Douglas Goldstein and Tom Root have found a way to make a living while playing with their toys. They are the co-head writers and co-producers of the joltingly funny Robot Chicken, a new series airing on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Also directed and produced with actor Seth Green (of Austin Powers fame) and Matt Senreich, Robot Chicken animates classic toy action figures in subversive satires of pop culture. (Imagine, if you dare, a sword-wielding Jesus doll acting out The House of Blue Leaves scene in Kill Bill, Vol. 1, for instance.) The rapid-fire sketches flip by as the Robot Chicken (a resurrected bionic fowl) channel-surfs TV shows from an alternate universe populated by walking, talking toys. Here, the guys explain how such a twisted idea made it to your television set. (Robot Chicken debuts Sunday, Feb. 20 at 11:30 p.m. ET.)

Where did Robot Chicken come from?

Douglas: Tom and I worked at Wizard Entertainment, which is a pop-culture magazine publishing house, and one of our magazines, ToyFare, is about action figures. And we tried to keep our ears to the ground for celebrities who like toys so we could possibly interview them for the magazine. And Matt Senreich, who’s now the executive producer of the show, was at the time the editor of ToyFare. He had heard that Seth loved toys so he called his manager; the manager was like, “I’ll see if he wants to work with you.” Seth called back directly and said, “I love your magazine, I love toys.” And then from there….

Tom: Seth was going on Conan O’Brien and wanted to bring a stop-motion short using a Seth action figure and a Conan action figure as they went off on some wild adventure. And Seth wanted some help coming up with a story and figuring out what other toys could be animated, so he came to Matt, Doug, and I and we helped him whip up a five-minute story. Somehow, Sony Entertainment got wind of this project and asked us if we wanted to do not just one but 12 of these short, animated stories that they would put on their website, which was Screenblast.com. This was back in 2001.

Douglas: And once they were done, Seth loved doing them, so he aggressively took them and said, “Hey networks, what can we do with this?” And the result is Robot Chicken.

Had you guys done animation before this?

Tom: We had never worked in animation and in fact we’ve never worked in television. But we knew action figures. And that’s sort of what Seth was after—our knowledge of action figures. In ToyFare, we take action figures and make them funny and that’s what he corralled us to help him out with. We all had to learn the ropes of animation.

Douglas: Half of the magazine’s appeal is humor—we make the toys say and do funny things, and a lot of people get it just for the humor.

So how did you go from having this concept to actually landing a show on the Cartoon Network?

Tom: Matt and Seth basically shopped it around. The process was a couple years where they were just trying to get a network to sign on and let us do it. Finally, it was the Cartoon Network who thought they could find a home for it on Adult Swim.

Douglas: At the end of 2003, it seemed very positive that it was actually going to happen at the Cartoon Network. Then in early spring of 2004, we got word that it we were going to move out to L.A. I was in New York at that time and Tom was in Orlando. And here we are—on June 1 we showed up and started working. We actually started brainstorming ideas before we left for L.A., and we started writing scripts in mid-summer. And now we’ve finished mixing the sound and handed in the first episode last week. That’s not really an indication of how long it takes to turn out one episode; we work on all 20 at the same time. There was a point where every possible stage of production that could happen was happening at the same time for different episodes. It was quite an interesting level of stress.

So what comes first: the toy, or the sketch idea for the toy?

Tom: A lot of times we’ll take classic toy lines that we love and try to come up with stories for them. For example, Voltron—the toys are really cool and the show was cool for its time. I tried to think of a Voltron story for a long time but came up with nothing, and finally we settled on a break-dancing contest between Voltron and one of the Ro-beast villains, and break-dancing was sort of the way into a Voltron story. A lot of times we’ll come up with something funny and try to plug appropriate toys into it. For example, we have a Cannonball Run-type race that’s nothing but action figures, and once we knew wanted to do that, we tried to come up with all sorts of racing toys with vehicles we could plug into that structure.

Douglas: A lot of times we want to make fun with the properties of our youth, like Transformers. And once we come up with the idea, we’ve got to see what we can do to make that work. The Transformers segment was a worst-case scenario of trying to make it work. I don’t know if you remember the original Transformers from the ‘80s, but when they became robots it took a lot of imagination to make them seem like robots—they were just built to transform and they didn’t really look like robots or move like robots. So for a while we considered using those, but then we thought, “You know what? Nostalgia is one thing, but we’ve got to get this show done and this isn’t going to work.” So we custom-made a lot of them. We took different parts of toys and made Frankenstein Transformers that looked perfect, but they were really eight different toys in one. And in the end, as long as the puppeteers can put them together, we’ll do it. Sometimes we have an episode where it’s like, “Okay, we want to have these huge crowd scenes and mobs!” And the puppet guys are like, “And I have to make how many guys for this mob?” And then we have to cut back the idea. But it all gets done and the final results are pretty cool.