Dropout’s “Dimension 20” is known for its genre mash-ups. Its “Fantasy High” and “The Unsleeping City” seasons transpose the concerns and archetypes of high fantasy into a John Hughes-esque high school movie and the urban legend that is New York City. “Mentopolis” takes the tropes of a film noir and crams it inside a single mind, a la “Inside Out,” while “A Crown of Candy” forces a “Game of Thrones” world of magical realpolitik to wield the weapons of “Candyland” in order to slake its sugar/bloodlust.
So there’s something comforting — and deceptively simple — about the series’ latest season, “Never Stop Blowing Up.” In the main, it is an ode to the absurdity of action movies, from renegade cops and powerful mobsters to master assassins and omnipotent hackers to James Bond-esque agents and racing drivers who solve worldwide conspiracies with the power of… cars. The mash-up comes in the show’s use of personae, with the show’s cast pulling double-duty by playing characters who work at a barely surviving video rental store in Lake Elsinore, California, in 2024 and as the action heroes those characters come to inhabit when they’re pulled into a magical VHS tape called (you guessed it) “Never Stop Blowing Up.”
The Dropout series supports the hilarious friction between the “real world” and “action movie land” in a bunch of formally playful ways that make the season feel just as extra as the world being built by game master Brennan Lee Mulligan and players Ally Beardsley, Ify Nwadiwe, Isabella Roland, Rekha Shankar, Alex Song-Xia, and Jacob Wysocki. Tape transfer filters, jittering effects, and dramatic aspect ratio change to square and back again to cheekily reinforce the most ‘80s-tastic moments of the show. The “Dimension 20” crew also armed Mulligan with a battery of badass animated graphics — bullet blasts, explosions, smoke, and lightning, among others — to play on the LED walls surrounding the cast whenever appropriate.
In addition, it feels right that, for the moments in “Never Stop Blowing Up” that break the laws of physics harder than maybe any prior season of “Dimension 20,” the show broke its own live-action format. We can’t just be told particularly absurd action beats; “Dimension 20” shows them to us, or at least shows us the storyboards for what, say, tricking a jet to fly into a puddle of beans looks like.
According to series producer Carlos Luna, the storyboard sequences, like much of the season itself, arose out of necessity. “We had done back-to-back seasons, more seasons than ‘Dimension 20’ had ever done, and it was all on a timeline,” Luna told IndieWire. “You know, ‘Fantasy High: Junior Year’ and ‘Burrow’s End’ were just, like, masterpieces, and we were like, ‘We don’t have time to create something so intricate.’”
Enter a big, dumb, action movie season — “We’re just, like, ‘what if we made dynamite?’” Luna said of an early production meeting. They did make some prop dynamite, and Mulligan figured out what to do with it — you hide an EMP inside a nuke inside of a bundle of dynamite, of course — but increasingly, the “Dimension 20” team found that if you give a mouse a cookie, he’ll want to channel nostalgia for physical media and create a bunch of action movie posters and trailers and maybe actual VHS tapes.
The normal character artwork the show commissions (about 70 illustrations on average) turned into animated reveals on character-specific movie posters, which in turn created the desire to actually see some of the characters’ stunts play out. “Originally, we thought it would be really quick. It’ll be like a one-minute thing that will hold on an image, and then it’ll hold on another image. And we kept getting notes from folks being like, ‘We want it to be faster. We want it to be more exciting.’ And I [realized we were] talking about animation,” Luna said.
Interspersed throughout each episode are snippets of animation in the form of storyboards for the fictitious scenes of “Never Stop Blowing Up.” But it took some trial and error to land on the right moments and create a rhythm that would be satisfying without taxing what animators Melina Caron and Sander Goldman could deliver on time.
“I had to go into each episode and carve out the exact 15 seconds to animate,” Luna said. “That’s why, when you’re watching, it’ll go from a little bit of animation to the cast laughing back at the table to more animation. We had to figure out all those timings correctly and make up our own rules for what gets animated.”
The main rule was that “Dimension 20” would only turn to animation for things they absolutely couldn’t do at the table. But sometimes, that could be tricky to time out. “It’s so funny how you misremember things that happen in the show. You think that they’re way shorter than they are,” Luna said. He and Mulligan came up with a list of moments they thought might work as storyboards and then, when they went and looked at them, “It would be like, ‘Oh that’s seven minutes. We can’t animate seven minutes,’” Luna said.
So the “Dimension 20” team tried to isolate moments that did work and amp up that deceptive sense of timing so that the audience would stretch animated moments out in their minds, making the storyboards as cinematic as possible. There’s visual play with motion and color while still keeping to the sketchy language of storyboards, but Luna and the show’s post-production team also pulled out all the stops they could with sound to make moments of animation count.
“I remember when Dang [Wysocki] gets launched into outer space, one of the notes that I had was that I wanted the music to die down when he breaks the atmosphere. I wanted it to feel like Superman hovering over the Earth; as he looks down, the editors gave it pause, and the animators animated that little beat, and it was just this great moment,” Luna said.
There’s so much obvious visual flair inside of “Never Stop Blowing Up” that those tricks of editing, the slight adjustments in music and rhythm, are a cloaking device to set up the comedy. Like any good actioner or heist film, the format-breaking flashbangs work hand-in-hand with the invisible techniques supporting them.
“Sometimes we work so hard for, like, five seconds. And when things look good, people don’t realize the work that goes into the little things behind the scenes,” Luna said. “We’re always trying to heighten whatever [the cast] does.”
“Dimension 20” is available to stream on Dropout.
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