is different from the movie. We still have that universe, but instead of a movie we have a blacksploitation universe.
You in particular, so much of your performance was the deadpan expression…
JAI WHITE: That becomes easier once you have a cartoon. (laughs)
Did you have to give the vocalization a lot more “oomph” since you couldn’t rely on the physicality?
JAI WHITE: Oh absolutely, yeah. I learned a lot. I’d done some voiceover stuff. Realizing you don’t have that visual thing on your own, in voiceover stuff you have to punch things up. There’s an interesting line for this particular thing, and I’d be flying blind if it wasn’t for Carl. Carl knows this world way better than I ever will. The rule of thumb in animation is to animate your voice. There were times I’d have to take that animation down and go flatter because he knows what it’s gonna look like. This animation is closer to real life.
There’s the realistic shadings.
JAI WHITE: Right, so it took awhile for me to figure out what tone I had to hit, and my tone might be different than the other characters.
JONES: This is where our show separates itself from a lot of animated shows. For most voiceover actors your first instinct is to go big and cartoony. I wanted the characters to come across really real. I wanted them to talk like real people. There are some characters who are larger than life. Even with Tommy Davidson, Cream Corn is still Tommy Davidson. Tommy’s personality is just big like that. Like Mike said, it’s the nuances and the subtleties. With Bullhorn that’s a little more exaggerated because we’re spoofing Rudy Ray Moore. He’s a little more larger than life, in contrast to the rest of the world he really jumps out as a special character because of that.
Bullhorn is a character that wasn’t really explored much in the first movie, and the second episode of the series is all about him having this magical porn adventure. What was it like to flesh out this character you created and make panties drop with the turn of a phrase?
BYRON MINNS: (laughs) That was fun, because to me he always existed beyond that anyway because just to bring him to life on film there was a life before that, in my mind. To be able to do that in animation is great.
What is your collaboration process with Mike like?
MINNS: Aww man, it’s horrible. (laughs) No, this is my brother, Mike is my brother, and we collaborated in life before the artistic stuff. It’s really great, sometimes we finish each other’s thoughts.
JONES: They just did it, you didn’t hear it. (laughs)
JAI WHITE: You thought he was talking, it was me. (laughs)
MINNS: It’s been fun, and for Carl as well. We had a great experience on the film, then we get a chance to work with Carl who’s brilliant in his own right, through this animation world which both of us knew nothing about.
What made you guys decide to build so many of the series’ plots around celebrities of that era, besides the fact that making fun of Michael Jackson and OJ Simpson is fun?
JONES: Yeah, we had the freedom to make fun of them, but we had the freedom to rewrite history. Because it’s animated we have even more flexibility because if it’s live-action it’s a whole other beast because you have to find someone who looks like that person. It’s harder to tell those types of stories, but with animation we can go so far. Michael Jackson and aliens… to do that in a live action TV show would be almost impossible.
Or just really grotesque!
JONES: Right, but with hindsight being 20-20 where do you take these iconic people from the 70s and tell our version of what happened, why they are the way they are. Even when we do that it’s not so exaggerated from the truth of reality. We try to make sure it’s rooted in something honest and real.
Like the abuse with Joe Jackson.
JONES: Exactly… oh, Michael was really beating Joe? (laughs)
JAI WHITE: You knew something we didn’t!
MINNS: The actual foundation for that was set in the film. We deal with rewriting history in terms of Black Dynamite actually being the cause of Nixon being impeached. The stuff was there in the beginning, but in animation we’re able to explore it and take it out of the stratosphere. Black Dynamite counted on Bullhorn, so obviously they had a relationship. He protected Honey Bee and the girls so they had a relationship.
Can you talk about the two-year hiatus between seasons?
JONES: Well first of all we didn’t have a two-year hiatus, that’s the common misconception cause it takes so long to do this animation. It’s not that we’re just hanging out, not working. (laughs) During that time you’re not seeing the show we’re working pretty hard. Even with “The Boondocks” it’s the same thing because it used to take two years to do a season and people would be like, “Did the man shut you down?” There were people writing letters to the network really upset and I’m like, “No, dude, we’re working, it just takes time.” Adult Swim was the only place we pitched it to, the relationship was there from “The Boondocks” and they just instantly got it. We didn’t have to hit the pavement and knock on doors.
It’s amazing to see the success of this show because you look at a movie like “Napoleon Dynamite” which did a lot more business than “Black Dynamite” but their animated show on FOX completely derailed and you guys are going into your second season.
JAI WHITE: They had a different marketing for the movie, we didn’t have a machine behind us. Had we done that it would have been very different. If “Napoleon Dynamite” came out in a small type of way it would be a cult phenomenon as well. The audience will find the movie, they’re starved for that. Over the years everyone who was supposed to see “Black Dynamite” if it had a larger release has seen it by now. People take pride in introducing it to folks who would appreciate it.
JONES: My personal perspective on a show like “Napoleon Dynamite” and other shows that haven’t really worked out when you try to translate them from film… If you notice most of the successful animated series are mostly created or written by animators and artists themselves. It is a slightly different beast to approach storytelling. You have to understand the visual medium in order to show up on the screen the way you need it to. You can have a really dope script, but you still need that person who’s gonna take it from the conception of the idea all the way to what people are gonna see on TV, or else it’s gonna fall flat. All those minute details in animation become very big things when you’re dealing with this medium. They always say one second of animation is like an hour, so the timing is very important. That’s why Seth McFarlane and Matt Groening and all these successful shows and these guys are also artists and animators themselves. I think that’s part of the success of what we’re doing.
What has been the most rewarding fan reaction, either from the movie or the show?
JAI WHITE: People call it the funniest movie they’ve ever seen. You have people constantly throwing out “Black Dynamite” one-liners to me, that’s the height of it.
MINNS: I think one of the most gratifying moments was when we were at Sundance and it was a sold out screening. People were laughing so loud you were missing jokes. That was a great moment for me, it was like being on stage live. I didn’t know from this little bungalow at Mike’s house where we first came up with these ideas, we weren’t sure people were gonna get it to actually feel people enjoying it fully, that was one of the greatest moments.
JAI WHITE: We were the ones having the first laugh in this little cramped office space at my place, and then sharing that and hearing all these other people, that’s something.
MINNS: I said to Mike when we first started, “Either they’re gonna love it or they’re gonna hate it, and either it’s funny or we’re crazy.”
JONES: Turned out it was both! (laughs)
“Black Dynamite” Season 1 Blu-ray/DVD hits stores on July 15, “The Boondocks” season 4 and complete series is in stores now, and “Black Dynamite” Season 2 debuts in October.
