Texas Travesty: First off, I want to get right into some hard-hitting questions. Are Georgia peaches really that notable?

Dana Snyder: Not to me, I don’t live in Georgia.

Dave Willis: I think they really accentuate their peaches to draw attention away from the fact that the bananas in Georgia are so terrible. They try to grow bananas down in Georgia and they just don’t have the water, temperature, or the climate and they’re just withered. They try to sell them roadside; they boil them.

DS: I’ll tell you what else is terrible in Georgia: the pizza. I defy you to give me a place in Georgia that sells good pizza.

DW: I thought you were going to say the healthcare.

DS: Oh, well that too, but that’s true for a lot of places. But I’ve never had a good piece of pizza in Georgia.

TT: That’s completely fair. I know you guys both have quite an extensive involvement in cartoons, particularly ones on Cartoon Network (Adult Swim). What appeals to you about that format?

DW: You don’t have to have cameras. You don’t have to have actors.

DS: You do have to have actors, because when you make the show before actors it sinks like a rock.

DW: That’s true, that’s true. Well, you don’t have to have a plot, you don’t have to have a commercial break. You can kill characters and bring them back. You don’t have to have an overarching theme, although it probably would make your cartoon more interesting. I don’t know, it’s just a different type of humor, you know? I think it’s a lot more absurd, certainly.

DS: Well, and you don’t have any distractions. There’s not really a B-Story. You can just focus on one story and that’s it.

DW: Yeah, and we have a small group of people that know how to make cartoons and we can just continually show up at offices and sort of do it. I mean, I’m not saying that making live action just isn’t fun and we have done a lot of that stuff and I think it’s part of our live show too, or some of the other live-action pieces we’ve put together. But it’s just something about making cartoons. It scratches an itch.

DS: That’s called a finger.

DW: Yeah, usually.

DS: It’s called the finger of show business.

TT: Has voice acting been a lifelong pursuit for the both of you?

DS: No.

DW: No. I just sort of backed into it completely. We would write these things and then we’d read them to ourselves and tried to read the draft in a funny voice. Then we realized it’d be so much cheaper for me to do the voice and also would save us time and calf feed because we don’t have to listen to anyone else audition.

DS: And I always wondered what made Dave want to do the voice.

DW: I don’t know, like I was the original voice of Master Shake in the read we did, it wasn’t a final thing. We didn’t have voices pin-locked for the Mooninites, but that’s how I ended up doing it. I had to do it because we couldn’t afford to get someone and we didn’t want to go out and look for someone else.

DS: I was a performer. All I used to do was perform on stage, that was it. And then a girl I went to school with, she knew Dave, and then Dave called her for people to do these voices, even though he told her they weren’t really looking for anyone, but there was a time when they looked for a couple of people at the beginning.

DW: We had a guy, I can’t really remember his name, but he did a really good Christopher Walken intro and said, “To me, Shake is going to sound like exactly like Christopher Walken, it’s going to be great.”

DS: That’s what I remember hearing, my friend telling me, “OK, here’s the part, it’s this milkshake,” and I said, “Well what do they want?” And she said, “They don’t want super, super hero-y but the thing they’re leaning most towards is Christopher Walken.” I was a bit confused, but once they said that he was a bit of a loudmouth and a jerk, I thought, “All right hold on; I think I’ve got this.”

DW: Yeah, we never had an idea for what that character would sound like when we were taking auditions. We just heard Dana and said “That’s it. That’s the one.”

DS: I never did any of it before Aqua Teen. It’s ironic, basically everything I do is now cartoon.

DW: I did a little on stage stuff, that Meatwad voice was just a voice I’d crack out to little babies and little kittens, like “Hey little baby, hey little kitten” (Meatwad voice) I mean people would drag their kitten or baby away. We had hired a guy to do Carl but he just kept talking about how the only reason he was good at this was so that he could get his Union card and how he was really involved in Shakespeare he was and we realized we had made a terrible, terrible mistake. He may still be doing Shakespeare in Dripping Springs right now.

DS: Playing the fair in Wintersdale.

TT: Dave, I heard when you pitched the idea of Aqua Teen Hunger Force to Adult Swim, they didn’t have much confidence in it. What was there not to like about the show?

DW: I would still to this day argue nothing. There’s nothing not to like about this show. I remember that I just sort had some slips of paper on which I had done the drawings of the characters, and I remember thinking, “Man, I just hit the cover off this ball. This is happening.” I didn’t get half the title out before I saw everyone just stare down at their Blackberries in disgust. Anything to not meet my eyes. I don’t know if they had confidence or didn’t have confidence, I just remember thinking, “Oh, man… I just need to keep talking just so they don’t have time to tell me what they don’t like. I could’ve always kept talking and then went to the bathroom and then not come back.” We could’ve always pretended like this never happened. But it was good. I don’t know how they genuinely felt about it, I just know that it didn’t end with a prayer, or a group hug or anything. It was just sort of like a (skeptical) “all right!” So when they actually let us do it, it kind of blew our minds a bit.

TT: Apparently you guys edit in space in each episode for a little bit of improvisation. Do you guys have any background and to what extent does it help you?

DS: Of course it helps you. We do, and it does help you. That’s the difference between us and that Shakespeare guy. If you’re a genuinely funny person, you’re going to make everything that you do funnier. You’re never going to ruin it.

DW: I don’t have any improv background, but I think that as a writer you’re sort of thinking in those terms and when I get in the booth I see we’re already bored with what we’ve written so I’ll just try to make up something new. In the end, you know that you can totally reinvent the thing anyways. Sometimes we have jokes that are just terrible, or they’re just bridges to get us to something else, and we’ll just say, “Dana, you’ve got to pull this one out of the fire, buddy.” Or my direction to Dana won’t go much further than “Uh…. Just go off.”

DS: “You can just go off on this one.”

DW: Sometimes when we have guests on the show, too, it depends on who they are, but some of them just demand to have everything written down; but, others really welcome the opportunity or they feel constrained by a script and they try to go off and I certainly, when I do stuff for other people, I give them the way I think they want it, then I’ll try to nail it the way they want it, then I think “Well, they can throw it away anyways, I might as well just try to make some things up.”

TT: When you guys were offered a movie deal, did you at any point think it would be too difficult to change a 15 minute show into a feature length movie?

DW: You’re laboring under the misconception that we were offered a movie deal. I feel like we tricked everyone into letting us make a movie. I feel like it was like the show, only six years later. We were like, “Hey we’ve got a movie idea!” and they just kind of looked down at their Blackberries again. I think we just convinced them that we could do it for cheap enough and keep the show rolling and before we knew it, it was a movie. Kind of like, “Hey, you want to try this comedy thing?” And now all of the sudden we have this tour. It’s a crazy way of doing things. We always knew we could make a movie. The question is, was it a good movie? And the answer, of course, is yes. Right?

TT: Yeah, I remember seeing it and thinking, “Well, they pulled it off. They did it.”

DS: These guys are more genius in 90 minutes than they are in 11 minutes.

DW: I’m glad you said that. I also would have accepted “no” as an answer.

TT: I’ll admit, I was a little skeptical going in. The show seemed to be geared towards a short attention span in that it starts and then it ends really quickly. You don’t get too invested as an audience, and that’s okay, because nothing is resolved. I wasn’t sure if you could make that work for a feature length, but you did. I’m not sure how, but it did.

DW: We’re going to do a mini-series next. A re-telling of WWII.

DS: We’re going to have Tom Hanks in it, we’re going to take really moving stories and make it unwatchable. Just add a bunch of farts to it.

DW: Every time they start to well up with tears we’ll just put in (does fart noise). No but seriously, we’ve written a couple of screenplays, and I know Matt Maiellaro has written a ton, but we still didn’t approach it hardly any different than the show. The only difference is instead of stopping after fourteen pages we just kept writing until about ninety. Then we thought that we should probably start drawing it to a close. I learned that in my screenwriting class. They actually say, “Write until you hit page ninety. And then put ‘The End.’” So that’s what we did.