How BoJack Horseman Got Made, an oral history

September 4, 2018 12:10 PM

How BoJack Horseman Got Made, an oral history. Excerpted from the new book(!!!) BoJack Horseman: The Art Before The Horse

(From the Vulture link)
Noel Bright: I love how Raphael tells the story about how the casting went: “Can we get this person?” “Sure!” “Wait — we really can get that person?” And then, all of a sudden, “Yeah, that person just said yes.”

Steven A. Cohen: Well, one casting story we always point to is the line Raphael had written in the script was that there was “a Keith Olbermann type” for Tom Jumbo-Grumbo.

Raphael Bob-Waksberg: “Keith Olbermann whale,” which is what I think the script described it as. It was just trying to describe the character!

Steven A. Cohen: Right. We didn’t think he was going to be Keith Olbermann.

Raphael Bob-Waksberg: Linda said, “Let’s get Keith Olbermann! We can do it!” And then we recorded him and we did all the lines, and afterward we just said, “Okay, now can we just get some whale noises from you?” And this is in New York; he’s over the phone, and he says, “Mmmmmmwrrrrwrwrwwrwr!” [whale noise] and it’s like, “That’s Keith Olbermann! Making whale noises for our dumb little cartoon!”

Mike Hollingsworth: We were like, “Can you make a noise like you’re spraying water out of the back of your head?”


Art References, Previously
Jokes you missed in Season 4
More previously, Season 4 trailer

FanFare

posted by Gorgik (24 comments total)

Season 5 Official Trailer.
posted by Pendragon at 12:17 PM on September 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

BoJack Horseman: a goofy cartoon about serious topics like fame, fortune, acceptance (and self-acceptance), rejection (and self-rejection), and how tech bros can ruin perfectly good ideas.

And holy shit, "Thoughts and Prayers." Nothing left to say. Nothing.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:44 PM on September 4, 2018 [5 favorites]

Lisa Hanawalt's (other) new book, Coyote Doggirl is out now.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 12:47 PM on September 4, 2018 [6 favorites]

"The Art Before the Horse" is such a good name that had Bojack Horseman not been greenlit another show about a horse would have to be made.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:48 PM on September 4, 2018 [11 favorites]

Michael Eisner [owner, the Tornante Company]: Told that there was a meeting in Steven Cohen’s office with a well-respected young writer, I happened to be in the hall as the meeting ended. In a one-minute hallway conversation, I was told three ideas. One of which being: “This one is about an animated show about a living ‘person’ who has a body of a man and a head of a horse.” Thinking that sounded interesting, original, and theatrical in this century — yet harking back to my youth of Mister Ed, the talking horse from the early ‘60s — I simply said, “Yes, let’s do that one.”

What is up with Eisner’s style of speech? He sounds like a BoJack character himself.

Here's a good recent interview with Lisa Hanawalt. I love how her concept art for Diane is all flirty and confident, nothing like the final character.
posted by ejs at 12:50 PM on September 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

I'm gonna get to see Lisa Hanawalt show off her new project this weekend and I am fuckin' stoked. She is great, and Bojack is great, and, golly.
posted by cortex at 1:11 PM on September 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

Thanks, Gorgik. Bojack is probably my favorite show right now. Powerful stuff. Horse majeure.
posted by sapagan at 1:20 PM on September 4, 2018 [10 favorites]

Thought about including some of these older ones (might be in some of the previous threads or Fanfare)

Jokes you missed
Jokes you missed Season 1
Jokes you missed Season 2
posted by Gorgik at 1:37 PM on September 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

The blurred line between the slapstick and the profound on BoJack Horseman made me write this elsewhere, about a year ago.

So a while ago Netflix started telling me that I would like their show "Bojack Horseman," a cartoon for adults. I ignored it because I thought the show looked like a stupid comedy.

It is neither: not stupid, and not comedy (despite being frequently hilarious).

It reminds me of a high-school English teacher (who must have been a substitute, because I remember him as male, but I think I had only female English teachers in high school) who gently corrected someone in the class for misusing the adjective "sublime." "Sublime," said this teacher, is in dictionaries as a synonym for "really nice," often in connection with food: "the dish was easy to make but sublime to eat" is one example that comes up when I look it up tonight. But that understates what it means, cheapens the word. My grandfather (continued this teacher) was an infantryman in World War II, and told of watching a battle advance towards his position at night, so that the only illumination came from exploding enemy mortars. Each blast illuminated the faces of the men around him: men who still had handsome boys' faces, knowing that their orders to respond to the battle would come in a few moments, wondering in the privacy of the darkness whether those orders would send them forward to their deaths or backwards like cowards, each burst of light revealing a different moment in the journey between courage and fear and sadness and hope. An unexpected moment of profound beauty in the midst of the terrible, made all the more beautiful by the terribleness of it. Sublime.

If you decide to enjoy this sublime work of art, commit to it: the writers are playing a long game, and most of the first season is setup.

posted by fantabulous timewaster at 2:53 PM on September 4, 2018 [13 favorites]

I...am obsessed with this show.
posted by whimsicalnymph at 3:21 PM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

Michael Eisner: Who knew Raphael Bob-Waksberg would deliver a brilliant, clever, funny, and emotional script, with the brilliant series to follow? That kind of talent shows up about once a decade.

That's one hell of a praise quote. And it's duly earned.
posted by mikelieman at 3:32 PM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

Lisa Hanawalt gave a talk at XOXO that was hilarious and very personal, her 2015 take on how the show got made. Full video online. She's going to be back at XOXO this weekend for her new show Tuca & Bertie. Not sure if this will end up online or not, this session is a little less formal than the talk she gave in 2015.
posted by Nelson at 4:26 PM on September 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

Once in a long while some art will emerge that just fits me. It is so perfect that I cannot describe it in its own terms, as if a fish acquired more water. What is it? It's a thing I never knew I was looking for. I can literally think myself into crying over how good it is, and I'm not an easy cryer.
posted by rhizome at 4:50 PM on September 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

A good friend of mine had a mutual friend of Hanawalts who passed away a few years ago. She doesn't watch the show, but a few years ago texted me a screen cap, and asked if I recognized her. Turns out she was memorialized in the show and has the same name with a different spelling.
I've always thought that was nice, even though I didn't know her personally.
posted by lkc at 6:59 PM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

The woman I watched the first season of this show with knew Raphael Bob-Waksberg in school and tells me his nickname was "Raisin". I have nothing substantive to add.
posted by Space Coyote at 9:47 PM on September 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

I know one of Bob-Waksberg’s relatives (I believe he’s a cousin?), and his nickname is “Muffin.”

Do with that as you will.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 10:30 PM on September 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

I was in the unique position of having very good friends try and talk me out of watching it - "He's you - you're BoJack" and when someone says something like that you say "ok, but now I have to watch it." and I may have, at that time in my life, been something like season 1 BoJack, but watching the show and becoming more self-aware of those behaviours has since made me a better horseperson.
posted by Molesome at 3:20 AM on September 5, 2018 [13 favorites]

"Traveler" loves this show put "traveler" in quotation marks oh God is that too pretentious ah whatever.
posted by traveler_ at 7:28 AM on September 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

One thing that I appreciate about Bojack is that its worldbuilding accomplishes what lots of urban-fantasy works fail to do, in that it actually goes to the trouble of imagining all of the ways in which the world would really and truly be different if its central fantasy element (animals are people too) were a real thing. The world of Bojack Horseman feels much more fleshed out and culturally-whole than something like Bright, to name another recent Netflix original.

For example: Bright postulates a world where fantasy creatures and humans have lived side-by-side for millennia, yet somehow the entire Shrek franchise still exists, completely unchanged by the surrounding culture. By contrast, Bojack Horseman postulates a world where humans and bipedal talking horses coexist, and extrapolates from that the existence of an Oscar-caliber sports biopic about Secretariat, who is considered no less an athlete than Steve Prefontaine.
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:45 AM on September 5, 2018 [6 favorites]

BH is fantastic, and yet I have to be in a pretty good place emotionally in order to be able to watch it, because it can also be incredibly devastating.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:32 AM on September 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

I recently saw a picture of a nondescript american presenter in some web article or another. I idly noted this to my friend across the table - "hey look - A Ryan Seacrest Type lol!". My friend looked over, "No, that actually is Ryan Seacrest".

Reader, A Ryan Seacrest Type still has greater significance to me as a social reference than the real Ryan Seacrest, who I now understand to be an actual human being.

Bojack serves all the pop culture insight I need in a perfect, heartbreaking crystal capsule. Yay for this show. Yay for this post.
posted by freya_lamb at 9:32 AM on September 5, 2018 [9 favorites]

Well, technically Ryan Seacrest *is* a type of Ryan Seacrest
posted by Pronoiac at 1:36 PM on September 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

The set of Ryan Seacrest Types includes Ryan Seacrest, as well as Joel McHale.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:47 PM on September 5, 2018 [7 favorites]

Season 5 Official Trailer.

Welp, time to forget what happened to me every previous season, binge-watch this season, then spend two or three days afterward just kind of staring into space and reconsidering everything.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 2:26 PM on September 5, 2018 [5 favorites]