Look! It's the MAT3K crew during a break in the action.

If you mean physically building them, Bernhard builds every single one of our props. He built the bots, he made the costumes, and makes all the props for the invention exchange.

And he does a great Frank...

Oh he does a wonderful Frank. He IS Frank.

He's was great in his guest appearance at the game show...

When the guy that does the game show came up to me and said they were going to have a category called "Anime's Frank Sez", I just busted out laughing and I realized that, yes, my creation had legs. I mean it still gets me now, I mean this was a throw-off idea I had in 1991, it was not supposed to have 1400 people in a theater watching it.

What are your comedic influences?

Me, personally, the greats like Shakespeare, I love Shakespeare's comedies. The greats like Monty Python. Some of the more recent stuff, the early seasons of Red Dwarf are really good. I HATE American sitcoms. I try to write the OPPOSITE of American sitcoms. See an American sitcom do something? Do the exact opposite, it'll only be funny.

That attitude gives you the almost dead-on Tom Servo persona :)

Thank you :) If I could just get the voice right. I'd need to lower it about twelve octaves :). Let's see (back to the question at hand), early Robin Williams, Saturday Night Live, early Jonathan Winters, if you've ever heard any of his stuff, it's hilarious. Basically part of it comes from finding comedy everywhere in life. Comedy is not a discrete part of life. It's not something that fills up a half hour block in your life with two commercial breaks and starting and end credits. That's not comedy. Comedy is going through life and realizing that you know, what just happened was really mind-numbingly stupid, and the only real response you can have to it is to laugh at yourself. You know, what I did was just so dumb, I have to laugh at myself. A big chunk of comedy is not being afraid of being laughed AT, because when you do comedy you are deliberately putting yourself into a position where the audience is laughing AT you, not just WITH you. You're doing really dumb things, putting on a silly persona, for a purpose.

And you do it hiding behind a little box :)

I have the advantage that Mark and Bernhard and Matt don't have, in that I get to duck down behind a desk and I get to work the puppet. Nobody sees me.

Was that a conscious decision on your part?

Actually when we gave out parts, what I did was, I sat back and I said, "I've got (the characters) Anime's Frank, Dr. Forrest Clay, Tom, Crow, and Joel Saotome. Who do I have that can pretend to act, and would be good at this part?" And I sat down and said "We've got our Joel." Mark is Joel. Mark's had people come up to him and actually ask if he is really the Joel Robinson. I had to have Joe Foring for Crow, he does a dead on Crow. Matt Pyson has the perfect evil laugh, so he had to be Dr Forrest Clay. And quite honestly, Bernhard of course in real life IS Anime's Frank. He can drop into that persona instantly. That's his goofy otaku persona when he wants to do a joke, that's him.

With his mannerisms and bearing, you can tell...that's him.

Well, it's not the way he is normally.

Well, you can tell he doesn't have to act too hard at least.

Yeah, he's a very natural actor...And I pulled on Tom (Servo) because I can do Tom ad-lib. Part of the reason I picked the people I did was that they can ad-lib in character.

How long do you foresee yourself doing this? How far do you want to take it?

I don't think any of us want to pull out yet. We're having too much fun. It's one of the things we look forward to at the convention. We walk into there, and our hearts are hammering in our chests. We're about to go out in front of one-thousand, four-hundred people who've been waiting in line for an hour.

At least you only have to worry about having to do one a year.

Yeah. Actually I had I think Mark Mandiola from Katsucon, after 97 ask if we could do one for Katsucon. I said that would be a lot of fun if it weren't for the fact that it takes us about 5 months to recover from doing it once :) It really is a yearlong process. Right after we leave the convention, probably during the drive home, or at dinner tonight, we're going to be talking about what we should be doing next year. and then we're going to start screening stuff about a month after we recover, and then start writing the script, and then start rehearsing. I mean it takes a year. We could do two of these a year, or more, but I think it would become such an imposition on our time that we'd burn ourselves out.

Exactly. I brought this up since I do game shows, and I've done two a year. I'd just recover from one and think 'Man, I have to do another one in two months!, Ugh."...

Well part of it is, all of us have very demanding jobs. The youngest of us is 26, we're all getting towards the peak of our careers. We have nice jobs, we have very demanding schedules. I'm getting married in a month. So we're all sitting here with these busy schedules, and I think if I asked these guys to do another one of these, they'd probably strap me to the side of a white whale and I'd just disappear over the horizon as Mr. Christian sailed the ship into the distance.

Thanks for the time and can't wait to see what comes around next year.

Thank you.