Douglas: It really wasn’t in the budget just to go nuts without specific ideas in mind. There were a lot of basic parts that were built. For instance, a lot of wire frames were made, and a lot of what we called “Mego bodies” because Mego was a company in the ‘70s that made pretty posable toys so that was a good base for us. But episode by episode, we made a big shopping list.

Tom: We have a guy who is our toy wrangler, and all he does for us is go to different stores shopping for toys—looking for old toys at vintage stores, looking for new toys at Toys R Us. He comes in once a week with enormous armloads full of toys that our puppet people take and modify.

Douglas: And it’s harder than it sounds. We’ll be like, “Okay, we have Strawberry Shortcake driving in a strawberry car.” He’s got to find a strawberry car that was made in whatever year, and he’s like, “I can’t find this. I found a Strawberry Shortcake trolley car—will that work?”

How do you create some of the elaborate sets, such as The House of Blue Leaves from Kill Bill, Vol. 1?

Douglas: These people have god-like skills. We have 10 or 12 set-builders in the back just doing their best to make a set that looks good and can be used in the shots that we have. We have a great lighting team that will light the set. If you look closely, The House of Blue Leaves is underlit where it needed to be. And sometimes we will reuse sets—you’ll see parts of The House of Blue Leaves used in different restaurant scenes later on in the series—because sometimes we want to spend more time on [making] another set. They are super-talented people.

Tom: All of our set guys are trained in architecture; some of them went to architecture school and are architects. We have a guy who worked on the Star Wars prequels building miniatures. So even though a lot of our stories are silly and the puppets look ridiculous as they’re moving in front of these sets, our sets are really accurate and really professional.

Douglas: And where they can, they’ll try to use something that came with a toy. If you have a rock ‘n’ roll scene and a toy came with a toy microphone for some reason, we’ll use it. But 99 percent of everything you see on the show that’s a set is custom-built.

Has the network ever voiced concern over some of the show’s edgy humor?

Douglas: They encouraged it. They said, “Don’t hold anything back. That’s what Adult Swim is all about.”

Tom: As far as standards and practices go, we do get notes back occasionally that we can’t go as far as we want to. But it’s pretty rare, and Adult Swim is really open to whatever we want to do most of the time.

What kind of outtakes might we see on the eventual Robot Chicken DVD?

Tom: A lot of it is just snips here and there that were cut for time. But we have a sketch right now that we are editing that is the life and death of Britney Spears told in a Citizen Kane kind of epic way. Our show as a whole is very fast-paced, so we’ve really had to cut into this “Citizen Spears” sketch as we make it the right pace. There are a lot of gags that have fallen out, and Seth has kept talking about doing a full-length version of "Citizen Spears," like a director’s cut.

Douglas: I think the largest example we have of cutting for time is we did a sketch that took elements of the movie Se7en and we told it with the Smurfs because a lot of them match the movie. It was about 5 minutes, and there was a general feeling that it ran a little long, so we took certain scenes out to make it tighter and punchier. And while it was a little heart-breaking for some us—it looked amazing—what you’ll see on the network is the three-minute shortened version. And hopefully, fingers crossed, we’ll get the whole five minutes on the DVD.

Do you ever worry that you’ll run out of action figures to represent pop-culture scenarios?

Tom: I don’t think we’re ever going to run out of pop-culture stuff because action figures started in the early ‘60s, so we’ve got the early GI Joes all the way through the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. We’ve also got the entire spectrum of non-action-figure pop culture that we can get into, so I’m sure new stuff is going to happen all the time that we can make fun of.

Douglas: The funny thing is that one of our big challenges is not really running out of ideas, but choosing which ideas will work. Because we will have written ideas, say last summer, that won’t see air until this spring. So what is huge in the news and very much in public consciousness back then may be completely out of public consciousness in the spring. There was a while there where we thought, “Should we even do these George Bush jokes? He may not be president.” Unfortunately, he still is president, so a lot of those ideas work. But that’s a challenge: We have to gauge whether this is a flash in the pan type of thing or not. We had suggested a few lip-syncing jokes since the whole Ashley Simpson thing was big at one point, and Seth accurately pointed out that that’s like a two-minute controversy—nobody will even think about that when it’s on the air.

Have you started thinking up new ideas for new shows?

Douglas: We are enjoying the process of not writing at the moment, but that’s something we’re keeping our eyes on—if we see something funny, we’ll write it down because we’re hoping for season two.

Tom: I want to do something with the AFLAC duck, but I don’t know what it is. That’s the only idea I have right now.