The live-action Knuckles TV show has officially landed on Paramount+. One name you probably didn’t expect to see associated with the show is Jorma Taccone, member of The Lonely Island and director of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Taccone directed the fourth episode of Knuckles entitled “The Flames of Disaster”.
In a new interview with Polygon, Taccone discusses what went into the creation of his Knuckles episode. Specifically, he details a significant portion of the episode which takes the form of a musical/rock opera. This rock opera takes viewers through Knuckles’ origin story in a style that only a member of The Lonely Island could really pull off.
Check out some quotes below, in which Taccone explains how the episode worked for him creatively and how it was filmed:
“Toby [Ascher, the showrunner], right from the jump was like, Look, I was raised on Adult Swim, I want to make this weird and push boundaries and make this as interesting and different and unexpected as possible. And obviously, that’s up my alley.”
“I am so used to working within the margins of not a lot of time or money, and being able to shoot a lot in that amount of time. And while this is way more episode days than I had had on things like MacGruber, we packed it back. I was trying to get a lot of shots per day. So certain parts we almost treated it like a music video. The first thing I did was have them buy me a little Bluetooth speaker so I could even run playback [of the song] just so I could get more takes quickly and read cue things very quickly. So I could do all these lines from Julian really fast, so fast I couldn’t wait for us to even connect to the timecode.”
“The moments I’m always proudest of are when it’s both funny and somehow musically moving. A moment where [Wade] rises up and the echidna angels are around him, bringing him up and then the music starts to soar and Bolton’s voice is soaring — you kind of feel something! It’s always my favorite to have it be both funny and insane and, like, I’m kind of inspired!”
The full series of Knuckles is available now on Paramount+. For anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, you can check out a snippet of this episode along with some more behind the scenes commentary below:
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