Chatting w/ Casper Kelly of Adult Swim Yule Log, Too Many Cooks, & Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell Fame

On this edition of Parallax Views, Adult Swim, the late night programming block, followed up the Season 6 finale of the popular Rick and Morty with the Adult Swim Yule Log (aka The Fireplace). What started out as a seemingly ordinary yule log video quickly morphed into something more unexpected: a feature-length film. More precisely, a horror movie featuring a cavalcade of genre tropes including UFOs, Satanic cults, murderous rednecks in the vein of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even a rather devious little imp. Melding humor with comedy, the Adult Swim Yule Log is something that has to be seen to be believed as it's unlike anything you've likely seen before.

Joining us on this episode is the Adult Swim Yule Log's writer/director, Casper Kelly. Casper is perhaps best known for his [adult swim] absurdist shorts Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough, the infamous Too Many Cooks, and the TV series Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell starring The Last Podcast on the Left's Henry Zebrowski. Additionally, Casper created the "Cheddar Goblin" sequence for the Nicolas Cage-starring horror movie Mandy and has written for such shows as The Squidbillies and Nickelodeon's CatDog. Oh, and he created the Scooby Doo parody of The Blair Witch Project known as The Scooby Doo Project. Much of Casper's work is available on Youtube and you can check a lot of it out through his website.

In this conversation we discuss:

- How the feature-length Adult Swim Yule Log came to be

- The thematic threads in Casper's work including depression, anxiety, media, and, in the case of the Adult Swim Yule Log, the grappling with the history of American slavery, the idea of "time privilege", and whether we are really progressing as a society or not

- Influences on Casper's work; John Carpenter, Sam Raimi and The Evil Dead, David Lynch and Twin Peaks, and the satirical elements of Paul Verhoeven (Starship Troopers, Robocop, and Showgirls) are all mentioned

- New media in Casper's projects (yule log videos and podcasting in the Adult Swim Yule Log and video game streamers in Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough)

- Making Too Many Cooks, which plays with the trope of 80s/90s sitcom intros; the research that went into making the short and the way in which the sitcom intro-style is both absurdist and realistic in terms of the kind of shows intros it's satirizing/homaging

- The question of whether Casper's works are comedic satire or eerie horror

- Working within constraints and how those constraints can actually lead to greater forms of creativity

- The difference between working on shows like The Squidbillies and CatDog compared to Casper's projects like Too Many Cooks and the Adult Swim Yule Log

- Whether or not Adult Swim has been short thrifted by the way some people write it off as "stoner comedy" content

- Horror and comedy as genres which are related to each other

- The making of the "Cheddar Goblin" sequence in Mandy

- Dealing with the issue of slavery in the plot of the Adult Swim Yule Log

- And much, much more!