mfh

film
= Astroy Bo =

Return to Films section | View movie against light background

Astroy Bo II, The Super Detective & Doctor Chicken Mystery Hour

Director, animation, editing, script, voice talent: Aaron Dylan Kearns
Genre: Animation, absurdist humor
Runtime: 9:54
Budget: $0
Release Date: February 20, 2016
Festivals/Screenings: Astroy Bo II had its world premiere at the first Tromanimation Film Festival, held Saturday, April 30th, 2016 at the 13 Saloon in Brooklyn.
Synopsis: A deeply nihilistic half-chicken scientist and his dimwitted detective sidekick quest to find Daniel’s Room, an Area 51 type location where are hidden the 8th through 11th Wonders of the World. Second installment.

2016 troma tromanimation film festival

Astroy Bo
Download poster

Astroy Bo I, The Super Detective & Doctor Chicken Mystery Hour

Direction, animation, editing, script, voice talent: Aaron Dylan Kearns
Genre: Animation, absurdist humor
Runtime: 6:41
Budget: $0
Release Date: April 1, 2015
Synopsis: A deeply nihilistic half-chicken scientist and his dimwitted detective sidekick quest to find Daniel’s Room, an Area 51 type location where are hidden the 8th through 11th Wonders of the World. First installment.

When I made these two shorts, I was the equivalent of a junior and a senior in high school, had been a huge fan of the 1960s animated series Astro boy, and sometime during my teen years had found my way to an Astro Boy fan forum and had eventually become a moderator. Astroy Bo began as an in-joke for this forum. The story for how Astroy Bo came to be is below the poster.

Astroy Bo II poster
Download poster

We were waiting on an Astro Boy reboot that was to be produced in France by a company for which it would be their first TV series, and going by how things progressed with the production of it I wouldn't be surprised if they basically announced it the moment they got the rights to the series, before developing concept art or scripts for episodes. To give context, the first announcement about the reboot was given around 2015, and as of 2019 they still don't have a release date set. Already, in 2015, we realized nothing was likely going on, and so for April Fool's Day I spent the night beforehand piecing together this fucked up Clutch Cargo amalgamation of certain in-jokes. I posted Astroy Bo 1> to the forum on April Fool's Day, with the message "Good News Everyone" attached, claiming I had a relative who had a friend who had an uncle who had a niece who was an intern at the French company, and that through various bribes and other shenanigans I'd gotten my hands on a leaked pilot episode of the series to be screened in 2017.

Eventually, I realized I could make a series of hypothetical Astroy Bo shorts before the proper reboot would ever be screened, effectively making mine the true and original reboot.

While Astroy Bo I was done in a single night, Astroy Bo II took several months to make due to the more "out there" humor of the short.

I remember working on the Space Disco Revival scene on New Years Eve as 2015 transitioned to 2016.

Storywise, the two films are a bastardization of a British murder mystery, that framework serving to tie together, in the first installment, many of the in-forum gags.

On the forum, a lot of people liked a one-shot character, known as Cobalt, in the 1960s series. He was basically the equivalent of a sit-com trope, the baby that's thrown in when the sit-com has run past its expiration date. The Cobalt character was like an older brother character to Astro Boy. As part of my cynical humor I decided he'd be the dead body that Super Detective and Doctor Chicken are going to investigate. Super Detective and Doctor Chicken are like the buddy cop duo from some Lovecraftian void, based on the characters Inspector Gumshoe and Doctor Tenma. (Tenma had invented Astro Boy, as a recreation of his dead son, which is a reason to be confused about Cobalt suddenly appearing when there had been no older brother.) I picked Super Detective/Inspector Gumshoe and Doctor Chicken/Doctor Tenma as the main characters as I thought in the original series they were kind of funny. Gumshoe had a hairbrush shaped nose that would be fun to caricature. As for Tenma, there was an iPhone game that had come out the year prior that had Tenma worked in as a character, then people were appalled when it was revealed Tenma was unlockable. In the game he looked like he had two Robocop-like laser cannon arms attached to his body, so he was part cyborg, though he hadn't been one in the original show. I decided to take this a step further and make him a complete cyborg, a carbon copy of Robocop, despite my never having seen the film, just clips.

And that's how Astroy Bo came to be.

Connect