Alas, we’ve reached the final installment of our special five-part series of The Aquabats! Super Show! season 2 episodic sneak-peeks! Each of the first five episodes of the new season premiering Saturdays at 1 p.m. on Hub Network include one Bat’s recollection of how the musical superhero team came to be—each told in a different style of animation. You can learn more about the project by reading our first installment featuring additional info from show creator, exec producer and star Christian Jacobs (a.k.a. MC Bat Commander) here.
This week’s episode, “Anti-Bats!”, pits the Aquabats against two competing bands seeking vengeance who have joined forces with the evil Silver Skull and come … the Anti-bats! Meanwhile, Ricky Fitness abandons the ‘Bats for love and must choose between his new girlfriend and saving his old pals as the villains close in. The stop-motion animated origin story as told from Ricky’s (Richard Falomir) point of view was created by Culver City, Calif. animators John Ikuma and Brent Johnson.
“[Ikuma and Johnson] are great animators and graphic/After Effects guys and they also do stop-motion stuff, they work with a bunch of studios,” says Jacobs. “For Ricky, we did a stop-motion style with some generic action figures and sculpted heads to look like the Aquabats in this kind of ‘80s stop-motion style.”
“We actually did two, the stop-motion one and we had Anton Bogaty—he’s another animator/artist, and he had a really popular YouTube animation a couple years ago with like an IG 88 disco thing [IG 88: The Dancing Robot],” the show creator adds. “So, one of Ricky’s memories is stop-motion and then we have the same story that we told and Anton did it in more of a Flash style. They’re both really awesome so at the end of the day I think we’re going to do something with airing both of them and letting kids pick which one they like best.”
