The 90-minute program will showcase the classic recurring “Funhouse” segments, including “The X-Presidents,” “Fun with Real Audio” and “The Ambiguously Gay Duo.” Ace and Gary will again be voiced by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell of The Office.
Best of Saturday TV Funhouse will feature new material animated specifically for the show.
The homoerotic superheroes will not only host the program, but will interact with the current cast throughout the show.
“The Ambiguously Gay Duo,” designed by J. J. Sedelmaier, had its start on 1996’s Dana Carvey Show and then moved over to SNL to inaugurate the “Saturday TV Funhouse” animated shorts segment. To this date there have been 10 episodes, all animated by the studio.
“The scenes created for the Best of special were some of the most complicated and labor intensive sequences we’ve ever produced for Saturday Night Live,” says director/producer Sedelmaier. “They involved shooting live action to accommodate the animation that would later be composited into the scene. It also meant animating at 30 frames per second, the normal being 24 frames per second, and animating on ‘ones’ - which means a different drawing for each frame of footage, as opposed to one for every other frame of film. And of course, we were working under SNL’s signature tightly wound production schedule.”
Sedelmaier corralled a large crew to work on this production and digital ink & paint house Cha-Pow! also helped out on some of the monologue animation. Sedelmaier credits include animator/production manager Dave Lovelace and animators Mike Baez, John Bonarrigo, Gene DeCicco, Tony Eastman, Andrew Friz, Steve Jackett, Heather Krumm, Dan Madia, Bryon Moore, Jim Petropouos and Claire Widman.
According to Lovelace, the studio used Adobe’s Flash and After Effects on the project, although the character work was hand-drawn.