Even if you’re a fan of The CW’s DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, animated spinoff Beebo Saves Christmas is a weird idea. Premiering tonight on the network, the hour-long, animated special doesn’t feature any of the Legends characters, or any superheroes at all. Instead, it’s a relatively straight-up animated, musical Christmas special with one, little catch… It stars Beebo (Ben Diskin), a character who previously only existed as a talking doll in the world of Legends.
First introduced as the hot present this year in Season 3’s “Beebo the God of War”, due to some time travel shenanigans a bunch of Vikings mistakenly think the blue Teddy Ruxpin-esque toy is actually a god of war. Beebo has since become a running joke on the show, and one time the Legends even joined together, Voltron-style, to form an enormous Beebo and fight that season’s main villain.
But Beebo Saves Christmas takes things back to the beginning, showing us the animated special that inspired Dr. Martin Stein’s (Victor Garber) life-long devotion to the doll.
“We thought, maybe this is the Christmas special that airs every year in the Legends world,” Kevin Shinick, who Executive Produced, co-wrote, and wrote the songs for the special, as well as recording several voices, told Decider. “So that’s part of the merchandising that he bought, so everybody in that world knows Beebo because they’ve watched this Christmas special over the years. And now we, in our multiverse, are getting to see this special as well.”
The prolific Shinick has worked on everything from Mad, based on the iconic magazine, to a just-released collection of his Marvel Comics series W.E.B. of Spider-Man. But Beebo Saves Christmas is a wild swing for Shinick, and The CW, who clearly put their hearts and souls into attempting a Christmas special that works for everyone, fans of Legends of Tomorrow or otherwise. Also featuring the voices of Ernie Hudson as Santa Claus, Chris Kattan as a vindictive elf named Sprinkles, and some other fuzzy characters named Tweebo (Kimiko Glenn), Turbo (Yvette Nicole Brown) and Fleabo (Keith Ferguson), Beebo Saves Christmas promises to both delight and confuse audiences this holiday season.
To find out much more about the project, we chatted with Shinick about its genesis, hitting the right balance for Legends fans, and what holiday they might tackle next. Oh, and beware some very mild spoilers. Unless, of course, you lo-lo-love them.
Decider: Where did this first start? Did they approach you about doing this special? Did you approach them?
Kevin Shinick: Warner Bros. Animation approached me and said, “Do you know Beebo?” And at first that could sound like an odd thing if you don’t. I had seen the one episode that he first appeared in. I did not see the next few episodes. So they sent me all the episodes and they said, “The CW would love to do an animated Christmas special around Beebo. Do you have any takes?” So I went back and I watched all the episodes and came up with four or five ideas, and then pitched them. And then they sent them to the CW. And then we looped in the guys from Legends, Phil Klemmer and Marc Guggenheim. And then we all kind of joined all those ideas together to figure out, because we didn’t know at first, what was the objective here? Was it to make it a direct tie into Legends? Were we going to see Legends characters brought to life in animation? So we had to figure all that out. And we finally landed on, we wanted this to be in the Legends world. Do you watch Legends at all?
Yeah, I’ve seen every episode!
So as you know, Dr. Stein [Victor Garber] goes and gets the Beebo, the first time we see him. But why is there a Beebo doll? So we thought, maybe this is the Christmas special that airs every year in the Legends world. So that’s part of the merchandising that he bought, so everybody in that world knows Beebo because they’ve watched this Christmas special over the years. And now we, in our multiverse, are getting to see this special as well.
The big thing that was going through my head while I was watching the special, I don’t know if you’re familiar with this very serious tweet from Chris Evans about the Buzz Lightyear movie, where he says, “And just to be clear, this isn’t Buzz Lightyear the toy, this is the origin story of the human Buzz Lightyear the toy is based on.” So is the idea here that this Beebo special predates the toy, which we see on Legends?
Exactly. So this special is kind of the reason the toy exists in that world, which, the funny thing is, because everybody in this world keeps tweeting at me, “Where can I get a stuffed Beebo?” And I was like, “Well, I don’t know where. That’s out of my control.” But that’s the idea.
So in your mind then, just to get way into the continuity of this…
I’m the guy to do it with.
Is there a prior Beebo animated series? Are there other Beebo things, or is it just the animated special, then the toys?
That’s how we looked at it. I’m not going to be the keeper of the lore. I’m sure CW might be like, “He’s a fool. There’s been nine seasons of Beebo.” But we treated it at, this is the Beebo special that everybody loved. Yeah, there might be a series for all we know. It makes sense if there was. And speaking logistically, if they build toys, there might be a series as well, but now we’re getting so meta.
So I co-wrote it with Matt Maala, who’s a staff writer on Legends, and we just grew up on Christmas specials. So we wanted it to be not just for Legends fans. That was the first thing I wanted to be clear about is, you don’t want to do something so insular that no one else is going to care. There’s so many inside jokes, or inside references, that you’re like, wait, what am I doing? So we wanted just grab that magic that happens sometimes. And as Phil likes to say, we run the gamut. There’s Charlie Brown Christmas special… And the California Raisins had a Christmas special at one point.
So we were like, if we’re somewhere in there, hopefully closer to the Charles Schulz one. But everything I write, I’m the first audience. So regardless of the audience, or the age range, or whatever, I want to be entertained. I have an 11 year old daughter. And there are shows I love to sit and watch with her, and there are shows I’d rather put a gun to my head, even though she loves them. You know what I mean? And I wanted this to be one of those shows that everybody can sit down and enjoy. Not that it’s adult humor, but it’s not kid humor. It’s a family show, and hopefully we did that.
I was surprised, honestly. It’s not sarcastic, it’s not cheeky… How did you make sure you were hitting that tone just right?
Well, the great thing about Beebo, which is so funny, because we talk about Beebo now as if he’s been on the air for nine seasons. You know what I mean? My favorite part of this journey was calling Ben Diskin, who I had worked many times on Mad, on Spider-Man, and he voices Beebo. And saying to him, “You know that character you were hired to say five syllable as? Well guess what? We now need you to headline an animated singing Christmas special.” He was kind of like, “Wait. What? What?”
But what’s so funny about it is I just innately knew, and Matt did too, Beebo is just this optimist. He’s full of life. He’s inspiring. And he’s so joyful and full of hope. And that’s great, but it’s also reality. So we didn’t want him all to be like Care Bears or something like that. We thought, even in his own world, I think he really stands out as glass half full kind of guy, almost to a fault.
Like you said, all we really know about Beebo is he says, “I lo-lo-love you.”
You know what was so funny? He holds such a place in my heart, and I know him so well that I feel like I was writing for someone who already existed. And what’s funny is, and Marc Guggenheim said this at one point, which made me laugh… We do draft after draft, and of course you get notes after notes, after notes, and everybody just trying to make it the best show possible. And at one point we had another round of notes, which is probably beyond what we thought we were going to get. And the network was asking me about Beebo and was like, “Why won’t he be angry here? Why is he still happy? Doesn’t it make sense that he be down?” I was like, “He has this resilience and he has this joy that no matter how much you throw at him, he’s still going to come back.” And Marc Guggenheim finally said, “Oh my God, he’s Kevin, getting all these notes.” And I thought it was funny because maybe there’s some of me in Beebo, there’s some of Matt in Beebo, but he does stand on his own as just this bright light that no matter what you throw at him, he’s like, “We can do this.” And that’s why it is weird to me that I feel I know him very well, considering he didn’t exist before we wrote him.
So given you had that start for Beebo, did you come up with the rest of his supporting cast based off of that, to give contrasts, or how did that go?
We also wanted this to be relatable to a lot of people. This special is about, and Santa says it best at the end: “Christmas looks different to everyone.” And that’s what we really wanted to do. We wanted this to be relatable to everybody, because there is no one thing. I mean, we’re living in a time now where everybody’s arguing with everybody, there’s so much conflict in the world, and people pick on each other for, “You do that? No. Marshmallows on the side of the sweet potato.” Everything becomes an argument. And you can have other versions. There are other ideas and traditions. And we wanted to come up with characters that could kind of cover a lot of humanity. You’ve got the moms, you’ve got the grumpy guy, Fleabo, you’ve got, Tweebo, who’s always on her phone. So we were try to reach out to caricatures of typed people without making them caricatures. We wanted them to be very real, but to speak to a specific audience.
Not to get too heavily into spoilers, but I was bowled over by the ending a little bit because you are used to these Christmas specials that are like: it’s not about the toys, it’s really about this other thing. But you come up with a very alternate message here at the end that almost — it’s not pro-consumerist, but it’s definitely not anti-consumerist either. Again, how do you walk the line there where it does feel heartwarming, but it’s also not like “we’re just selling toys.”
Well, because honestly, I never thought of it as selling toys, clearly, because I don’t think we’re selling toys attached to this, even though people are clamoring for them. But I think it is a matter of not judging what you get out of the holiday. All these people, all these characters we created are based on real people in our lives. We joke that, at times, I won’t name names in my family, but some members are like, “Okay, it’s wrapped. What’s next?” And my wife’s kind of like, “What are we doing? I want to enjoy wrapping these gifts.” And that’s why there’s a legitimate line in there where he is like, “I don’t want it to be fast. I want it to be memorable.” And so everybody does have their own traditions.
Some people like it fast, some people like to do the shopping, some people like the quietness. And we realize that, you watch these specials and sometimes it can be depressing around the holidays if you don’t have someone, or if you can’t be with someone, or it’s just not going out the way you want it. Look, we’ve lived through two years of COVID, for crying out loud. Expectations are not always met. So it’s a question of, it’s going to look different to everybody. It’s going to look different year to year sometimes. And that’s okay. So I wasn’t going for consumerism, but if that includes consumerism, it is what it is. In a sense, it’s whatever gets you through the night.
I wanted to ask you about Legends references. Victor Garber is narrating, of course. And there is at least one Easter egg that’s pretty blatant in Santa’s sleigh towards the end of the special. But was there a temptation to put more in there? Did you have to pull it back at any point?
There was a little bit, but only in design and things. Matt and I didn’t write to it, but when we came up with the gag where Tweebo was like, “I can take a third party TikTok and stick it on a blah, blah.” And Santa’s like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” And we thought, well, there’s an opportunity we can mention CW. So we did. I think the animators were like, “Well, it’d be nice if there was a nod of all the gifts, to something Legends.” So we didn’t set out to do many Easter eggs. We wrote the script as it is.
And then after that it was kind of like, all right, what’s the icing on the cake? What could we put in here? And look, I wrote the idea of the narrator, and of course I wanted him to be a very typical narrator in order to subvert it with Beebo’s ridiculous voice. And so we thought, well, wouldn’t it be great if we got Victor because he kind of started this whole thing. He’s the one who bought Beebo. So when he said he would do it, we were super happy because it was not only a nod to it, but a sign off. So everything that was added Easter egg-wise was not an afterthought, but icing on the cake.
On another note, you have Ernie Hudson as Santa Claus, who is absolutely fantastic, but just on a cultural level, just seeing a Black Santa Claus is kind of big deal. It almost feels like a deliberate thumbing of the nose at the “Santa could never be Black” crowd without explicitly stating it. Was there any sort of discussion there with the CW, or was it always just a given of: “this is it, we’re doing this.”
You know, it was kind of a given. I will say, to be honest, there was one or two voices who brought up, like what you just said, “Should we make more of this, because I don’t think this has happened before?” And we were like, “You know what? It is what it is.” What’s so funny is, we just hired Ernie before we decided what any of the characters were going to look like. I mean, not Tweebo and Beebo, and all that stuff, but we figured, “All right. Who’s going to be Santa?” We had a range of people. And that is, I will say, a great thing about this cast is we had a lot of great talent come in and audition for this. But once we heard the people who wound up with those roles, you’re like, “Oh, oh God. Yeah, well, there you have it.”
It’s that old expression of, when they walk in the door you know it. And so when Ernie came in it was like, “oh God, yeah, this is totally Ernie.” And what I love so much about it is, I saw Ghostbusters the other night when it came out. And no spoilers if you haven’t seen it, but clearly Ernie’s in it, and they’re speaking to the next generation. He’s speaking to the kids. Clearly the franchise is setting up a younger generation. And I just thought, this is the Hudson holiday season in a sense, because you’ve got him here handing off to kids, and in Beebo he’s just speaking to all the kids of the world.
And I know he has grandkids that he wanted to do this for, but I was like, “You’re doing this for the world, Ernie.” I said, “You’re underselling yourself how well you’re doing this.” And that’s why when animation started to come in, or we put in his song, I had to show it to him because I know he was kind of like, “Ooh, I hope I sing okay.” He was so self deprecating that I was like, “You sound great, Ernie.” So it was very nice to have him as that.
He’s fantastic. I do have a bone to pick with you, though.
Uh-oh.
I watched the special, probably a month ago at this point, and almost every day I’d wake up with that opening chorus of, “I lo, lo, lo, love the holidays.” stuck my head. How do you craft an earworm like that?
Well, let me just say to you, I think I have watched this upwards of 200 times. So it’s permanently damaged my brain, but in a good way. I’m the executive producer, I’m the lyricist, I’m a co-writer, but I sat down to write them, and I wrote the songs first just to try and make them different for each character. And I knew I wanted that song to set the tone. It just sets the tone for Beebo, it sets the tone for the show. And I also wanted to set the tone in terms of the humor, where you get a little hint, where Beebo is this wonderful joyous guy, but then you notice a little crack when he’s like, “I’m not La, La, La, La, La, La, La listening.” And he’s a little bit like, it’s my way or the highway.
And I thought, in fact, the song got out a little long. So then I added that line, “I La, la, la, love how long this song’s going for.” Things like that made me laugh, because I was like, it is getting a little meta. But I wrote the lyrics. And then you just hope that, all right, well, this is what I want. And you express it as best you can. But man, oh man, then you get Daniel Chan, who does the score for Legends, he’s their normal composer guy, he just took that and ran. And we collaborated together. And I mean, my God, as you said, it’ll be in our heads forever and ever. And then we also brought in Jason Webb to do some of the other songs. I’m just so happy with all of them because I do feel they’re all different.
I do feel they speak to who sings them. Ernie again, encapsulating Santa. I think his whole song of, what will I do for Christmas this year? I think he does beautifully. But I think Sprinkle’s song, with Chris Kattan, is like a show stopper. It’s one of my favorite songs. So the only downside is the show was running long, and I had to cut a lot of the lyrics that I enjoyed in the opening song. So maybe it’s too much of a good thing, but it got a little funny with all the ridiculous things he does every year. Like, make sure the drugstores know to put the decorations up on November 1st, and all these ridiculous things. But then you cull it down to what’s the strongest, and then you have what it is. So I’m glad it’s stuck in your head, to be honest.
That’s great. I started singing it to my seven year old son, and now it’s stuck in his head, too.
Good.
We touched on this a little bit earlier, but now that you do have Beebo Saves Christmas, if you were to go back to this world, would you want to do another holiday special or would you want to do an ongoing Beebo show?
I’ll say this much: this was a tight schedule. I think the first draft was due this time, last year. And as you know, for animation, that’s not a lot of time. So we were really moving forward with this. If it was any other show I might have been like, “Oh thank God, this is done. Let’s move on to something else.” But this was such a great team to work with. Writing with Matt, the producers, the network. Jojo Ramos Patrick was the director. She did a great job with her animation team. So I would do this in a heartbeat. I never even thought about it as a series, but we’re already like, “When’s the Easter special? Should Beebo take on the Groundhog?” Things like that. So who knows, but I’d be open to it because I had such a fun time with Beebo. So yeah, anything’s possible.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Beebo Saves Christmas premieres Wednesday, December 1 at 8/7c on The CW.
Where to watch DC’s Legends of Tomorrow
This post first appeared on Nypost.com
ncG1vNJzZmhqZGy7psPSmqmorZ6Zwamx1qippZxemLyue82erqxnmKTEbsDHnmScr6NixKq4w2ajnp%2BVo7G0ec6fZK2nnaS%2Fs7vWZqqpoZ6ks6d5wZ6cm6ddqK63sdJmmqGqmajBrq3SZpqapZViwbB5wZ5m