I got a chance to speak with Leo Caine, the writer and creator of Astro-Cons, which is a weekly web cartoon about the Department of Space, a federal agency that is basically run illogically.
Speaking with Caine, here’s his opinion on the show, “It’s basically about all the insanity that goes down in D.C. The Astro-Cons create an intergalactic goal –they’re a bunch of convicts that are sent to outer space to explore a galaxy. So instead of using our best and brightest astronauts, we allow convicts to go and explore the unknown world. It’s kind of like an intergalactic version of Australia. I’ve been working on it for about five years now and it was actually on and off a shelf for a few years. Then my executive producer and I- actually we met at a company we used to work at- he’s one of my clients- started a production company and I told him about Astro-Cons and he read the script and became interested. We started production in January and launched our first episode on Thursday, the first day of Comic-Con, so its pretty cool, and we just debuted our second episode today.”
I asked where his inspiration came from, and he answered, “Living in D.C. for about 10 years, just being around that insanity and hearing the stories of what everybody deals with and how kind of mind numbing it is, and how they have to distract themselves doing various things. One of the conversations in the first episode are two people having this huge epic fight about if the premise of The Planet of the Apes could actually happen. And that’s what I found people just talking about- they would hate the monotony of their jobs and how much they have to do, so they would just talk about pop culture all day., and that’s sort of where a lot came from. . . .We’re really excited, we’re going to have 11 episodes for the first season, and you can find us on our website, astro-cons.com or our Youtube channel, a Facebook page, a Twitter account @Astrocons, pretty sure we’re going to have a Friendster page, so there’s a lot of places where you can check us out. Our designer did a lot of work on it, it’s unique how it looks- he put 2D over a 3D background, and we have a lot of cool pop-cultre, geek-culture references- the first episode actually makes lots of references to Back to the Future, so it’s fun to watch it- especially if you’re a child of the 80s. It’s actually pretty interesting , the cast is heavily involved in the production: we all have personalized accounts for the characters, and the agency is directed by Director Spivack, who’s voiced by Jeff Ronan, and we sort of based Spivack off of Jeff. But it’s great since Spivack’s a sort of stubborn military guy surrounded by a bunch of engineers and nerds, so he just says whats on his mind- very abrasive, not D.C. at all, and curses just about every episode, and we bleep it out since it’s funnier. So yeah, check it out.”
You can watch the first episode here, and don’t forget to see some of the other videos they have on their channel!
