When Eddie Alcazar was growing up, his favorite game was Street Fighter. And now, he’s taken that love and integrated it deeply into his new animated series Bullet Time. Alcazar, who spent years working in the video game industry – including a stint at EA contributing to the Medal of Honor series, developed Bullet Time as an ode to games and the fans who love them.
“I spent about eight years in the video game industry working on a lot of different titles, and they’ve always been a huge part of my childhood,” Alcazar says.” I think Mario was the very first game I ever played (but) my favorite game is Street Fighter. Once Street Fighter came out, that was very revolutionary. And so I wanted to do something that I was knowledgeable in and that I could have fun with. And I felt like it was almost in a way, Beavis and Butt-head when they watched music videos.”
The premiere episode of Bullet Time, which IGN is exclusively premiering and can be watched in the player above, follows irreverent dog Bullet – along with his friends Todd and Kat – playing in (and winning!) a Street Fighter-esque video game match. And while most of the show is traditionally animated, the game-within-the-show is produced using classic claymation techniques.
“8-bit seems like the obvious choice,” Alcazar says. “And the more I thought of it I was like, okay, this is kind of cliche, a lot of people are doing pixel art these days. And so I wanted to see (if) claymation would even work. Why not try to do something a little bit different and have it be claymation? Every episode (of Bullet Time) is driven by a different game. Mario Kart obviously is so huge these days, (and) there’s definitely a racing one coming up.”
Bullet Time’s creative team includes animation powerhouses Danny Elfman, Eric Bauza, and Ren & Stimpy’s Bob Jaques
One of Alcazar’s main goals with Bullet Time was to recreate the style and character-driven themes of animated shows from the early 90s. In doing so he headhunted Bob Jaques, the legendary animation director from the classic Ren & Stimpy show. “We were getting all these amazing legends and great talent to create something that they don’t really do anymore,” Alcazar says. “I was trying to do something meaningful.”
Aside from Jaques, Alcazar brought in
acclaimed composer Danny Elfman
and prolific voiceover artist Eric Bauza, who says participating in the project was a no-brainer.
“(The early 2000s were) a very strange era for animation,” Bauza says. “The 90’s gross-out humor of Ren & Stimpy or Beavis and Butt-head kind of faded away because of something like Jackass. Would you rather see Stimpy fart in Ren’s face or would you rather see Steve-O fart in Johnny Knoxville’s face? I ended up voicing Stimpy for a reboot of Ren & Stimpy that was a little bit more adult in nature. (I became friends with Bob Jaques) and that’s who joined (me) to Eddie on this. (With) Eddie being at the helm and Danny creating this music for the piece, I was just blown away. And yeah, it definitely does harken back to a time where character stories (were) a huge part of it.”
How Danny Elfman’s work on Frankenweenie influenced Bullet Time
For his part, Elfman says working on Bullet Time, which Alcazar partially created as a tribute to his own since-deceased pet dog, was no different than working on a big-budget feature.
“I didn’t approach it differently than I would if it were live action,” Elfman says. “It’s character-driven. When I was doing Frankenweenie for Tim Burton, I (had) just lost my dog and I’m writing about this dog that gets hit by a car and he’s all tragic about it. He wants to bring it back to life, and I’d be literally writing the score and (there would be) be tears coming down because I was still feeling it so fresh in my mind. So I certainly understand one’s devotion to the animal and turning it into some completely different kind of a thing.”
“I connected (Bullet Time) to my dog who was pretty much on his last days,” Alcazar says. “I was like, alright, I have to make this special. At that time I thought it was going to take a year. I ended up four years of working on this, but in that time I kind of got a strong education of how these cartoons are made and what makes them special.”
Central to Bullet Time’s story is Bullet’s borderline obsession with video games. Elfman says that, despite working on major game projects like the Fable series, he tends to shy away from that medium for a very good reason.
“(When my son) was a teen, all the other fathers at his school gamed with their kids except for me,” Elfman says. “And I just learned early on that when I start playing games, I can’t dislodge myself from it. (In) the arcade days, it would be Mario Brothers and Asteroid. And I found myself literally dreaming about strategies. And it was really fucking with my head. And because I’m somebody who’s writing music all the time, if I’m not writing a film score, I’m writing songs. I either am doing this a hundred percent or I’m not at all. (With) video games, (it’s) my same relationship to sugar. I’m a sugar addict and I know it. And if I don’t want to become a diabetic, I have to stay away completely. So even though I’ve dabbled a bit, and I would love to do more because they could be very creative and interesting, I had to completely remove myself from that world as a participant because it was just a vortex.”
Bauza’s relationship to working on games is a bit more clear-cut. “If I do score something in a video game, then I know I’ve done something right,” he says. “I recently did the voice of a talking dishwasher in a game called Date Everything! Three of my buddies from voiceover created this game. It’s a dishwasher with a face, but has human sexy legs, and you could date this dishwasher. And it’s the weirdest concept, but it just makes me laugh. So far, he’s been my favorite character.”
With Bullet Time’s premiere episode now available to everyone, Alcazar is thinking about the future and how he can expand the world of the series.
“Obviously I think there’s a game to be had out of this whole series,” Alcazar says, “but maybe finding a new way to do it where you have mini games and you could actually play what Bullet is playing. That’s the stuff I’m thinking about all the time, coming from the gaming world – how to do it differently. How much can we even extend this world? I just love world building. I love exploring different places this character could go, and the details are really fun for me to get into.
“This stuff is hard,” Alcazar says. “(It’s) not easy, it’s very tedious, but there’s a lot of heart that goes into it. Bringing together the best team that are also like-minded and have them instill that soul into something like this is a very special thing that I feel. Hopefully it’s almost undeniable once people see it.”
