The nonsense was all there on the page — Adam Pally in an echidna costume, Julian Barratt rocking out in an owl headdress, an enormous puppet hell demon, a black-box-theater-worthy interpretation of a Sonic stage — but when director Jorma Taccone began orchestrating the hallucinatory musical tucked inside Knuckles’ fourth episode, his impulse was to pile on even more.
“Toby [Ascher, the showrunner], right from the jump was like, Look, I was raised on Adult Swim, I want to make this weird and push boundaries and make this as interesting and different and unexpected as possible,” Taccone tells Polygon. “And obviously, that’s up my alley.”
The episode, “The Flames of Disaster,” is not just up Taccone’s alley — he built the dang alley. After breaking out with Digital Shorts on Saturday Night Live, the Lonely Island member applied his go-hard-or-go-home comedy stylings to feature work like MacGruber and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. While, on paper, a spinoff of the Sonic the Hedgehog movies may not have immediately called for his established skill set, his longtime collaborator Brandon Trost, the director of photography on Popstar and Sonic the Hedgehog who pivoted to directing on Knuckles, convinced Taccone to step in for a one-off.
Thanks to a lo-fi approach to executing on the musical concept, Taccone could basically do whatever he wanted, and with the resources of a major motion picture crew; Knuckles employed most of the same crew from Sonic the Hedgehog 2, that would eventually go straight from the series into Sonic the Hedgehog 3.
“My goal for the episode was honestly to have this be something that you watch and are like, Whoa, what was that? — it’s so packed for 21, 22 minutes,” Taccone says, still sounding as giddy as he was on set. “When I showed it to my wife, her response was, ‘I don’t even know what to say about that.’”
“The Flames of Disaster” picks up the morning after a raucous Shabbat dinner, as bounty hunter Jack Sinclair (Barratt) kidnaps deputy sheriff Wade Whipple (Pally) off the porch of his mom’s house. Knuckles declines to save him — Wade needs to become a true warrior, and this is his shot. Even if he’s being carted across Idaho in an electrified steel cage. As Wade reels from shocks to the brain, the action shifts to his subconsciousness, where Pachacamac (voiced by Christopher Lloyd), the elder of Knuckles’ tribe, appears to him at a bowling alley of the mind to send him on a spiritual journey — of interpretive dance and puppetry.
The first thing Taccone did when he received the script for “The Flames of Disaster” was call his brother Asa Taccone, who has played an instrumental role in writing the songs for Lonely Island over the years. Working with another of their go-to collaborators, composer Matthew Compton, the trio wrote a power ballad for Barratt to wail as Pally swayed, kicked, ran, and twirled his way around the bowling alley set. At this point, Taccone can’t even tell if he’s parodying anything with “The Flames of Disaster” — “honestly it feels very Lonely Island to me?” he says, realizing he had created his own musical subgenre — but when the song was wrapped up, it made sense to call in a favor with one of his leading creative inspirations: Michael Bolton.
The Lonely Island gave Bolton a late-career resurgence with their SNL video “Jack Sparrow.” Now Taccone can text him when he needs a little of that Bolton magic on a new project.
“It’s been bizarre in my life to say that I can consider Val Kilmer a friend [after MacGruber], and it’s been bizarre to say that Michael Bolton is definitely a dear friend,” Taccone says. “We call him Lord Boltron, which I would really like to spread as much as possible. We really want people at concerts to be yelling out ‘LORD BOLTRON!!’”
“The Flames of Disaster” checked two boxes for the Knuckles production: An episode with very little of its main star, a pricey CG creation, and an episode that could lean even further into the lo-fi to contrast with anything the audience would expect from the series. Taccone approached it as a “community theater production,” despite working with many of the most sought after production heads working in Hollywood.
When Taccone met the episode’s choreographer — Ellen Kane, whose credits include West End productions and the recent Matilda movie — he remembers her being super game for any wacky idea. He could only be self-deprecating. “I was like, ‘Just know… this is beneath you.’”
But Taccone sells himself short: The ultimate production is astounding. The director says his personal comedy mantra is “comedy is contrast” and there are examples everywhere. Pally spends most of the episode in a dingy Knuckles costume dancing through Kane’s precision choreography like he’s in Fame. A giant demon erupts from the back halls of the bowling alley only to go on and on about browsing Facebook Marketplace (“My whole thing was: I just want him looking for mountain bikes,” Taccone says.) There are throwaway gags — watch for the puppets phasing in and out of the dream — that the director says he carved out time for just because if anyone caught them for a split second they’d get a laugh. Not every dream came true, like the floating head of Michael Bolton, but he came close. With a seasoned team, he could say “Can I get a flare gun? I want the mailman to shoot a flare gun,” and then he’d have a flare gun.
“I am so used to working within the margins of not a lot of time or money, and being able to shoot a lot in that amount of time,” Taccone says. “And while this is way more episode days than I had had on things like MacGruber, we packed it back. I was trying to get a lot of shots per day. So certain parts we almost treated it like a music video. The first thing I did was have them buy me a little Bluetooth speaker so I could even run playback [of the song] just so I could get more takes quickly and read cue things very quickly. So I could do all these lines from Julian really fast, so fast I couldn’t wait for us to even connect to the timecode.”
The absurdity is technical, and for Taccone, the results are transcendent. He is the most surprised that an episode of the Knuckles TV show made him get… a little teary.
“The moments I’m always proudest of are when it’s both funny and somehow musically moving. A moment where [Wade] rises up and the echidna angels are around him, bringing him up and then the music starts to soar and Bolton’s voice is soaring — you kind of feel something! It’s always my favorite to have it be both funny and insane and, like, I’m kind of inspired!”
Knuckles season 1 is now streaming on Paramount Plus.
