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Scavengers Reign, a smart new 2D animated series primed for launch on Max in October, was spawned from Joe Bennett and Charles Huettner’s acclaimed 2016 sci-fi short, Scavengers.
The imaginative eight-minute film was first viewed on Adult Swim’s Toonami block and told the phantasmagoric tale of two astronauts marooned on the planet Vesta Minor who discover a way to catch a glimpse of their home planet by following a specific order of steps utilizing the planet’s strange assortment of flora and fauna. Its slightly surreal qualities and touching humanism made Scavengers a bona fide hit which fans absorbed on multiple emotional levels.
‘Nature is extremely weird the deeper you get, so we decided to just cherry-pick and pull from things that already exist in nature and go from there.’
—Co-creator & executive producer Joe Bennett
Ecology and Desire
Believing that this short had serious potential as an animated adventure, Max greenlit a 12-episode series arriving this fall, with its intriguing take on biosphere health, the harmony of nature, and ecological connectivity relating to desire, memory and perception.
Co-created and executive produced by animators, writers, and directors Bennett and Huettner, Scavengers Reign was first unveiled at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June, greatly expanding the narrative beyond the haunting source material. Benjy Brooke (Love, Death + Robots) serves as Scavengers Reign’s supervising director alongside executive producers Chris Prynoski, Antonio Canobbio, Shannon Prynoski and Ben Kalina for Titmouse. The series was co-executive produced by Sean Buckelew and James Merrill for Green Street Pictures.
“Scavengers began when someone at Adult Swim who was making smaller short-form content reached out and said they’d been watching our shorts online and was wondering if we were interested in doing something with them,” Bennett tells Animation Magazine. “I’d been interested in a short film that had no dialog, so I pitched him a very rough animatic of what I was going for.”
Bennett’s creative partner, Charles Huettner, loved the idea of a sort of Rube Goldberg machine at its root and the cause-and-effect of seeing that process play out in nature, with layers of symbiotic relationships and mutually beneficial interactions between creatures and plants.
“We had some ideas back and forth about the look of it,” says Bennett. “I was anticipating doing something a bit [rougher]. But Charles did a beautiful background inspired by Moebius. So it took about a year to do, we had about $14,000 to do it and we were reaching out to friends here and there to do certain scenes. Mike Lazzo was running Adult Swim at the time and he was really excited and soon after, we started talking about it being a series. I was so into the idea of doing a series with no dialog, but it didn’t seem like they were keen on it at all, and they’re probably right.”
From 2018 to 2019 Bennett and Huettner worked on the pilot while the project was still at Adult Swim, but it fizzled out after nervous executives thought it might not be the right fit for their slate.
“Then it died out until HBO Max started to blossom and these new executives saw Scavengers and thought it was great and wanted to turn it into something. It took about two years to finish all twelve episodes. Scavengers Reign is a co-production between Titmouse and Green Street. We have a big crew of international animators that I’ve worked with for over a decade. A lot of them are French and they pretty much gave it a French influence matched to a Korean style.”
During the research phase, Bennett remembers reading about Lynn Margulis and the Gaia Hypothesis — the Earth seen as one sentient being that we’re all just living bacteria upon.
“There’s a consciousness to it and these castaways get there in the series and realize that it’s a very hostile planet and pretty merciless,” he notes. “But if you can go with the flow and don’t fight it, you will make it out alive. There are characters along the way struggling with inner turmoil and others that understand this consciousness that exists and the fact it’s a highly intellectual world and everything around them is living and breathing and connected. We tried to put as much of that trial and error stuff from the short into the series, and the short is pretty vague about how long they’ve been there. The series has a little bit more of a timeline.”
Part of the appeal of their original short was that viewers became so involved that they became an active participant in the intricate routine performed while inhabiting this weird world and its menagerie. Bennett and his team were challenged in myriad ways envisioning many more alien denizens of Vesta Minor.
“We quickly realized that it was almost impossible to come up with things in some form or fashion that don’t already exist in some version here,” says Bennett. “Nature is extremely weird the deeper you get, so we decided to just cherry-pick and pull from things that already exist in nature and go from there. The cool thing in the series is that the characters are pretty stagnant in their home base areas and are familiar with the creatures and plants around them. But at the end of the pilot you realize there’s a new location that they need to go to which is entirely traversing the entire planet. They’re running into totally new environments and creatures along the way and it’s taking them by surprise. So they’re using a lot of the resources they had, like living organisms to help them get through, but it’s just one new challenge after another.”
Natural Impact
By comparison, Bennett asks us to think of the negative footprint that we have on our own planet, then imagine one that’s exponentially crazier on this made-up planet where you do one wrong thing and there’s a massive butterfly effect that ripples out.
“I was watching a lot of animal documentaries at the time and trying to look at examples of these types of symbiotic relationships,” Bennett adds. “There’s this white dove that lives in the Sonoran Desert that eats off the cacti and when it flies off and shits it’s propagating and allowing the cacti to grow more and more. So we were taking that and coming up with our version of it, which has an impact on the characters themselves.”
“I was also thinking about vore fetish, where characters sort of live inside each other,” he notes. “The idea of creatures on this planet that people could use as a utility, where they’re inside and operate it like a machine with all the organs. There was no real intention of this becoming part of the sci-fi genre, but instead thought of it as more nature oriented. We were both very fortunate to get this made. It was a lot of work and stressful and very surreal. Anything I’ve been proud of in the past comes with a little pain.”
Scavengers Reign premieres on Max on October 19.
