"Razor's Edge", Lance Falk and Giant Monsters

From: Andy Hill <chance_at_unix.infoserve.net>
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 1995 10:56:02 -0700 (PDT)

     Had an interesting phone call yesterday, here's the short version of
it - I'll actually have a proof of the article shortly (I think I said
that before, but there's been a few delays beyond my control).

     For those of you who don't know who "Lance Falk" is, he was part of
the SwatKats design team and wrote some great episodes.

     Lance Falk's favourite eps were "The Metallikats", "Metal Urgency"
and "Unlikely Alloys", as he liked the B-Movie gangster dialogue and
interaction between the Mac and Molly Mange characters. Lance tried to
make his episodes grow out of the frictions between the character's
personalities, and had little use for characters which existed strictly
for "comic relief", like Burke and Murray. In "Metal Urgency", Lance had
only written in the scene with these two and the SwatKats simply so he
would have the opportunity to meet Mark Hamill! Lance had always tried
to write episodes that focused on character development as opposed to
simple battles with Large Monsters, but was always held back in his
pursuit of such stories by people in the managment team at H-B/Turner who
insisted on reminding him that the audience was " 10 yr. olds". Villains
were usually portrayed as giant entities of Pure Evil, something else
that Lance wanted to avoid - hoping that there would eventually be room
for semi-sympathetic villains, perhaps with a tragic back-story (like
future planned appearances of Rexx Shard). He
managed to combine aspects of both in his "Unlikely Alloys" (the last ep
completed - I haven't seen it) - creating the largest monster yet
conceived to appease the execs who wanted that kind of thing, but also
factoring in Mac and Molly in a less than totally villainous way. It
seemed that some forces at play in Hanna-Barbera failed to recognize the
potential of more three-dimensional bad-guys in the afternoon format (as
are often found in Batman:The Animated Series), and had more episodes
been produced we would likely have seen more characters of this type.
Lance also pointed to Mark Saraceni's "Razor's Edge" as having some of
the character development aspects he wanted to expand upon, but the
cancellation of the program robbed him of the chance. He's working for
Warner's now, and I hope his contract leaves him free to write the script
for the SwatKats movie, should it ever be produced.

     Interesting note about "Razor's Edge", the writer - Mark Saraceni -
is co-designer of H-B's "Two Stupid Dogs", and has written eps for
Warner's "Taz".

  
Andy


Received on Sat Apr 15 1995 - 13:52:56 PDT