The nonsense was all on the page – Adam Pally in an echidna costume, Julian Barratt rocking an owl headdress, a huge puppet hero demon, a black-box theater-worthy interpretation of a Sonic stage – but then director Jorma Taccone began the hallucinatory musical that was orchestrating it Knuckles‘ fourth episode, his impulse was to pile on even more.
“Toby (Ascher, the showrunner) was like from the jump: Look, I grew up on Adult Swim, I want to make this weird and push boundaries and make this as interesting and different and unexpected as possible,” Taccone tells Polygon. “And that is of course right up my alley.”
The episode “The Flames of Disaster” isn’t just up Taccone’s alley — he built the dang alley. After breaking out with Digital Shorts on Saturday evening livethe Lonely Island member applied his go-hard-or-go-home comedy stylings to work like “ MacGruber And Popstar: Never stop, never stop. While a spin-off of the Sonic the Hedgehog films may not have immediately called upon his established skills on paper, his longtime collaborator Brandon Trost, the director of photography of Pop star And Sonic the hedgehog who turned around to continue directing Knucklesconvinced Taccone to intervene on a one-time basis.
A lo-fi approach to executing the musical concept allowed Taccone to basically do whatever he wanted, and with the resources of a large film crew; Knuckles employed most of the same crew Sonic the Hedgehog 2that would eventually go in straight from the series Sonic the Hedgehog 3.
“My goal for the episode was honestly for this to be something that you look at and think: Wow, what was that? – it’s so full for 21, 22 minutes,” Taccone says, still as giddy as he was on set. “When I showed it to my wife, her response was, ‘I don’t even know what to say about that.’”
Image: Paramount Plus
“The Flames of Disaster” opens the morning after a raucous Shabbat dinner, as bounty hunter Jack Sinclair (Barratt) kidnaps Deputy Sheriff Wade Whipple (Pally) from the porch of his mother’s house. Knuckles refuses to save him. Wade needs to become a true warrior, and this is his chance. Even if it’s being transported across Idaho in an electrified steel cage. As Wade reels from shocks to the brain, the action shifts to his subconscious, where Pachacamac (voiced by Christopher Lloyd), the eldest of Knuckles’ tribe, appears to him at a spirit bowling alley to send him on a spiritual journey – of interpretive dance and puppetry.
Image: Paramount Pictures/Sega/Paramount Plus
The first thing Taccone did when he received the script for “The Flames of Disaster” was call his brother Asa Taccone, who has been instrumental in writing the songs for Lonely Island over the years. Working with another of their favorite collaborators, composer Matthew Compton, the trio wrote a power ballad that allowed Barratt to wail as Pally swung, kicked, ran and spun around the bowling alley. At this point, Taccone can’t even tell if he’s parodying something with “The Flames of Disaster” – “Honestly, it feels very Lonely Island to me?” he says, realizing he’d created his own musical subgenre, but once the song was finished, it made sense to call in a favor from one of his main creative inspirations: Michael Bolton.
The Lonely Island gave Bolton a late-career resurgence with them SNL movie ‘Jack Sparrow’. Now Taccone can text him when he needs some of that Bolton magic for a new project.
“It’s been crazy in my life to say I can consider Val Kilmer a friend (after MacGruber), and it was crazy to say that Michael Bolton is definitely a good friend,” Taccone said. “We call him Lord Boltron, which I really want to spread as much as possible. We really want people to shout “LORD BOLTRON!!” call.”
“The Flames of Disaster” checked two boxes for the Knuckles production: an episode with very little of the lead character, an expensive CG creation, and an episode that could lean even further into lo-fi to contrast with everything audiences would expect from the series. Taccone approached it as a “community theater production,” despite working with many of the most sought-after production heads working in Hollywood.
When Taccone met the episode’s choreographer – Ellen Kane, whose credits include West End productions and the recent Matilda movie – he remembers her being super game for any crazy idea. He could only be self-deprecating. “I was like, ‘Just know… this.’ is below you.'”
But Taccone sells itself short: the final production is astonishing. The director says his personal comedy mantra is “comedy is contrast” and there are examples of this everywhere. Pally spends most of the episode in a scruffy Knuckles costume, dancing through Kane’s precision choreography as if he’s joining in Fame. A giant demon bursts out of the back halls of the bowling alley and continues to prowl Facebook Marketplace (“My whole thing was, I just want him to look for mountain bikes,” says Taccone.) There are throwaway jokes – note the puppets stepping in and out of the dream – which the director says he made time for just because if someone caught them for a split second they would laugh. Not every dream came true, like Michael Bolton’s floating head, but it came close. With a seasoned team, he could say, “Can I get a flare gun? I want the mailman to shoot a flare gun,” and then he would have a flare gun.
Image: Paramount Plus
“I’m so used to working within the margins of not having a lot of time or money, and being able to shoot a lot in that time,” says Taccone. “And while this is a lot more delivery days than I would have had with things like MacGruber, we packed it back up. I tried to take many photos per day. So certain parts we treated it almost like a music video. The first thing I did was they bought me a little Bluetooth speaker so I could even do playback (of the song) so I could get more takes quickly and read cue stuff really quickly. So I was able to do all of these lines from Julian very quickly, so quickly that I couldn’t wait for us to even connect to the timecode.
The absurdity is technical and for Taccone the results are transcendent. He is most surprised that an episode of the Knuckles The TV show made him… a little teary.
“The moments I’m always most proud of are when it’s both funny and musically moving. A moment where (Wade) stands up and the echidna angels are around him, bringing him up and then the music starts to rise and Bolton’s voice rises – you kind of feel something! It’s always my favorite when it’s both funny and insane, and, like, I’m a little inspired!”
Knuckles season 1 is now streaming on Paramount Plus.