Dropout’s Dimension 20 is known for its genre mashups. The Fantasy High and The Unsleeping City seasons bring the themes and archetypes of high fantasy to a John Hughes-style high school movie and the urban legend of New York City. Mentopolis takes the tropes of a film noir and crams them into a single mind, like Inside Out, while A Crown of Candy forces a Game of Thrones-esque world of magical realpolitik to wield the weapons of Candyland to satisfy its sugar/blood lust.
So there’s something comforting — and deceptively simple — about the show’s latest season, “Never Stop Blowing Up.” Essentially, it’s an ode to the absurdity of action movies, from rogue cops and powerful gangsters to master assassins and all-powerful hackers to James Bond-esque agents and racers solving worldwide conspiracies with the power of… cars. The mashup is evident in the show’s use of roles, with the series’ cast pulling double duty by playing characters who work at a barely existent video store in Lake Elsinore, California, in the year 2024. And than the action heroes these characters become when they are pulled onto a magical VHS tape called (you guessed it) “Never Stop Blowing Up.”
The Dropout series furthers the hilarious friction between the “real world” and “action movie land” in a number of formally playful ways that make the season seem as extraordinary as the world created by game director Brennan Lee Mulligan and players Ally Beardsley, Ify Nwadiwe, Isabella Roland, Rekha Shankar, Alex Song-Xia and Jacob Wysocki. Tape transfer filters, juddering effects and dramatic aspect ratio shifts to square and back again cheekily enhance the show’s most ’80s-esque moments. The Dimension 20 crew also equipped Mulligan with a battery of hard-hitting animated graphics – including bullets, explosions, smoke and lightning – that can be played on demand on the LED walls surrounding the cast.
It also feels right that the show has broken its own live-action format in the moments of “Never Stop Blowing Up” where the laws of physics are broken more than perhaps any previous season of “Dimension 20.” Particularly absurd action scenes can’t just be told to us; “Dimension 20” shows them to us, or at least the storyboards of what it looks like to make a jet fly into a puddle of beans, for example.
According to series producer Carlos Luna, the storyboard sequences, like much of the season itself, were born out of necessity. “We had done back-to-back seasons, more seasons than ‘Dimension 20’ had ever done, and everything was timed,” Luna told IndieWire. “You know, ‘Fantasy High: Junior Year’ and ‘Burrow’s End’ were just masterpieces, and we thought, ‘We don’t have time to create something that complex.'”
It’s the start of a big, silly action movie season — “We just thought, ‘What if we made dynamite?'” Luna said of an early production meeting. They did indeed make some dynamite as a prop, and Mulligan figured out what you could do with it — of course, you hide an EMP in a nuclear bomb in a bunch of dynamite — but the “Dimension 20” team increasingly found that if you give a mouse a cookie, it wants to channel nostalgia for physical media, creating a lot of action movie posters and trailers and maybe actual VHS tapes.
The normal character illustrations the show commissions (about 70 illustrations on average) became animated reveals on character-specific movie posters, which in turn fueled a desire to actually see some of the characters’ stunts. “Originally, we thought it would be really fast. It would be about a minute of one image and then another image. And we kept getting comments from people like, ‘We want it to go faster. We want it to be more exciting.’ And I realized we were talking about animation,” Luna said.
Each episode is interspersed with animation snippets in the form of storyboards for the fictional scenes of “Never Stop Blowing Up.” But it took some trial and error to find the right moments and create a satisfying rhythm without overwhelming animators Melina Caron and Sander Goldman, who were able to deliver on time.
“I had to take exactly the 15 seconds I could animate for each episode,” Luna said. “So when you watch it, the animation goes from a little animation to the actors laughing at the table and then more animation. We had to get all of those timings right and make up our own rules about what gets animated.”
The main rule was that Dimension 20 would only resort to animation for things they absolutely couldn’t do at the table. But sometimes it could be difficult to time that. “It’s so funny how you misremember things that happen on the show. You think they’re a lot shorter than they are,” Luna said. He and Mulligan made a list of moments they thought could work as storyboards, and then when they looked at them, “you thought, ‘Oh, that’s seven minutes. We can’t animate seven minutes,'” Luna said.
So the Dimension 20 team tried to isolate the moments that worked and reinforce the deceptive sense of timing so that audiences could stretch out animated moments in their minds, making the storyboards as cinematic as possible. There’s visual play with movement and color while maintaining the sketchy language of the storyboards, but Luna and the show’s post-production team also pulled out all the stops with sound to make the animation moments pop.
“I remember when Dang (Wysocki) gets shot into space, one of my notes was that the music should get quieter when he breaks through the atmosphere. I wanted it to feel like Superman was floating above the Earth. When he looks down, the editors had him pause and the animators animated this little beat, and it was just this great moment,” Luna said.
Never Stop Blowing Up has so much obvious visual flair that these editing tricks, the slight adjustments of music and rhythm, are a camouflage to build the comedy. As with any good action or heist movie, the format-breaking flashbangs work hand in hand with the invisible techniques that support them.
“Sometimes we work so hard for five seconds. And when things look good, people don’t realize how much work goes on behind the scenes,” Luna said. “We’re always trying to make what (the cast) does even better.”
“Dimension 20” can be streamed on Dropout.
