Seis Manos Season 2 teased by creators, plus Castlevania Connections

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Later today, the cast and crew of Powerhouse Animation will host another watch party for their epic and action-packed Mexican series Seis Manos. The Saturday Mourning Cartoons team wanted to get in on the Saturday morning fun, so not only will we be re-watching the Viz Media series on Netflix (and again and again), we're also giving you some bonus coverage for it! The creative team behind the kung fu/grindhouse/Blaxploitation mash-up series will once again be taking to social media to offer episode commentary for fans as they watch, along with never-before-seen behind-the-scenes content, intriguing anecdotes, etc. on the mythology and lore of the show. And we got a chance to sit down with co-creators Brad Graeber and Alvaro Rodriguez, and co-executive producer/writer Daniel Dominguez to learn even more about Seis Manos.

To our surprise, the team revealed that it was Powerhouse's first creation of a battle-focused sizzle reel for Seis Manos that helped them land the deal to be the studio of castlevania animation. And it was the success of Castlevania that gave Powerhouse the clout to push forward with their first original production, Seis Manos. This is just one of many examples of the fates aligning for the studio in its attempt to bring this incredibly rich, diverse, and compelling story to people around the world. Graeber, Rodriguez and Dominguez also thanked their fans who showed their support online, however, and by sharing Seis Manos with their friends and followers. We even get a teaser for potential sequel seasons and a tip or two on what to do to be sure to see more Seis Manos in the future. Listen and read below!

Could you all introduce yourselves by name and title on the show for our listeners?

Álvaro Rodriguez: I'm Álvaro Rodriguez, I'm the co-creator and executive producer of Seis Manos.

Brad Graeber: I'm Brad Graeber, I'm the co-creator and executive producer of Seis Manos.

Daniel Dominguez: I'm Daniel Dominguez, co-EP and writer on Seis Manos.

To start, I wanted to do a wellness check just to make sure everyone is okay and ask how you are all doing during the ongoing quarantine and pandemic that we are all facing.

Daniel Dominguez: I'm pretty relaxed. The work is regular. It was interesting to work in pajamas rather than in an office, but luckily I wasn't really affected. Everyone I know is safe, healthy and healthy. The only real effect it had on my life was that we got a Platoon. That's all.

Brad Graeber: I'm fine as well, although I can confirm that Daniel also often came to work in his pajamas, the Cookie Monster pajamas. So I don't think there was that much of a transition for him. But no, I feel like things are tough, they're probably going to stay that way for a while, but we hope. And I think one of the spaces where things have evolved without being as static as other places has been in animation. So we hope this bodes well for Seis Manos and other projects.

Álvaro Rodriguez: Yes. At the studio, we've been working from home for about two months now, but there are definitely challenges and things are tough, but at the end of the day, we're very lucky and privileged to be all still working, and most of our timelines haven't changed, and people are looking to do more animation. So it was as difficult for us as it was for the others.

Image via Viz Media, Netflix

Yeah. Over the last six or eight weeks or so, most of the people I talk to are in the animation industry, so whether it's creators, voice actors, I've heard a lot of stories about the way the animation is not only had a negative impact on how live-action productions could be, but they actually saw a slight increase in a lot of work. So can you tell us how some things in the industry may have changed for you, if anything?

Brad Graeber: Certainly. At the end of the day, there are definitely a lot more calls for people trying to figure out how to do things in animation. We probably get 10-15 people contacting Powerhouse about music videos almost every day just because there's no way to get them in live action right now. So it's certainly gotten a lot more interest, and there are artists who, it doesn't change an animator's day much, they sit in front of their Cintiq and draw and converse via IM most of the time, so there actually, it might be a bit of a drain on productivity for artists right now because they're not constantly interrupted by stupid meetings.

But that being said, producers have to work twice trying to keep everyone on the job, calling and checking things in, and managing systems where people aren't all in the same space. That being said, there certainly seems to be a new interest in doing more animated projects right now.

Daniel Dominguez: Yes. I don't know, I was quite busy before and I'm still very busy, but I don't know, the climb is certainly ok. I remember one of my favorite things when I started therapy was learning to say “no,” and now I'm having incredible fun with it, so it's fun to say “no” more.

And then, with all the difficulties that come with that, there are silver linings. It's been interesting to see how animation companies or just content companies in general have found ways to reach people. In a way that you did with Seis Manos, you organized these Saturday watch parties. So how was that experience, how did it happen, and how did you experience the creative force of the show?

Brad Graeber: It came about because some of our people at the studio, and I think Daniel saw that they were doing one for Kipo and we talked about it and I think we were talking about it internally at the same time , trying to figure out how to make some of these watch parties to engage the audience a bit more. Also, the Saturday morning cartoons were just a fun little idea to frame them.

Yeah.

Brad Graeber: But honestly, from a selfish point of view, I miss Daniel and Álvaro very, very much, and I miss working on the show, and most of the work that I've been doing while we have this upside than we' that I talked about wasn't necessarily on the creative side. And so whether it was intentional or not, it's been a wonderful thing to reconnect with the guys and see people react to things and just feel the love for the show, and listen to all these fan theories and things like That's an uplifting experience for me because it does without emails and spreadsheets and remembering why we do what we do at Powerhouse. Plus I'm stuck in an office, and I don't know how Álvaro and Daniel feel, but even just seeing them tweeting about stuff and telling jokes or sending a meme or something, it's very reminiscent of the process we had worked on the show. So I don't know, it was very uplifting for me.

Image via Viz Media, Netflix

Álvaro Rodriguez: Me too. There's a weird experience that comes from having a project that, like most animated things, takes a year to animate, takes so long between the time it's written, the time it's recorded, the time it's animated, then the time it's out. And you go through this kind of surreal experience. We went to San Diego Comic-Con, we went to New York Comic-Con, but once it drops, it drops. And so there's very little continuity that you would have with a show like, "Well, there's an episode that comes out every week," and you can build your audience, it's just falling. So we tried to find ways to engage an audience. One of the great things about social media is that you can see these kinds of tendrils unfolding and unfolding on a global scale. People are tweeting about it in Europe or South America months and months after the thing comes out. So that sort of thing with our Saturday morning cartoon, which is obviously ironic in the first place because it's an animated cartoon for adults. But that kind of experience just engages us as creators, engages us as people involved in the process, and it's really a great experience to revisit that and see how this thing has legs and reaches audiences.

Daniel Dominguez: I remember we all went back and forth, before we even entered the room, putting so much, more than ever, certainly, I think in anything, not doing than to develop and flesh it out. This thing. And I don't remember the specific day, but I remember Álvaro and I was just talking about… Because I grew up on cartoons, I grew up on adult cartoons that I fell in love with, I was just surprised at the level of complexity you could do in storytelling with this stuff.

And then I remember thinking like we were… and that was part of the project all along, but just the realization of what it would be like to have someone who was a fanboy or a girl, like I It was when I was younger, this stuff sees that and finally sees itself represented in the show in a way that I think has never been done before. There was no Latinx show in this space. And what that would mean. And then when we went to Comic-Con and we saw these people line up and cry and say to us, 'I gotta see myself up there', I don't know, it was a visceral, wonderful confirmation of why this kind of thing is important.

And then, I don't know, A, the fun, it was wonderful to come back and play with these guys, but also to see all the people online having the same reaction, seeing all these same things on Twitter. I don't even speak Spanish, so I just see all these Spanish tweets going back and forth about it, and it's just kind of... I don't know. I don't know. I feel like the Grinch with his heart growing 10 sizes.

Speaking of the experiences you have on social media while doing these parties, have you noticed any new fans coming to the show for the first time and experiencing it for the first time, or do you see a lot of people who watched it at launch, watched it since then, and are now coming back to absorb more of the behind-the-scenes information you share?

Brad Graeber: I would say a bit of both. There are some really wonderful fans who have written great tracks and commented on things that Álvaro has released or others have released or Powerhouse has released, and there's certainly a nice little group of fans that participate, but some the best thing is to see their fans react to what they talk about and then introduce them to the show and get new people involved. And it certainly helps when you have a show with Angélica Vale or Danny Trejo involved, and their social media reach is so great. And so there's a lot of new people coming in as we talk about the work they've done on the show as well.

Yeah, and I wanted to talk a bit about the representation, Daniel, that you mentioned earlier too, because this show is fantastic for the genre of, and I don't want to minimize it, but kind of tick these boxes which many productions are very present today. A lot of new productions are very responsive to social commentary, diversity on screen or on the page, whatever it is. What I love about Seis Manos is that you strive to make sure people who aren't normally represented have a chance to shine here.

Image via Viz Media, Netflix

So what was this kind of creative process, going back a few years now, why was it important to focus on the particular characters that you do?

Daniel Dominguez: It’s been a lot of years.

Álvaro Rodriguez: One of the things that I think is really important in this regard is that there were never any checkboxes in Seis Manos. Seis Manos was just telling a story, and that's just the world she was in. So there was never any agenda or “this Latinx character, this African-American character, this Asian-American character,” or any of that sort of thing. There wasn't any sort of formula, it was pretty much about the characters in this world, and it was just kind of a little… I don't know a complete surprise, but it was definitely a surprise.

And talking to one of the voice actors that I had met before, and I said, this actor Roger Craig Smith who was the voice of Batman and Batman Ninja and so many other things, and he plays Larry, the CIA agent in the... Or the DEA, whoever he is, the government agent. And I was like, 'You're basically the only white male on the show. But there was no intention behind it other than our show, so in a way, it was a lot more freeing because we weren't keeping a checkbox count in terms of representation.

Daniel Dominguez: Even before, oh my God, I don't know how many years, when Álvaro and I first met, who at this point, I don't know, how long have we been- us friends? Six years or something like that?

Álvaro Rodriguez: I think it lasts seven years.

Daniel Dominguez: It's been seven years, and this project predates that.

Oh wow.

Daniel Dominguez: I remember, because we knew each other very early on when he told me about this, and I knew all these people in the animation space because I had been writing in that space for a long time. And Álvaro saying, “Me and Brad Graeber have this really dumb thing,” and so they had this stuff before that, and seven years ago was before the wave of. doesn't catch up with the reality of the world or whatever. And in that moment, even hearing about him in the nascent stage, it was like, 'Well, that's just great because those are the things that we're excited to write about and are close to our hearts' . because they're really fun to write, they're interesting, and their story is worth telling, and it's as simple as that.

And thank God, . kind of caught up with the reality of the world we live in in all sorts of ways like that, both from a diversity standpoint, but also from a sociological and political standpoint, et cetera. But then, I remember us running around preaching and saying, 'I swear to God, this is awesome. A lot of people want it.” And they were like, 'I don't know, man. And then reality caught up with the show.

Brad Graeber: Al and I went around and featured it in many places for a few years before it really got picked up, but when it did, it went really, really fast too . So at the end of the day, like Al said, it wasn't an intention to tick the box or anything in particular, it was just one of those things where we wanted to do a badass show . We were both from Texas, it was kind of a natural history that mixed together all the things that we loved, grindhouse, kung fu shows, all that other stuff, and it was just that. And then we found two wonderful writers to work with, and that became what it was. There was never a formal plan.

Daniel Dominguez: Yes. It must have lasted at least a decade.

Image via Viz Media, Netflix

I know for me personally, the first time I had a chance to see any of this or be introduced to any of this was in 2017, back at the Rooster Teeth Animation Festival, where, I forget who was there, but you presented kind of a sizzle reel of a fight sequence that was more or less done. And me and the whole room, I was just kind of jaw dropping on the floor like, 'I need to see more of this. " Yeah.

Brad Graeber: Yeah. What's funny is that each image is of course intertwined and there's no clear story to any of this, but I think if I remember correctly Fred Seibert and I were on a speaking panel animation, and that was when we started Castlevania. That being said, Seis Manos was a fight choreography test we did with Sam Deats in the studio to try and get the show out and sold, and that was before Sam worked on Castlevania. And then he had done a bunch of really cool Naruto fan art fight sequences, and then we had the Seis Manos track, and that's what we used to sell Powerhouse to be the studio that worked on Castlevania.

Oh wow.

Daniel Dominguez: Wow.

Brad Graeber: Yeah. Castlevania and Seis Manos are actually related to the first one or the chicken or the egg? And there really isn't a clear version of that, because without the Seis Manos test, I don't know we'd have Castlevania. Without Castlevania, it would have been hard to sell a show like Seis Manos because people weren't doing things like that back then.

And now you're going to see all these thought-provoking elements of how Castlevania and Seis Manos are in the same Powerhouse Cinematic Universe, so be prepared for those fan theories if they aren't already there.

Brad Graeber: Yeah. I will confirm that this is not true, although in Seis Manos there is an Easter egg where El Balde picks up a small little Alucard doll...

Daniel Dominguez: It happens.

Brad Graeber: …in the market. So we try to drop things like that on the show, but I think Warren Ellis would definitely crush if we said they were in the same universe.

Daniel Dominguez: I think you made it officially canon accidentally there, and then 20 years later when Álvaro and I and you are all sold out, we can be like, 'Yeah, dog. Every Powerhouse show is set in a universe, and also Jurassic Park, and yes. "

Álvaro Rodriguez: I don't think I will have to wait 20 years to be complete.

Well, now I'm going to have to go back and watch this for the fifth time now, because I think I missed the Alucard doll easter egg, so I'm going to have to go back and watch .

Álvaro Rodriguez: I think it will happen in the next episode.

Image via Viz Media, Netflix

Oh, perfect. All right.

Daniel Dominguez: Dude, I think it's sold even more because I think it looks like a PopCap doll too, so hint, hint, Brad.

So speaking of which, this weekend you're continuing the Saturday watch party series, and I think that's episode five and six, so we have Blindfold and Reunion coming up. Anything you'd like to tease for our eagerly awaiting listeners the day before these episodes?

Daniel Dominguez: Definitely be part of it. It's 10:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, Saturday morning adult cartoon. . on Twitter, #SeisManos in one word, hashtag S-E-I-S-M-A-N-O-S, and join the fun. You can add us and we'll respond unless we don't see it. We just make all kinds of silly jokes and tell stories about doing the show and stuff like that.

And I usually have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm horrible at doing my homework, so I'm really random. And yeah, I dunno, man, it's so much fun. Honestly, adult Saturday morning cartoons are just a great idea anyway, now that dark cartoons can come out.

Right.

Daniel Dominguez: And I think thanks in large part to Powerhouse, thank you Powerhouse. And it should be a thing anyway, honestly. I just imagine a 41-year-old mom and dad sitting there saying, “I need a bloodbath just for catharsis for two hours on Saturday morning. "It's a great moment.

Brad Graeber: One thing I'm going to do is I have some footage from the recording sessions, which was one of the highlights of working on the show was getting in there and watching the scripts come to life that these guys put together, so I think I got some takes, until I get in trouble I'm going to pull some of the different Mike Colter takes, and even some stuff that got cut from the scripts.

But five and six are kind of, I don't know, when I tried to prep all the things to tweet, and I'm a type A who pre-wrote every tweet for episodes one and two of the Saturday morning cartoon, and had a folder where I tagged all the different photos to post with them. I had 50 something for episode 1 just because there was so much in those episodes to explain, from kung fu to Mexican cinema in… there's so much. And I ended up only being able to post half of the tweets I pre-wrote. He was just trying to quickly copy and paste a whole bunch of stuff that fast.

Five and six, to me, are similar as far as episodes one and two go. We made the show and then we had fun in three and four and then five and six just got a lot of easter eggs and things that they were based on so there's a lot of things that need to be recognized because , I don't know, I always have fun seeing things I don't even remember.

Like for example, we have a single photo of how they shot to shoot the murder of the little girl in the ice cream truck from Assault on Precinct 13, and I had totally forgotten that it was drawn to shoot when they shot Piojo the first time. I was like, "Oh my God, yes. It was in there. So, I don't know, five and six, there's just a lot to say about that, and I'm sure Al will have great things to post as well.

Image via Viz Media, Netflix

Álvaro Rodriguez: Yes. I like to go back and watch the script and take a few little screenshots of the script page and even some notes just because it was fun to go back and watch and then also knock my fans out of cinema, "Oh, that was a reference to that movie," or, "It was influenced by that movie," and just lay it all out on the table. Open kimono, as they say.

Daniel Dominguez: Yes. Especially in the writing and editing process, our first draft of the pilot was, God, I don't know, 34 pages or something. And they said, “There are so many little things in there. If we had an unlimited budget, it would have been amazing.” There's a sequence where this monster is murdering a bunch of coyotes and running through the desert. And I know there are a ton of them in every episode. It's just fun, but at some point you kind of have to pick up the pace and stuff like that. There are nuggets everywhere that are fun to throw around.

Yeah. I was wondering what your homework was like to have to research all of this, and how much you were like, “Oh, I was waiting to let someone know,” or “Oh, wow. I didn't remember us trying to do that kind of thing." So it was fun to watch and unearth all of this historical, almost archived tribute. It was very cool.

When you've developed, over the last decade or so, so many things to shoot and so many things, even as hyper-specific as the Assault on Precinct 13 scene, or any other genre of the Blaxploitation roles, or the kind of 70s grindhouse cinema, or one of the Chinese martial arts movies, or all of that. So how did you even begin to encapsulate all of these things in what would become Seis Manos? How did you make these decisions?

Brad Graeber: That's a good question, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the best way to answer is that we all come from a different space, but all of them have worked very well together to kind of put our specific likes and wants, and then boiled that down and made something that was completely unique to him. So at the end of the day, I'm really into the fight choreography and the old Shaw Brothers kung fu stuff. There's a lot of stuff, like Daniel said, that we haven't necessarily been able to get on the show, but I would push for more stuff Al has this amazing cinematic knowledge of all those 70s grindhouse movies and would share little snippets of that, I'd send the guys a Taoist book, they'd say I had to watch that Blaxploitation movie, Daniel would reference different anime things from the past, and it kind of created a new thing through these different interests and all of us, pushing and pulling on each other.

Daniel Dominguez: Yes. Yeah. I remember Álvaro sent me to Blaxploitation school as part of the homework we were doing, which was great, by the way. Oh my god, that was phenomenal. I actually totally ripped a line out of a movie called Truck Turner and added it just because it's one of the best things I've ever heard a human being say in a movie. But yes, it was a wonderful Venn diagram. I'm obsessed with the CIA going through Central and South America. I felt like this was an opportunity to explore some of these things in a fictional narrative and stuff like that, and we were all grindhouse fans, but Brad is kung fu with the balls, and Álvaro is basically a collection of human criteria. Yeah, it's just a wonderful collection of people throwing together what they love in a way that I think ended up feeling really organic.

Image via Viz Media, Netflix

Yeah. And that's how it is, too, from the viewer's point of view. It's amazing how well it all works together, but it also feels like if they did this kind of anime series in the 70s with this quality, it feels like a story that would have just come out of that era. He feels very much derived from him and from a room. But whose was it, or whose idea was it, to put that grainy, sort of burnt-out, and sometimes split filter over a lot of busy scenes?

Brad Graeber: That was Willis Bulliner, the director, and Adam Conarroe, and we all talked about it, but the way that they did it, it’s hard to imagine the show without that. But they did it in a really creative way. Not only do the cigarette burns happen in the show when they should happen mathematically, but they also kind of turn it up and turn it down depending upon the darkness of the scene and what's going on in the scene. And so, I think that they really do it in a unique and creative way that's never been explored before.

Daniel Dominguez: Yeah. To have seen it not just applied, but to have been utilized sort of thematically and tonally dependent on what is happening, I was so blown away by that choice. It was amazing.

I think personally, one of my favorite splits, it may be in an episode that hasn't come up in your watch-party yet, I think it's the seventh one or maybe the eighth one, but it's right after a major reveal and right before the jump to the intro title sequence. There's a great split and the film runs out or the film breaks, and then it jumps back.

Daniel Dominguez: Yes.

I love that. I thought that was fantastic.

Álvaro Rodriguez: Yeah.

Brad Graeber: And then what's funny about that is, animation is a very iterative process, like Al said earlier, it's just such a long distance between scripts and records and all that other sort of stuff, and I was so worried about that one, and it wasn't until the sound got in there that I was like, “Oh, this will work.” Because when you see it in the animatic and there's not that run down sound, you're like, “Oh, this is gimmicky. This may not work,” but Willis really stood behind it. And then when the guys at TBD Post, Brad Engleking and all those guys put the sound in there, you're like, "Oh crap, yeah, that's perfect."

Now we've talked a lot about kind of where you all pulled from for inspiration, but you also have your own unique and original mythology that, to be honest, is only kind of getting going here in Season 1. There's a lot of nuggets, there's a lot of breadcrumbs and teases, maybe you can walk me through some of the developing your own mythology for this original property.

Álvaro Rodriguez: Part of the thing that I was always fascinated by in the telling of this story as it started to come together was, I love mythology. I love all that stuff. So finding elements that were basically based on the cult of Santa Muerte or something like that, but creating Santa Nucifera. Nucifera is Latin for one of the types of lotus. So now we had this sort of potential crossover between Santa Muerte and, we're at one point calling the Lady of the Lotus, but it was basically all invented. It wasn't based on anything except sort of putting our own spin on the mythology that already existed.

Image via Viz Media, Netflix

We were obviously really interested also in this sort of thing that happens with syncretism, where Catholicism is sort of pasted over the indigenous religions and all that kind of stuff. And so, in building all of these things, it was kind of like this sort of mishmash of all these different cultures and all these different schools of thought, and the idea of ​​the goddess. And there's even some Egyptian mythology kind of things with the sarcophagus, but it all seemed plausible in this space, which I thought was really cool. Yeah.

Daniel Dominguez: And that was an invention of the same thing, Nucifera too, just the whole lotus aspect of it melded so well, and as part of homework stuff we did, Brad had us read the Tao and go through it, and go through a really great translation of it and all that sort of stuff. And so, honestly there's, like he said, a bouillabaisse of Chinese mythology. So the lotus creation, the wonderful thing that Al came up with, melded so naturally with things that we pulled from the Chinese mythology space. And what all of that sort of ended up doing, I think, in a really interesting way, you're not wrong, sir, in that we definitely quite intentionally built it as a breadcrumb trail.

And it was partly pragmatic. I know when I came into the project, part of that was that Netflix was actually asking us to include in the sort of sales pitch of it what a three season arc would look like. And so we intentionally built a three-season arc for the show, which required that in Season 1, we do it in a way that is setting up essentially act one of the three-act tale. And so you're right, a lot of that is meant to pay off in future seasons.

Brad Graeber: Yeah, and a lot of it was great research on the guys’ part, and then also a lot of really cool synchronicity that happened. El Balde is a little based on Adolfo Constanzo and the murders that happened in Matamoros in the 80s, but he had ngangas, which were these buckets that they kind of did these rituals with. And then when we visited a curandero in Austin to learn more about the process and make sure everything in the background was correct and all that, they actually had one. Talked about how you could use it to control the spirit of a witch or something like that, and then that was already in the script that Al had, but it was this kind of synchronicity that happened across the project.

And Al and Dan did so much research; Dan on video is showing us one of his Santa Muertes that he got from the curandero shops. But we did everything, from looking at voodoo books, I remember long conversations about that, Al and Dan went and visited a Taoist priest out there in Burbank and had conversations with him. There's definitely a unique universe that pulls a lot of different threads together, but there was a lot of time spent making sure that we got it as authentic as possible.

Daniel Dominguez: But also being a Joseph Campbell fan. I'm always such a fan of the Er Myth and the idea of ​​all myths are one myth and that kind of thing too. And if you look at all mythology, religion, faith, all those sorts of things, you find so many just sort of identical strands running through everyone's sort of stories for how and why things are the way they are.

Image via Viz Media, Netflix

Well, I'm happy we get to add Seis Manos mythology to that list, and hopefully we get to see more of that in the future. But as a quick aside, are you guys working with Insight Editions or anybody on a behind-the-scenes book? Because I feel like there's such a wealth of information and inspiration and art that most people probably won't get to see, but would love to. Are you working on anything like that?

Brad Graeber: Not right now. We would love to. Part of the hope of these Saturday morning cartoon watch-parties and all of this is that the audience continues to build and the interest happens, and we kind of get those tendrils out into other parts of the social media world and more people are introduced to the show. But right now, I think about a book like that all the time, and I'd love nothing more than to put together a book like that, and I'm sure Al and Dan feel the same way. But not right now, unfortunately.

Daniel Dominguez: Tell all your friends about us and tell them to tell their friends about us, and I'll give you all the merch you want.

So let's just get the elephant out of the room here. Season 2, what do we have to do as a community, as an industry, what do we have to do to move that needle so you guys can say, “Yeah, Season 2 is a go, and we're working on it” ?

Daniel Dominguez: I have an idea that I don’t think anyone will agree with, but my master plan continues to be, get a really famous rapper to tweet about us. Because everyone who loves hip-hop loves kung fu, now that's a fact.

Brad Graeber: Yeah. I desperately want to tell, but we were lucky enough to where we were able to write Season 2. The scripts are so good.

Daniel Dominguez: They're so good.

Brad Graeber: They're so good. Al wrote a script that has this amazing metaphor to another famous kung fu movie that I want to make so, so bad.

Álvaro Rodriguez: I have no memory of any of this. I have no memory of any of it. No, we wrote a second season, we had talked about our third season. We're guardedly optimistic, but part of I guess the idea is, yeah, we're going to hope that we can continue spreading the word and building that audience and growing that audience, and just trying to get exposure out there. And I usually think that's always been the sort of, the thing that stops things in their tracks, is just a lack of exposure. And I feel like Seis Manos, for whatever reason, just sort of slipped through those cracks and didn’t get the kind of exposure that an original IP needs to get in order for it to gain traction.

Daniel Dominguez: Yeah.

Álvaro Rodriguez: And so that’s why some of this social media stuff has been so valuable in that it’s continued to give some exposure to it, but we’re sort of still waiting for our real breakout. And yeah, I'm not sure what's going to be the thing that changes that, but yeah, we loved the property. We loved the project. We loved the stories that we were telling and the characters that we were building, and we'd love to be able to keep doing that.

Picture via Netflix

Daniel Dominguez: I can tell you, I have not had more fun or been more proud of a season of television, and I've been involved in a lot of wonderful things and continue to be, but that season two batch of Seis Manos, it pulls so much of the mythology together. I'm just going to say this, I'm just going to throw this out there as a lure for people, somewhere in there is a baboon in a mech with a flamethrower. I'm not going to say why or how we got that in there.

You somehow hit all my specific things that I look for. Somehow.

Brad Graeber: It really is so good. But yeah, I do think the show will eventually find its audience. I'm hoping it's sooner rather than later, and again, the animation landscape is changing, and I do think there's a thread to hit with this series and we're just trying to find out and do our best to make sure that we do hit that thread.

I will make you guys this deal. I will work on getting a world-famous rapper to get into Seis Manos, if they're not already, much like the Wu-Tang Clan members have been for a very long time, if I can get maybe some confirmation or a nod that a Master of the Flying Guillotine maybe shows up in Season 2 or 3.

Daniel Dominguez: I guarantee that.

Perfect. Deal. All kidding aside, Tuca & Bertie was very socially aware and conscious and it was out there in the zeitgeist, and then it was really focused before it could find its audience, but this week, we saw that a Season 2 was picked up by Adult Swim. So I feel like there are audiences and there are arenas for these types of shows, so I don't know if you guys can talk about it or not, but are you able to look outside of Netflix, or are you just currently waiting to see what your numbers are, or what their decision ultimately is?

Daniel Dominguez: I'm just going to slowly turn and look at Brad for however he wants to talk about that question.

Brad Graeber: Right now, we’re hoping that it finds an audience on Netflix and that that audience continues to grow. There's a time period where things can move to other places, but for what it's worth, Tuca & Bertie is a wonderful show, and I think maybe on Cartoon Network, it might be the right place for it. I still believe that Seis Manos is a streaming show and that Netflix is ​​the proper place for a show like that, but it's difficult to say what will happen long-term, but I'm hoping that it finds an audience here on Netflix.

Álvaro Rodriguez: Yeah. I would say the same thing. We had great partners with VIZ and Netflix. When we first met with Netflix with VIZ, VIZ came on board and then we went together to talk to Netflix, Netflix were so encouraging and it was a very liberating thing. One of the things that was said in that meeting has always stuck with me, which was, “Don't try to put something here that's going to appeal to a particular demographic and like you've got to find the thing that's going to make 13 year old boys want to watch this or 16 year old girls or people from whatever the demographics are, just be as authentic to your story as possible. Because the more authentic it is, the more universal it will be.”

And so when you're getting that kind of advice, you're getting those kinds of guidelines going into the process, you can't help but want to be in business with those kind of people. And so Netflix and VIZ and Powerhouse and the sort of collaboration that we've all been a part of with our voice cast, it's like everyone feels really invested in the show and invested in the story that we were telling, and that's something we want to try to keep going as much as possible.

Brad Graeber: Yeah.

Daniel Dominguez: And just absolutely on a creative level too, they’re just so wonderful to play with. And just compassionate and smart and supportive, obviously, as he said, but it's a great space to play.

And I can second all that too. From all the folks I've talked to on Netflix productions, they seem like fans and friends to genre. They are one of the platforms out there, maybe the top, who is willing to kind of push that envelope and allow a wider range of genre and perspective, and all kinds of stuff. Pushing for Season 2 on Netflix, let's hope.

But as we kind of wrap up or start to wind down here today, I want to bring you back to a character focus for a second. We mentioned earlier how great Seis Manos is at delivering characters, mainly underrepresented characters. I specifically love Silencio as a mute character, but also Lena as his partner, who is differently abled. I don't know if we ever get the background on her or not as to why she lost a hand, but I love the fact that they have this relationship, and you show it how they complement each other, especially in the guitar playing scene . Now Silencio and Lena, were they always part of the script early on?

Brad Graeber: Silencio was. Lena was not necessarily part of the script early on, but I think that backstory did get told in either three or four in a scene where they're … I guess it's after they've made the plan to leave.

Daniel Dominguez: Oh, that's right.

Brad Graeber: Leave San Simon and then Lena confesses her role in knowing about Father Serrano and knowing about Balde and all of this stuff. But no, again, the idea about representing differently abled characters, I can't say it wasn't intentional, but it wasn't ticking off a box thing too, there was just something that was so natural to this idea of ​​the way that those two characters find themselves, and it's something I've always been sort of fascinated by.

But just the idea, like the guitar scene, the “Mal Hombre” scene, it's so iconic in that it represents how these two people complement each other and how they together make something that didn't exist before, how the relationship itself is this sort of new thing. Not that they're not each individually whole in themselves, but now there's a new thing that's created that only exists because of their relationship.

And there's just something that's very sexy about that, and there's something that's just really touching about that too, because they were both sort of made this way by El Balde, and that's the reveal that Lina provides us, too.

But yeah, I think that there’s something that … a sort of absolute freedom of being able to tell a story without looking towards checking off boxes or particular agendas. Let's just explore all of our loves and all of the things that inspire us, things we have affinities for, from Mexican cinema to mythology and all these other things, and how they blend into this one space. And that's how all of these things came to be was just from opening ourselves to that.

Daniel Dominguez: Yeah. Garcia actually, being a female police officer, came about organically, too. That was entirely because we were doing a bunch of research on that period so we could draw things from real history in that space, and found out that right around the time period that the show had been placed in, that women had at that moment begun to achieve civil rights in Mexico and specifically be allowed to become police officers for the first time. And so it was just like, what an interesting story to explore that fit so well within the context of the world that we’re building.”

Brad Graeber: Yeah. All the initial decks that we pitched up until we got into actually writing the show, Garcia was a dude. And it's so hard to even imagine that as a thing now, but yeah, he was another guy with a mustache and the relationship with Brister was completely different. And it was just one of those revelations that totally changed exactly what the show ended up becoming.

Álvaro Rodriguez: Well, I’m going to respectfully disagree in that that idea did not come about organically, that idea actually came from one of the executives at Netflix.

Brad Graeber: Oh, did it really?

Álvaro Rodriguez: You didn't remember?

Daniel Dominguez: No, that was my idea. That wasn't Netflix.

Álvaro Rodriguez: No, that was Tykee’s idea. Tykee said, “We need to have another woman character in this show, you should think about this,” and that’s where the Garcia becoming Officer Garcia the woman came from, and it made so much sense in the room at the time. It's like, "Of course it should be a female cop."

Daniel Dominguez: Maybe.

Álvaro Rodriguez: Yeah.

Daniel Dominguez: I feel like when Brad Woods first called me, I was like, “This is one of the three things I think you should do.” Because I had done all that reading on Wikipedia about that time period. All right, I'm going to share it. I'll share it with Tykee. I'm going to share it with Tykee.

We'll chalk that up to collective unconscious. Yeah.

Daniel Dominguez: Yeah.

So all those things that you guys just talked about are just some of the many, many reasons that folks should be checking out Seis Manos, beyond the incredible action and the original mythology and just the fun of the series itself. But because I'm about out of time with you guys, I wanted to give you a chance, while we wait to hear more on Seis Manos Season 2, what else are you all currently up to, either at Powerhouse or in your own creative path?

Brad Graeber: I'll go first because it's easy for us. So we're working on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe for our friends at Netflix and Mattel, which is going along extremely well and we're super excited about. We're working on Heaven's Forest, which is another show with Warren Ellis and Kevin Kolde and also for Netflix. And then Season 3 of Castlevania came out fairly recently, and we're working on more stuff for that as well.

So at the end of the day, everybody's still pushing. We've got three or four shows in development. There's another show called Blood of Zeus: Gods & Heroes, which is based on Greek mythology. That one's in post right now, and things are firing on all cylinders.

Very cool.

Daniel Dominguez: What am I doing? I’m finishing up running the second season of an adult animated sci-fi action genre show for HBO Max, but I cannot name specifically.

Interesting.

Daniel Dominguez: Yeah. But it's the second season, so the first season's already out and the show is wonderful.

Álvaro Rodriguez: It’s Tuca & Bertie.

Daniel Dominguez: It takes a really hard left turn into a serious sci-fi action. What else? A variety of other development projects that are all having fun in lawyer land, and yeah, things are wonderful. It's a blast to be able to write wearing Uggs in my house and look forward to that show that I can't name when it comes out and all the wonderful Powerhouse stuff.

Álvaro Rodriguez: After Seis Manos, I went to New York to work on a Showtime series that we were about to start shooting when everything shut down called Rust with Jeff Daniels attached to star. I'm hoping that we'll get back to that once the fog lifts. In the meantime, I'm trying to work on a couple of other projects with some international television companies to develop a TV series. One could be a limited series, one might be an ongoing series, so that's what I've been doing. But I've been kind of more in the light action space. But always looking for opportunities to get back in the animation space, particularly with these guys.

Absolutely.

Daniel Dominguez: Yeah, I should say that, and I can't get too specific, but there is another original that we all built that we're trying to figure out getting out there as well that is very exciting and spooky . And I can say nothing more about it.

Well, that’s a perfect tease to end the conversation on, so thank you you guys again so much for your time today. Thank you even more for Seis Manos. I can't wait for folks out there to either see it for the first time, or catch up with you guys during Saturday's watch parties, and hopefully we hear a Season 2 renewal soon, so fingers crossed. Thank you guys so much again. Have a great day.