Brendon Small has made you laugh. As co-creator of the animated series Home Movies, he was a big part of Adult Swim's growing popularity, not to mention a very funny writer, voice actor and musician. He's recently topped himself in all of those regards with Metalocalypse, his new series for Adult Swim. We got the chance to speak with him recently about his love of metal, posing for Playgirl, and getting to design his own guitar.

Chief Magazine:  So, Brendon, you have a lot going on!  You’re originally from Springfield, Illinois?

Brendon Small:  I lived there until I was 8 years old.

Then where did you go?

Then I moved to Salinas, California.  My dad works in the produce industry and he got a transfer, so we all left what I thought it was the ultimate place to grow up as a kid, and got demoted to Salinas, California.  I remember kids throwing rocks at each other.  And, the white kids can’t conjugate verbs.  I thought [to myself]: “everyone is so stupid here.”

[Laughs]  Even at the age of 8 you were able to understand that.

I feel like, whether or not I could totally articulate that, it was how I felt.  That was my general feeling.  It was like “This is a demotion. I hate this place. These people are stupid.”  Salinas, California is basically known for being the home of John Steinbeck.  The main crop is lettuce, so the place smells like fertilizer.  It’s an expansive, desolate and oppressive kind of an atmosphere, which is what made those books so great.

He [Steinbeck] is my favorite author.

And there were people constantly shooting retarded people in the back of their heads.

[Laughs] You can’t go anywhere without that happening!

That’s just happening in Salinas… It’s all Of Mice And Men.

[Laughs] I have to admit, I don’t have cable.  So, I haven’t been able to actually sit down and watch the shows but I have watched some on YouTube and stuff like that.  I have read about the characters.  So, when you made Home Movies, was the main character meant to be autobiographical?  You know, at that age when you were like “I hate this place…”

I definitely used a lot of stuff from growing up, to write.  It’s not necessarily autobiographical.   I did make movies as a kid, but not to this extent.  I mean, the show is about a kid who makes movies, obviously, with a single mom.  My parents are still together today.  They may divorce tomorrow, who knows?  But yeah, the storylines are mildly autobiographical but not the show itself.

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Ok.  So, you were at Berkeley College in Boston and then you started taking classes in writing and comedy at Emerson.  When you were approached by Loren Bouchard, were you trying to go for a show, anyways?  Were you looking into writing an actual…

Basically, my thoughts at the time were: “I’m very, very sick of learning about music and the music that I really like isn’t that popular right now. I just don’t know what I’m gonna do with guitar.”  So, I just put it in its case for a few years and was very drawn to comedy.  My goal was to study comedy for a while and I spend a lot of time writing.  I took these classes for writing sketch comedy and writing for TV, at Emerson College.  Through music, I had a lot of discipline as far as writing a lot of stuff in small amounts of time.  Some was good, some was bad, but it was definitely a learning process.  

I was also doing stand-up at the time.  When you start out as a stand-up, you’re just trying to not suck.  That’s your main goal.  You have very good nights and very bad nights.  Even when you watch professional comics, they still have good nights and bad nights.  At that point, I was pretty much ready to move to L.A. and get an internship somewhere and work as a PA or writer’s assistant or something.  I remember talking to my parents at that time and they were like “Well, what would make you stay in Boston?”  So, I said “If someone offered me a TV show” and they were like “Oh. Well, that’s not gonna happen.”  About a month later, I got a call from Loren Bouchard, who said he was in early development on a show and he wanted to bring me in as a voice actor.  So I told him I didn’t want to just voice act, but I wanted to write and help create.  So luckily, I got my foot stuck in the door and kind of ran with it.  It’s all luck based, though.

Originally, the show was meant for UPN but then it got moved to Cartoon Network.  It was on for four seasons, right?

Yeah, it was four seasons of about 13 episodes each.  It had a bit of a rocky start.  It started on UPN, which was kind of the wrong network for it.  UPN was cool.  They got the show, but it just wasn’t their audience.  It turns out there was no audience for the show there. [Laughs]  It was on its first kind of run.  There were people that liked it a lot  and supported it.  But, at some point you have to say: “No one’s really watching the show and it’s not really making anybody any money.”

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That must have been difficult to take when you needed someone to offer you a show, and someone offered you a show, and…

It happened in such a great way, where I took nothing seriously.  I had a show that was on for 5 episodes and then got canceled from UPN.  Another 6 months went by and we had a show again.  I was like “Oh, I get it.”  I think I was 23 when I did the pilot for Home Movies and I was 24 when it started airing and when it got canceled.  I was 24 1/2 when it started airing again.  I get the business.  It’s showbiz.  Nothing really makes any sense.  It’s not gonna be a stable job market kind of a thing.  I understand that, now.  Don’t let the highs get you too high and don’t let the lows get you too low.  

Ok.  Well, Adult Swim is sort of the ideal place for Home Movies, as well as Metalocalypse.  It’s a good platform.  It [Cartoon Network] is not really a variety show but it’s sort of set up like that.

Yeah.  It’s an amazing playground of creative freedom.  The network will believe in a group of people and say: “Hey, do something cool. Let’s see what you can do.”  They don’t manhandle you like other networks do. They leave that creative inspiration for the creators.  They let some people go farther than others but if it works, they pretty much leave them alone completely.  It’s been a really, really great creative relationship working with those guys.  They care about what we care about.  That’s the thing, if you don’t have passion for your TV show, you should probably just go home.  In the world of creativity, if you’re not doing something you care about, what’s the point?  There are plenty of other ways to make a lot of money.  And when I say a lot of money, I mean very little. [Laughs]