She’s a Knock-Out! How ‘Invincible Fight Girl’ Creator Juston Gordon-Montgomery Wrestled His Adult Swim Show to Screens

Like any live performance, professional wrestling is all about timing. With his new Adult Swim show, Invincible Fight Girl, creator Juston Gordon-Montgomery (DC Super Hero Girls, My Dad the Bounty Hunter) couldn’t have picked a better time to unleash his high-octane series into the world than now. As World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and anime experience newfound popularity and financial success, creating an animated series as a love letter to both storytelling mediums was simply a no-brainer. However, although the series may fit perfectly in 2024, Montgomery’s work crafting the show dates back several years.

“It began kind of as a seed in my brain all the way as far back as 2016,” says Gordon-Montgomery. “And a lot of it was just looking around at the Western animation space and seeing what I felt wasn’t represented, which was a show that was really action-focused, but using action in this way that anime had been using it for years and years and years.”

‘We understand how to do wrestling on screen, but the real thing [we] felt like a lot of people hadn’t done in the West was find a way to tell a story through fighting.’

— Series creator Juston Gordon-Montgomery

 

Invincible Fight Girl tells the story of Andy (voiced by Sydney Mikayla), an aspiring wrestler in a world where professional wrestling is the most dominant form of entertainment. After years of concealing her desire to compete in the squared circle from her parents, who want her to be an accountant, Andy’s wrestling prowess accidentally becomes public knowledge. Consequently, Andy embarks on a journey that takes her far from home but places her on an exciting yet grueling path to championship dreams.

Like its protagonist, Andy, Invincible Fight Girl has allowed Gordon-Montgomery to transform his childhood passions into his profession. “It’s half just loving wrestling and half being a massive anime fan,” says Gordon-Montgomery. “And trying to be like, ‘OK, how do we get all of that into one show?”

Learning the Ropes

With a love of pro wrestling harkening back to the ’90s, Invincible Fight Girl’s intentionally over-the-top characters and setting are Gordon-Montgomery’s homage to the bewildering spectacle that captured his childhood imagination. “I haven’t kept up with [wrestling] as much now because some of the lack of pageantry is not as fun to me,” says Gordon-Montgomery. “But when it’s Macho Man Randy Savage giving just a nuts interview, and the guy on the other end is just like, ‘Yeah, everything he’s saying makes sense,’ that’s my s—.”

Although wrestling cartoons aren’t exactly flooding the market today, there has been no shortage of excellent entries into the genre over the years, specifically in Eastern animation, such as the legendary Kinnikuman — which Netflix recently revived — and Tiger Mask. “One thing that was a little challenging was that we were aware of Ultimate Muscle, we were aware of Tiger Mask, and we were trying to have those [shows] in our periphery but not look at them too closely because we were trying to do our own thing,” says Gordon-Montgomery. “We sort of looked at them to be like, ‘What are they doing? We gotta look at that.’ Just to know and be informed.”

Fortunately, Gordon-Montgomery picked a healthy roster of creators to bring Invincible Fight Girl to life. “We each have our own knowledge of wrestling,” says Gordon-Montgomery. “Like one person on our crew was a pro wrestler who transitioned into being a designer full time. But yeah, he and his wife used to be pro wrestlers.”

Getting the crew members to share similar grappling preferences proved easier than having them align on which anime techniques to incorporate into Invincible Fight Girl’s distinctive style. “The real thing was trying to get everyone on the same page about anime influences and what that actually meant,” says Gordon-Montgomery. “So, for example, we looked at a lot of Naruto because that was huge for me growing up.

“The sort of heartfeltness and earnestness of that storytelling mixed with the high stakes of it — the ability to tell a story through conflict and ideas clashing — all of that stuff was kind of our entry point,” says Gordon-Montgomery. “We understand how to do wrestling on screen, but the real thing [we] felt like a lot of people hadn’t done in the West was find a way to tell a story through fighting.”

Fighting Champion

Like building an athletic body and wrestling skills, making an animated series requires almost equivalent hours and labor. From Invincible Fight Girl’s conception in 2016, Gordon-Montgomery would spend years honing the idea into its present form. “[Invincible Fight Girl] didn’t start to fully manifest into something until around 2020,” says Gordon-Montgomery. “And that was just doing a short of it for Cartoon Network, and just kind of like, ‘Hey, here are the characters, here’s the world and here’s where I would potentially want to go with it.’”

“So, we got greenlit officially in 2022,” says Gordon-Montgomery. “And then it was just fast. It was like [through] 2022 and really finishing it earlier this year.”

Even though Invincible Fight Girl was able to avoid development during the COVID-19 pandemic, the instability of the Warner Bros. and Discovery merger, leading to the infamous “animation purge,” provided a different form of anxiety for the show’s crew. “I think we were coming through the studio at a particularly tumultuous time,” says Gordon-Montgomery. “One of the most surreal moments is while that’s happening, I’m involved in the writing at every stage. Even though in terms of boarding and animation, we’re pretty early in the season. I’m by that point on Episode 6 or 7, and we’re talking about storylines where characters are having their dreams threatened by external forces.

“So, there was a lot we did on the front end, me and my producer, just really trying to be smart and trying to plan for things and trying to be respectful of everyone’s time and resources,” says Gordon-Montgomery. “I’d say a lot of the trouble we ran into was mitigated by a lot of forethought and planning and having a crew that was super down to make it work.”

Weathering the storm of the WBD merger proved an essential ingredient in crafting the theme for Invincible Fight Girl, because Gordon-Montgomery views the show as a rebuttal to the societal turbulence gripping the planet. “We’re living in a time where there’s so much uncertainty, and I think a lot of people are rightly questioning a lot of the systems and institutions they’re a part of,” says Gordon-Montgomery. “[Invincible Fight Girl] is for people who feel within themselves there’s something they want to pursue, but they just don’t know. Do you give your life up to pursue something that you don’t know if it will come to fruition or not? And I think that’s ultimately the nucleus of what the show is about and who it’s for.”

 

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Invincible Fight Girl premieres on Adult Swim on Saturday, November 2.