You're listening to Later with Moe Kelly on demand from KFI AM sixty.
Two, KFI AM six forty. It's Later with Mo Kelly. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Cartoon Network and Max released a first look clip at the highly anticipated series Ayanu, the epic superhero animated series steeped in Nigerian culture and mythology, showcasing for the first time a glimpse at the series set to captivate audiences with its magical
storytelling and breathtaking visuals. A Lion Forge Entertainment production, Ayanu is in an adaptation of Dark Horse Comics Slash Unique Studios popular graphic novel series Ayanu, Child of Wonder by Award winning creator and producer roy Akupe. Roy is so good to have you back on the show all these years later. How are you this evening, sir.
I'm doing well and it's it's a super pleasure to be back here after almost I think five or six yeries.
I think it might be more than that.
Also joining us tonight is Vincent Edwards, supervising director.
Vincent, thank you for coming on tonight, my pleasure, thanks for having me and.
Emmy Award winning writer. Also on the line, Carrie Grant, Carrie, how are you.
I'm doing great? Thanks for having me.
And last but not least, the story editor for a Young and Brandon Easton, longtime friend of the show, also joins us.
Brandon, my brother and my friend. What's up? How you doing? You feeling better? I heard you a little bit under the weather.
I'm doing all right, bro, I mean comic Con beat the COVID out a minute. I heard it was a super super spreader event. But it's all good man, Great to be back. It's been a while, bro.
Well, Brandon, let me start with you.
You've written for Agent Carter, Thundercasts, Transformers, War of Cybertron. Put another way, you know the fantasy genre very well. What for you makes compelling storytelling which appeals across demographics.
Authenticity and specificity of theme, as long as you have a actual story to tell and something to say about the world. All the great stories that have last, you know, the Test of Tom have had something to say about you know, love, loss, fear, anger, hate, all the things that make humans humans. So in Thew's case, we have great themes of discovery, self discovery, empowerment, and a search for understanding. And I think that's something that transcends every single culture on Earth.
Carrie Grant, you, as a writer, understand the process of taking an idea, maybe someone else's idea, and putting it into a form where it breathes, it lives. What is that process like when you're maybe adapting someone else's work.
Basically, that process is just trying to really get inside the work as much as possible. In this case, it was reading Roy's graphic novels over and over and over again, and then taking what he and Brandon had kind of created as a foundation and tried as much as possible to really get into the mind state of the show itself and the characters, get into the voices.
And I just I think that just kind of comes with practice.
I've been doing it for a while now, so I've gotten better and better at at mimicking really trying to deeply understand the story that's being told and the characters that are telling them so I can be cohesive.
Vincent Edwards, you as supervising director have a job which is different.
I think.
Tell me if I'm wrong that you have more of a big picture, punt intended view of how all these moving parts are supposed to come together and work. How do you know that it is working right and working well when you come into the picture.
Walt Disney famously described the animation as the illusion of life, And that's my job. The director team is kicking it off the script page and bringing it to life for the audience so that they can experience a cathartic emotional journey that might give them a little bit of insight into their own lives as people and their.
Fellow human beings.
And that's really the point of any good story, and that's kind of what we focus on doing in our animation is bringing that to lots.
Roy, you have Ianu something I would call your baby, something that you've worked on for years and years, and then you have to entrust it with people. You may like them, you may appreciate them, you may respect them as professionals, but you're turning over your baby to them. In many ways, what is that collaborative process? Like all the people that just introduced and their jobs, how can you just hand it over to them?
I know you're involved, but still it might be tough.
Yeah, I mean you mentioned the keyboard, the trust rights. I think that's where it starts for something like this. And you know, I always tell people going from you know, being on the graphic novel and then being executive producer on the show, it's two different things, right. Graphic Novel is a very small team. You know, you're right, You work with directly with an artist or you and that's
about it. When it comes to animation, you're talking about hundreds of people, so there's no way you can do it all on your own. But I think if you surround yourself with people with that smarter than you, you know, it helps elevate the project as a whole. And then you have to be confident in the things that you know are your your strengths. And to me, that's where I focus on the law of the show, the cultural specificity.
Those are the things that for me I try to really really hone in on because I think that's what makes you special. Everything else that I try to rely on the people that have been surrounded with to help me get this vision to screen. And I think as long as you can build a foundation of trust, it
becomes easier from them. Who is Yan is a teenage often girl who loses all recollection of a past and then she realizes that she has the powers of the gods of her land, and it's one of these powers that can save the entirety of ur Baland, which is where her story takes place, from what we call the corrupts, which are curse animals that all they want to do
is literally destroy humanity. So that's that's, in a nutshell, the story of a Janus as as a person as also as a whole in terms of where our story is going.
Brandon Easton, take me into the writer's room, maybe Carrie granted sitting right next to you and you were collaborating or going back and forth. How do you take what Roy just said and then start that process of creating this gumbo, if you will, of what's going to be on the screen when we see this on the Cartoon Network and Max and Show Max around the world.
What I had to do was break down what could work on the screen versus what works on the page. And that really was the trick. So as long as we had a forward moving narrative that fully established Hueyanu was early on, and have the emotional stakes up front,
everything else fell into place. Then I mean, the writer's room was the first season especially was a very small but very select crew of people, some of which I had known, a few I did not, but we all came together very quickly, and that was something I felt was very unprecedented based on my own experiences and a bits.
Carrie, what about you? Do you agree with that or would you disagree with that?
One hundred percent agree?
I think when I came on, Brandon and Roy had already sort of laid a foundation for us to follow, like a guide for us to follow. And then because we I think all of us in the room were felt so deeply connected to the material and really wanted to be there, and we all love telling stories and
telling stories like this. So yeah, the process of kind of coming down, we did have to be deeply in some ways deeply connected to each other for that short time that we were working together, too, Like we really shared space. We discussed you have to kind of discuss deeply, not necessarily deeply personal, but personal things about being human in order to really convey the story.
So yes, I one hundred percent agree with Brandon.
Okay, Vincent, now you got this content which is dropped in your lap a supervising director. You have all these animators to Roy's point, how does it all come together?
Where's your starting point?
Design is a start and storyboards are the next step. The storyboard is to the completed project what a blueprint is to a completed house. And so if your blueprint is very concise, the instructions are clear for the the contractors the animation studios that will then do the animation work, then they're able to bring those characters to life. But really it's the board artists and the directors and the designers that kind of create the we call it pencil acting.
When you've got storyboard drawings that show what the visual performance of the characters expressions and bodies movements are. That's really the foundation of what sells drama, but allows people to relate to what are essentially to be drawn images as though they're real people. And that's kind of the craft that we practice.
If you just tune in, we're talking about Eanu, Child of Wonder, which is coming to the Cartoon Network and Max here in the States and show Max are all around the world. We'll have more with the creators and the writers in just a moment.
With Mo Kelly.
Six KFI AM six forty. It's later with Mo Kelly.
We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app and we're in the middle of the conversation talking about IANU, Child of Wonder, which was just premiered, and it's going to be hitting Cartoon Network and Max here in the States very soon and show Max in countries all around the world. I'm joined by Roy Akuope, who is the creator and director of Ianu. Also Vincent Edwards who's the supervising director, Carry Grant, who's a writer, Emmy Award winning writer, and also Brandon Easton,
friend of the show, writer for All Things Fantasy. He's been with me since the very beginning. And so let me come back into the conversation.
Roy.
When I talked to you years ago, you were at a different point in your career and there's this old movie called Broadcast News where it says, what do you do if your dreams exceed your reality? My question to you is, did you could you foresee when you were working on EXO and then all this has happened.
Yeah, I mean, I don't want people to take this out of context when I answered, but yes I did, because this has always been the plan, right, So it's not necessarily a thing where I'm surprised about where I am. It did take over what Exo was released in twenty fifteen, so we're talking about ten years since I released my first graphic novel to be able to get to this point. So to me, I've always had a vision to adapt my stories from comic books and graphic novels into animation
and live live action in the future. So for me, it's always been a goal. But at the same time, it took a lot of people and a lot of sacrifice from not just myself, different people to be able
to get to this point. So you talk about people like Erica Mottley, who was the first producer to see this and you know, say that this has to be made into an animated series, and you talk about Line for coming on board as a financier, and then obviously they cut to network on Max and then everybody that you can see or you can hear on this program now, and then hundreds of other people that you know obviously can't be on this show right now. So it takes
a village literally to get this to this point. And you know, we wouldn't be where we are here to deal with the Yana without the help of.
So many, Carrie.
I've been someone who's followed the industry for a long time, and I remember the difficulties of writers when it came to streaming and how many people were in those writing rooms I talked about with Brandon and the need for different voices, different viewpoints, at vantage points in these writers' rooms. What would you make of the generality of shows now on streaming. You know, if it wasn't for streaming, we wouldn't have a show like a Yanu, Child of Wonder.
But at the same time, there's still the uncertainty of what it will be moving forward for writers in streaming, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, I think that we're in an interesting time right now.
Think in some ways it's great because there's so much on TV, Like like people have been saying for years, you're in some sort of a like a golden era of television, and there's so much out there. There's so many things, especially in animation, the medium has really come a long way, has been adult animation, all of that, all of that, and I just think that where we there is uncertainty right now for where writers are and
will be moving forward. My hope I can tell you what my hope is that writers get what they're what they're doing for the for.
The work that we do.
And I think that that's kind of like at the heart of the issue that you're that you're referring to or alluding to. I think with streaming, I think we're in a weirdly transitional period right now.
I love, I love.
I think it's just that the industry has to expand, and I think it it will.
That's my that's my optimistic prediction.
Vincent.
Let me ask you, because I didn't get the chance, is to drill down on your backstory when it comes to working with all these animators, illustrators and these storyboards, is how emotionally connected do you have to be to a piece to do your best work?
Does it matter at all?
It matters a lot. One of the things that separates just a job that you do for a contract as opposed to a project of passion and that you're able to really invest some yourself in is connecting to the material. And when I became involved with Theano and I saw what it was and what the core of its story was, I really really resonated with some of the themes. They're universal, they're they're they're archetypal, you know, Shakespearean. I mean, it's
really powerful stuff. And that is my compass heading in terms of what is the show?
Is this not the show?
Is this the show? It's my job to be sort of the conduit between the creative team that's going to execute that to achieve Roy's vision accurately, right. But to do that, I really have to well have to give it darn myself, and I really do.
It's great stuff.
There has yet to be a writer that I've met who hasn't already thought beyond the story that they're actually writing. So, Brandon, I got to ask you, we may get to see a portion of the story of a young child of Wonder, but in your mind, have you already written season two and three?
Well, season one and two are already done, Like we're in the can for that. I have ideas for season three, but I don't don't know if I'll be in the mix for that. But yeah, we when we were working on season one and two, we already had infrastructure for where we're going to go, based on a lot of Roy's ideas and based on some of the events of the future graphic novels so in a lot of ways we already had kind of it was like a mad libs if you remember that stuff back.
Absolutely, we just.
Had to fill in the gaps over what Roy already had in his head, and that was it made it a lot easier. I mean, it was a challenge, but also made a lot easier knowing that Roy had a target for both the narrative and the themes.
Roy the last word is going to be yours.
When I tune in on Cartoon Network or Max and I get to check out a child of Wonder for myself, and there may be a kid who's eight years old tuning in at the same time, what do you think that child and I may take from it, or what would you want us to get from it?
I think that's a good question. I think I think I can speak for everybody here when I say that we want kids to have fun, right. We want kids to have the opportunity to be kids and see kids being kids on TV in a way that they're just enjoying watching it. The second thing is that I want people to get to see side of African culture, history and mythology, you know, past, present, and future that they
don't get to see in mainstream TV. One of the things is that we wanted to really lean into the cultural aspects, but make it universal and global where anybody from any part of the world could watch and enjoy it. And the last thing is I want people to be inspired.
I want people to be able to see this and normally see themselves in our characters, but to be able to understand that, you know, the people actually working on this right have something like Vincent said, we all have a stake in Indiana, Like we're all giving our blood, sweats and tears, our hearts and putting that into the project. And I think you get to see when every character speaks,
when they move, when they talk, how they act. And I hope people are inspired, you know, by characters and and and see them as as as people that they can aspire to be as well.
He is roy Akoupe Award winning creator and producer of a New Child of Wonder. I want to thank him for coming on. The New Child of Wonder is going to be on Cartoon Network and Max and I was also joined by the creative team behind the Child of Wonder, also Vincent Edwards, supervising director.
Vincent, thank you for coming on. This evening. Thank you, Kerry Grant, Emmy Award winning writer, Thank you for coming on.
Thanks for having me. Mom.
And Brandon Easton, longtime friend of the show who is story editor for A Yannie. Brandon, I hope you're getting better and I need you in studio next time so we can catch up.
I'm going fine and I will be happy to come by. Thanks so much for everything.
You're listening to later with Moe Kelly on demand from KFI AM six forty.
And we're getting down to the end. I am so excited. If you didn't know, tomorrow I'm getting on a cruise. And not only am I getting on a cruise, about ten of my family members are getting.
On a cruise. And outside of that, to Wallace.
Sharp and his son are joining us on this quick three day cruise to Ensenada, Mexico. And if you don't know, to Walla Sharp has never been on a cruise. He's not really big on water. So as Mark Ronner hosts this show tomorrow night, we will be sending at the minimum, we're going to be sending pictures, We're going to be sending video to the anecdotes of how Tuala is handling
the open Seas. We get on the ship tomorrow morning afternoonish and we leave port at about I want to say, about four o'clock or so, so by the time Mark Ronner hits the chair, we'll have an update on how Tuala is doing. We'll make sure that at least Mark I don't know how much phone coverage and ability will have that first night, but we'll make sure we get at least pictures on some video to Mark or Stephan
or someone they'll be able to share. But we're gonna be on Royal Caribbean and the name of the ship is Navigator of the Seas. The reason I'm talking about this because it coincides with some other news regarding Royal Caribbean. When I was booking this cruise, Tualla was asking, you know, general questions like how large is the ship, and I said, we're gonna be on Navigator of the Seas and that's
like a mid size ship in their fleet. And of course Twala didn't necessarily have any reference, and most people don't, but Royal Caribbean is the cruise line responsible for the biggest cruise ship in the world right now, Icon of the Seas. Don't ask me about all the weight and size and height. It's the biggest Mother Father out there in the world. And if you see it with pictures of it, comparing it to the Titanic, it's like maybe four times as big as the Titanic.
It is a floating city.
You have shopping malls, it's halfway an amusement park.
There's so much to do. If you can think of it, you can do it on the ship.
And I try to remind folks if you've never been on the cruise, you really don't even feel the water. These ships are so massive that unless you are on a debt in which you can see the water, unless you're in a stateroom maybe on your balcony and you can go out and feel the ocean air, you really don't have any perspective or context to know that you are on the water. You are out in the ocean. Look, it could be a hollow deck on Star Trek Enterprise.
It'd be about the same. You just really don't know. And I try to tell people, if you want a comparison point, light turbulence on an airplane is more disruptive than what you will feel on these massive, just massive ocean liners. And if you know what's the largest today is not the largest tomorrow. Royal Caribbean is growing its fleet of what they call these megaships, and they're going to build three more Icon of the Seas style vessels.
Icon of the Seas, as I said earlier, is the largest cruise ship in the world, and presently Royal Caribbean has about sixty eight, yeah, sixty eight ships, and they're going to partner with Finnish shipbuilder Meyer Turku to build additional Icon style and Icon sized ships. And the deal includes options for Royal Caribbean to order a fourth and fifth vessel in addition to other Royal Caribbean ships. A sister ship, Star of the Seas, will set sail from
Cape Canaveral in the summer of twenty twenty five. The third Icon class ship which will launch in twenty twenty six. They haven't named it yet, but Royal Caribbean Group President and CEO Jason Liberty said the company ordering the forthcoming ships is based on enthusiastic customer response to Icon of the Seas and I'd have to take him at his word because Icon of the Seas is continually booked.
You cannot get a ticket.
On that ocean liner for the for the most part, and it's two hundred oh.
Here's the information.
The Icon of the Seas is two hundred and fifty thousand ton ship. It accommodates roughly eight thousand people, and it has dozens of restaurants.
Theme parks, plural.
And what they call neighborhoods, these clusters of state rooms.
They have their own neighborhoods.
There's so many people and so many attractions on those ships.
Quote.
Building on the incredible momentum and market response to launch the Icon of the Seas and the excitement for its sister ship, Star of the Seas coming in twenty twenty five, we're thrilled to join with Meyer Turku once again to expand our roster of Icon class ships and continue our future growth plans. Since its debut, Icon has changed the game in vacation experiences and exceeded our expectations of both
guest satisfaction and financial performance. Close quote and since I've done enough cruises now I've been on very are relatively small ships and relatively large ships.
They are different in a number of ways.
Now, my wife doesn't prefer the large ocean liners where you have more than four thousand people. Because it's just a big city, you lose the feeling of being on a cruise, or at least I agree with that argument some people like to have where you have all these thousands of people and you kind of get lost in the masses and it feels like you're in a different city each day, even though you are literally in a
different city when you're going into different ports. But I'm saying on this ship, especially if you're on a seven day cruise, that's what my wife and I usually do. This one we're doing this weekend is just a three day one coming back on Monday. But if you're on like a seven day cruise, you want to be able to do something each and every day, but you want to do something different each and every day. And when you have these super ocean liners, yes you can do
that and never repeat. Like for example, on our ship, there's going to be a casino. I don't know how much the wall is going to gamble. He's working on the pod right now. That's why it's not in here. But you know, you can go to the casino, you can do things on the deck, you can go shopping always, you can go shopping. You can always find something to eat, there's something to do. These are tremendous vacation opportunities. And I know I sound like I'm endorsing it.
No I'm not.
I'm just saying I am someone who has enjoyed cruising for the better part of twenty years and it's something that my wife and I love to do.
And if you haven't, you know.
Hit me on Instagram at later with mo Kelly at mister Mokelly and if you have specific questions, I can answer those specific questions for you, because, like me, I needed someone to help me. You need someone to walk you through the process. Not that you couldn't do it by yourself, but it's so much easier when you have someone walking you through who can answer your questions. How about this? What do I do about that? What type of documentation do I need? What sort of clothes should
I bring with me? How much should I bring with me? All those things it helped me and I usually passed it on. In this one, I'm passing it on to Tuala, But just to let you know when you see a story like this, going back to the story of how Royal Caribbean is expanding, its fleet and they're building these three more massive super shifts. It tells you in an economic sense that the tourism industry is doing very well
despite what happened during the pandemic. We remember how the cruise industry was just brought to a literal halt because of COVID. But now we're getting back to where we were pre pandemic, and people are cruising more than ever before.
Cruising statistics show that cruising is let me see, let me say like this, In twenty twenty three, thirty one point seven million passengers took cruises and surpassing twenty nineteen's record of twenty point seven million passengers, So a jump up by eleven million in.
Just four years.
And obviously they expect that trend to continue, with the number of cruise passengers to reach thirty four point seven million by the end of this year. And you can count to Wallace Sharp as one of those people.
Can't wait.
You're listening to Later with Mo Kelly on demand from KFI AM six forty. Welcome to MO on the Movies. Oh right, don't be ridiculous, darling, it's MO on the Movies. It's not a chance.
KFI AM six forty. It's Later with Mo Kelly. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. And before we get out of here, just two items I wanted to share with you in case you didn't know. We always have these dicussions about well should you remake certain movies. I say, don't remake classics, don't remake cult classics. You're playing on nostalgia. You can't deliver on the remake, and oftentimes it just falls short. And a perfect example of that is when
you take a movie like Point Break. Point Break was fine in the nineties Keanu Reeves and also Patrick Swayzee, but when they did it, it was something original, and then when you come back with the remake, you don't have any of the original characters. It's not very good. The people who love the original, they're not going to fall in love with the remake, and the people who were too young are not born for the original are not going to feel any affinity or nostalgia for the
remake or reboot. So usually it's a bad idea. Now, there are movies which are very obscure in nature, the ones that people don't care much about, or there's maybe been fifty or sixty years in between, so there's really no carryover. Yes, go ahead and remake those movies. But when I tell you that Sylvester Stallone is making a sequel, it's not not a reboot, but a sequel to a movie in nineteen ninety three, you may think, I don't know about that, But then you think about, well, Top
Gun did a sequel more than thirty years away. Then you had a sequel of let's say Beverly Hills Cop. Then you had a sequel of Coming to America. So there is precedent for waiting a long time to.
Do a sequel. So it's hit miss. But I wonder what will happen when I.
Tell you that Sylvester Stallone is doing a sequel to the nineteen ninety three movie Cliffhanger. I know, right, It's like, who is asking for a sequel to Cliffhanger?
Probably nobody. It's one thing when you take a movie.
Which is below, which is revered, something that people have turned into a cult classic or something, you say, whatever happened to this character or that character, and then you follow it up with a sequel because the fans have demanded it. I don't know if anyone has demanded a sequel to Cliffhanger. You may remember or you may not remember, but let me just refresh your memory. The original Cliffhanger was produced on a budget of seventy million. It did
pretty well all things considered. It grows the worldwide total of two hundred and fifty five million in nineteen ninety three.
That's nothing to sneeze at. That is pretty respectable.
This sequel, Cliffhanger two, is expected to start filming this fall, and it's supposed to have a healthier budget in comparison to the original. But there's also something else to consider. It's not just whether you get some of the original actors. It's not whether you just continue the original storyline. We were having this debate the other night talking about the best trilogy of all time and and how oftentimes the best trilogies have a singular directorial vision attached, like you
have the same director for all three films. Well, if you don't have it from movie to movie, then a lot of times you may lose your way. The original director, Rindy Harlan, will not be returning to direct this sequel of Cliffhanger, So that says to me, already that's going to be kind of questionable. I'm not so sure that it's going to be something that I want to see.
And Tulla finally got here after finishing the podcast where I was talking about you bad, talking about how Royal Caribbean was making these bigger ships and how you were asking like, you know, what's what you know Navigator of the Season and I said, well, it's it's.
A smaller ship, but it's not like Icon of the Season. You didn't have a point of reference.
And I was trying to explain to people, Yeah, but you know, you heard what I was saying about Cliffhanger and my trepidation as far as making a sequel for that movie.
Where do you come out on that one?
I think that this is one movie, especially because what we've seen Stallone do as of late is capitalized on his age as an action hero from The Expendables to his new series on Peacock. He still has that gravitas, that action esqueness about him, but being a Cliffhanger and doing that that doesn't necessarily have an age on it though, because you can still climb rocks. Look, there is a mountain climber who just made it to the top of Evereston I think ninety not long ago, so it's not
an impossible film. Some of the things that he was doing before, I could easily hear him saying, like, my shoulders are getting too tired for all this climbing, you know, And I think that that, to me, is what he needs to be doing, same as he did with the last two Rambo films, where he was an older, worn war torn Rambo who still had just that old man strengthen that old man violence of like I'm gonna have to take you out in two or three moves.
I don't have a whole fight in me.
Yes, he can do that with Cliffhanger.
Okay, I needed to be then to your point self aware. Yes, I don't want it to take yourself too seriously, and I don't want it to be too campy, now, you know if you because Cliffhanger still was an action, serious adventure. It starts off with a death, so it was a serious tone. So I would want the sequel to be in that same vein if you're gonna have a sequel now it's been so long, i'd have to rewatch it to get all of you know, the threads of the storyline for me to understand the sequel.
But look, I'm complaining, but I'm gonna go see it. Yeah, I think that this is one that we have to go see. Is this going to win any awards? Is it gonna do dead pull Wolverine numbers at the box office?
Hell to the no.
But it's gonna be fun very quickly, We're almost out of time and then we gotta get out of here and turn it over to George Norri. La Bamba a remake which is supposed to retell the story of singing Richie Valence. It boggles my mind why someone wants to do a remake of a biopic.
This is one of the most ridiculous movie news reboot remake stories that we've seen. And I think forever you do not remake a reboot or a retelling, or a dramatization or a bio of something that's already been done.
Man, And I get it.
There have been a couple of different stories that have come out about, say, Aretha Franklin or some of the greats you know. There have been a couple of different interpretations of in temptation stories and things like that. But LaBamba is an all time classic. You do not redo LaBamba, you do not reduce Selena. And you see they did a Selena series and that's fine, it went deeper into the business. But no, you don't do this with lobamba.
Yeah, we don't need a long discussion about that one. No, no, hell no, we'll talk to you soon. Mark Roner is taking over tomorrow night.
You're listening to Later with Moe Kelly on demand from KFI AM six forty