In an interview with Deadline, Seth Green (Austin Powers trilogy, The Italian Job, Party Monster) speaks about the inspiration for Crossing Swords, which premiered on Hulu on Friday, June 12th. The show is a stop-motion comedy, but it is far from kid-friendly. The trailer for the show says all about the series’ adult-only humor.
Green is an executive producer on the show and is the creator of Robot Chicken, a popular Adult Swim show that premiered in 2005 and is still running today. Robot Chicken is also a stop-motion adult comedy.
Crossing Swords‘ premise can be found on Hulu, and reads, “From the producers of Robot Chicken, Crossing Swords follows a goodhearted hero wannabe named Patrick, who lands his dream job as a squire, only to learn the royal castle is a corrupt hornet’s nest of horny monarchs, crooks, and charlatans. War, murder, full-frontal nudity—who knew brightly colored peg people led such exciting lives?”. Although a medieval concept is popular in modern cinema and television, Crossing Swords adds to and satirizes the theme through its irreverent and crass comedy.
In his interview with Deadline, Green says that the creators of Crossing Swords pitched the show as a “Game of Thrones-style — feudal land with a King and a Squire… all these tropes that we know from fantasy and actual feudal kingdoms, but using that for comedic purposes and also by filming it this way and using these type of characters.” While Game of Thrones deals with serious issues that the audience is meant to become earnestly involved in, Crossing Swords allows its audience to laugh at characters, trivializing their issues in a humorous way.
Green also says that even the simple fact that the characters don’t have arms “undercuts the seriousness of any of these concepts or conflicts and allows you to laugh at them and maybe see an incredibly complex sociological or civic issue through the lens of the most basic of its attributes” (Deadline). In other words, Crossing Swords takes issues that are otherwise somber and complex and simplifies them into something that is comprehensible, as well as comical.