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You may have guessed that, by the countless times I've posted chapters of The Legend of Neil around here, that I'm kind of a Legend of Neil fan. That would be true. I'm as big a sucker for classic videogame parodies as the next guy -- possibly moreso -- but there's just something about Neil's tale of a guy who autoerotically asphyxiates himself while masturbating to the 8-bit fairy that somehow transports him into the game that makes me giggle every single time I hear the high-pitched song in the beginning.

So for some reason, I thought I'd try my first interview on Topless Robot with LoN's creator/director/writer Sandeep Parikh (bottom right in the pic above) and co-writer/Neil himself, Tony Janning (top). They opened up about making the series, their love of Zelda, and getting Felicia Day to scream all those filthy things during the fairy scene -- which turns out was surprisingly easy. Rob Bricken: Hey sirs.
Sandeep Parikh: Sorry about the delay, man. Even after I was late, my computer then crashed as soon as I sat down. It was wonderful.

RB: Dude, I haven't put on pants all day. There's absolutely no problem with being a few minutes late.
SP: Oh good. I was worried, 'cause we're also pantless, so I didn't know...
Tony Janning: We wanted to make sure that was cool.

RB: Very. Okay, so, you realize of course that Sandeep, you and LoN have a Wikipedia page?
TJ: There's our legacy.
SP: There you go. We made it, we finally made it!
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RB: I saw that LoN was inspired by a roommate. Can you tell me the story?
SP: Yeah, sure. The roommate story goes that he got a care package from his mother containing his old NES and all his games, including Zelda. He claimed he could beat the game in an hour, which I thought was impossible.
When he started playing, we were already kind of tipsy at this point from a night out, and we were drinking a lot more during the game. I began improvising the characters in the game, like, "What's this old man doing in a cave, like why's he there, why does he have a wooden sword? Did he make the sword?" And I just started riffing off of that, and we were both laughing, and I thought there's a sketch in here.
I wrote the sketch drunk that night and called it the Legend of Link, and I was like oh, it'd be funny if Link was a total asshole, and - well not an asshole, but just was a real dude. In the morning, hungover, I reread it and it was still funny, so I then sent it over to the best guy that could play an asshole that I knew, which is Sir Tony Janning. He's a knight.
TJ: I'm knighted.
SP: That's not true. But yeah, so I sent it over to Tony.
TJ: I read it and thought it was hilarious, and we went out and shot it out of our own pocket in early March.

RB: How did it turn from Link to Neil?
SP: And then two weeks into it I decided it should be about someone getting sucked into the game, a dude from the real world, and then he really could have this perspective of like, you know, "what the hell am I doing here?" So I rewrote the sketch with Neil being sucked into the game and it became a lot funnier, and I sent it over to Tony and he said "Oh yeah, this is way better," and then he added his own spin to it, and then that's when the Legend of Neil was sort of born. And then we couldn't really change any of the existing production elements, so it was kind of a mad dash to make it happen.

RB: So, do you both deny that either one of you auto-erotically asphyxiated yourself while playing Legend of Zelda? [Both laugh]
TJ: Adamantly.
SP: Yes, we adamantly deny that ever took place.
TJ: That's never happened.
SP: And we definitely haven't tried it since making the show, that's for sure.
TJ: Never crossed my mind.

RB: Tony, how did you meet Sandeep?
TJ: We met at the Empty Stage Theater, which no longer exists. It was in Westwood. We were both in the same improv group, and it was basically like a theater that just had people from all over the city that did shows, in Acme and Isle West, and Upright Citizen's Brigade, a lot of people would come to the Empty Stage, that was run by Stan Wells, and just do shows. So we met there, and it wasn't until I went to a Channel101.com screening, that he was also there premiering a show he did called "Blood Oath of 3 Men and a Baby" and I was there because I knew another guy, Eric Acosta, who plays Wizrobe, and when I saw that he actually wanted to do this sort of thing as well.

RB: LoN has some elaborate sets and effects -- who's paying for that? How is it happening?
SP: Yeah I mean, the show is technically quote-unquote funded through Atom.com and Comedy Central. The reason I say quote-unquote is because the funding is quite low by television standards, but all the folks at atom.com have been unbelievably suppportive and great to work with. They put a lot more than just money into the show, including great marketing efforts, setting up live chats, comicon appearances etc. They work with limited resources very creatively and they give us almost total free reign to keep the project in our voice. So I'm nothing but grateful to them for taking a chance on us and this project. It was a risky endeavor and it took real vision from their executives to make it happen.
But for me personally I feel like the show goes way beyond what the funding provides for, and that has everything to do with the fact that our team, our core team is all very passionate, talented people, that invest so much of their time and energy, unpaid, to make the show as good as it is. So when you see all of these elaborate sets, it's because Leah Mann, our production designer - it was her first production design gig too - so she really poured her heart and soul into it, and spent so many extra hours you know, designing all this stuff, and really scraping together, you know, just being tremendously resourceful, and creating caves out of paper, and dragons out of Styrofoam, you know, literally.
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RB: The difference between the early episodes with the scrawny white boys in masks, versus the more elaborate makeup and sets of season two is pretty massive.
SP: Right, right. Yeah, I mean it just sort of fell into that pattern of, we always wanted to keep one-upping what we had done in the previous episode, or just you know, just sort of one-upping ourselves throughout, and I think that now we're in trouble, because man, it, you know I feel like season three is gonna have to be off the hook.

RB: Who's doing the computer effects? Because those are pretty astounding as well.
SP: Yeah, another extremely passionate, like incredibly talented dude, Sevan Najarian, who we met through Channel 101, which Tony mentioned -- Channel 101, by the way, is just sort of this monthly festival where people submit these five-minute television pilots that they created, which is what originally we made the first episode of LoN for. So Sevan was just a guy that we had seen a bunch of his shorts, and he's just a total wizard with aftereffects and what-not. I shot him this like long, elaborate email when we first were doing LoN being like, you know, just basically begging him to help us out with a few effects and he wrote me back one line. He's a man of very few words. He was just like "I'm all over this project." That's all he wrote back. And he has just done an absolutely tremendous job, I don't even know how we would do it without him.
TJ: He's a magician.