How That Holiday 'Predator' Stop-Motion Special Was Made

If you love ‘Robot Chicken’ you need to check out Stoopid Buddy Stoodios’s upcoming ‘The Predator Holiday Short!’ Before it hits, though, the “stoodio” shares how they created Santa and his reindeer in the ultimate showdown against the galaxy’s greatest predators. The idea for the feature came about when executive producers Matt Senreich and David Brook were spending some time with 20th Century Fox’s vice president of digital marketing and strategy, Matt Motschenbacher, at Comic-Con.

Before we go too into detail, if you haven’t seen a preview of the special yet you should really check it out in the video below!

I can’t help but laugh every time I watch this trailer!

At any rate, Senreich and Brooks were given the opportunity to take the ‘Predator’ franchise and do something new with it. According to Senreich:

“It was really just a random hangout moment. I geeked out about the idea because we just loved the property, and I love taking projects and taking these absurd worlds and making them mundane.”

PREDATOR Holiday Special, BTS CR: Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

With the idea coming together rather easily from there, Senreich shares what the idea behind the special ended up being:

“The piece is really just a fun homage to Predator in a stop-motion technique. So we’re in Santa’s North Pole, and it appears to be this perfect Christmas scene until a Predator shows up and starts stalking the reindeer. We follow one of the elves around as he’s running for Santa and trying to warn Santa that the Predators are coming.”

Thankfully, this isn’t just your standard Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, and the stop-motion style should be familiar to viewers as Brooks added:

“We kind of take the animation in a very Rudolph-style way, except it’s a lot more bloody and gory than you would expect.”

As to why they decided to go the route, Senreich shared:

“We grew up with a lot of this stuff that we have a nostalgia for a lot of these properties. As far as the animation style, a lot of our animators go back to Rudolph as what inspired them to get into the business. And as far as taking a property like Predator and just turning it 90 degrees on its side is what we really like to do, it’s our sense of storytelling.”

He went on to share that of all the properties that they’ve been able to poke fun at on ‘Robot Chicken,’ this one could take the cake regarding what they wanted to put together:

“I saw [the original] Predator in the theater with my dad. I didn’t know exactly what I was getting myself into at the time. I was a big Arnold Schwarzenegger fan at that moment, and that was at probably one of the tops of his career, and I walked out of that thing glowing because Jesse Ventura was also in it, and because I was a big WWF fan at the time. It was just this fun, campy, ultra-violent movie. It was probably one of those where I was a little too young, but for me, it was one of those first ones that I saw as I was getting older that stuck with me. I can’t praise the fun of that first one enough.”

Now, he was able to bring this fun into the style that his studio is known for.