Geekscape Interviews: Art Brown and Doug Sloan-Executive Producers of ‘Dragons: Race to the Edge’
Fans of the How to Train Your Dragon films and the subsequent series will be excited to learn that there is a brand new 13 episode show, Dragons: Race to the Edge, coming to Netflix June 26th! At WonderCon, Art Brown and Doug Sloan, executive producers of Dragons: Race to the Edge, were special guests at the Sunday-morning panel DreamWorks: Dragons, Dinos & More. Attendees were treated to a special first look at the series which looked awesome! The series takes place a year and a half before the second film and fills us in on what happened during the gap in time between the two films. Sloan told the audience that there will be “tons of new dragons”. In one of the clips, Hiccup finds a mysterious ship where he discovers the Dragon’s Eye which “is a game-changer, both for Hiccup and for all of the Dragon Riders,” Brown said.
After the panel, I was able to speak with Art Brown and Doug Sloan. Read on to learn what it is like making an animated show for Netflix, what kind of dragon they would choose, how they got involved with the dragon world and more!
DreamWorks Dragons:Race To The Edge ©2015 DreamWorksAnimation LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Q: With the current success of live action shows on Netflix, what is it like doing an animated show? Is it any different for Netflix versus regular television?
Art Brown: I think it is exciting for Netflix. They’re constantly breaking new ground. I think that is one of the cool things about them and there is potential for our show and big international shows to have some effect internationally. So, I think those two things combined are pretty cool.
Doug Sloan: I think our show hopefully will span a wide demographic. They’ll be able to show it – adults will watch it, kids will watch it, and I don’t know if they expect that, but we are hoping that that’s what happens. I think that will be great, but it’s going to be awesome.
Brown: You have the kids that were the fans of the first movie who have grown up and you’ve got the next group who have watched the show and you have the new ones coming in, so it has potential to be pretty wide.
Sloan: Yeah. It’ll be cool and Netflix is really good about letting us do the show. They don’t… they are not as hands on as normal networks, so they know that we know what we are doing. They know that we know how to do it, so they pretty much let us do what we do and it works out great.
Brown: Yeah.
Q: What kind of dragon would you like to have?
Sloan: Oh my gosh. Wow! That has never been asked to us.
Brown: Yeah.
Sloan: That’s awesome.
Brown: Right!… You know I think the relationship of Toothless, obviously. I think the sense of humor of Hookfang…
Sloan: Yeah.
Brown: You know Hookfang loves to mess with Snotlout. I mean, I enjoy that…
Sloan: Toothless is, for me, if I really were to have a dragon, I think I would probably want a real huge one that I wasn’t going to fall off of because Toothless seems like he would be a little small for me. I’d probably fall off. He does some crazy stuff which I am not that into.
Brown: Right. He might be better for me.
Sloan: He might be better for you, yeah. I think a big… like a Hookfang or something like that…
Brown: A Monstrous Nightmare
Sloan: Something where I have a lot of room…
Brown: Like a Titan Wing Monstrous Nightmare…
Sloan: Yeah, there you go. Now we’re talking. Absolutely.
(both laugh)
Q: How did you get involved with this dragon world?
Brown: We had just done a movie for Nickelodeon and got approached when they were initially doing the first couple of seasons of the show. We hadn’t even seen the movie. Our representation sent it to us and we watched it at his house and we were like “Oh my God!”
Sloan: It blew us away. We were like, “You’ve got to be kidding, this is brilliant!” We really really wanted to work on the show. We didn’t care in what capacity – writing, producing, show running, whatever. So, we started off on the show as writers, just writers, and, as time went on, we ended up running the show, but we would not have taken that job, I don’t think, had it not been for how great the first movie was. We probably would have said “Nah, it’s not…”
Brown: And for a couple execs at Dreamworks who we really enjoy working with – Gregg Taylor, Ann Daly, and people like that who we really… It was a combination. We loved the movie and wanted to be involved with it and we love the people there, so we…
Sloan: And when you get a chance to work with Jeffrey Katzenberg, I mean you take it.
Brown: Yeah.
Sloan: This property is so important to them that he does peek in every once in a while and to learn from him and Ann and those guys is… I mean, when do you get that chance? It’s amazing.
Brown: Yeah, you don’t get a lot of chances to work on great great shows, shows that are both huge hits and quality, so you kind of go “I want to stick around for awhile.”
Sloan: Yeah! Yeah, you’ll have to drag me out kicking and screaming.
Brown: Drag you out?
Sloan: Dragon…
Both: Ooooh… (laughing)
Sloan: Bad. Really bad, I’m so sorry.
Brown: It’s late in the day.
Sloan: Yeah, it is.
Q: Yeah, I think the clips that you showed and the teaser trailer look really good because it often happens, I feel, when you go from a movie to a show or movie to sequels, the secondary product just doesn’t look right. The colors are wrong. Something is off.
Sloan: Yeah, it’s just that to make a movie costs an enormous amount of money – animated movie or live action – and we make our TV shows for what half a minute of a movie costs so it really really does take all of our thinking and planning and all of that to make the show look good, but our goal is to make it look somewhat close to the movie.
Brown: And we’re able to… these seasons, we were able to… You know, we are lighting it differently. The first two we had to just sort of do what we could afford and it is more dynamic, more filmic now.
Sloan: People think we spend millions and millions of dollars on the show and that is absolutely not the case. I mean, we are the same as any other show, it is just the people who work on our show are really smart and they really have figured out ways to make our show look brilliant without breaking the…
Brown: And they care!
Sloan: Yeah, the really do care which is good. Caring is sharing… Or, sharing is caring. One of those two.
Brown: One of the two.
Q: I definitely think you can tell when creators and people involved with the project actually love the material versus when they are just trying to turn out something to make money.
Sloan: If you go through our office, every single desk is decorated with dragon stuff. There are little dragon toys on all the desks and everybody has a picture of a dragon and they just love the show which is awesome.
Q: Anything else that you would like to tell the fans?
Sloan: Just thank you for watching and thank you for being so into the show. We really… we make the show for them, we make the show to take them on a ride, to make them happy and make them excited about the adventures. We really want to thank them for being there and supporting us and being interested in it.
Brown: And for knowing the show better than we do in many instances which keeps us on our toes.
Sloan: Yep. It’s awesome.
Q: Cool. Thank you very much.
Both: Thank you.
Check out the awesome teaser trailer here!
Make sure to check out Dragons: Race to the Edge on Netflix June 26th.
