You may know Ian Jones-Quartey's name best from his work on series like Adventure TimeSteven Universe, and Bravest Warriors, but the talented animator and storyteller is about to introduce a brand-new addition to the cartoon canon in OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes. Jones-Quartey's creation centers on K.O., an unfailingly optimistic kid who wants to be the greatest hero the world's ever seen. Cartoon Network has offered some early sneak peeks at the new series, but it arrives in earnest tonight at 6:30pm ET in a one-hour special premiere!

I had a chance to chat with Jones-Quartey ahead of the premiere in order to talk about the show's inspiration, its evolving animation style over the years, the disco-inspired theme song, and just where OK K.O.!  could be going in the near future. We also talked about the series' tie-in video game OK K.O.! Let's Play Heroes which was developed in an untraditional manner. It's easy to see why Jones-Quartey is excited to share his creation with fans, but it was also quite enlightening to see how it all came about.

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Image via Cartoon Network

First of all, for newcomers to the series who have never heard of it before, Jones-Quartey puts it in his own words:

I would describe it as, it’s about three best friends who work together, and they’re superheroes, and everybody on Earth is a superhero, and they fight robots, and they punch robots, and the robots explode. If any of that sounds good to you, then I think you’ll be down for the show.

I'm sold. So were the gathered fans in attendance at the recent San Diego Comic-Con event who got to meet K.O. for the first time:

We showed an episode that’s going to air in the first week called “Do You Have Anymore in the Back?” We showed that to the entire Indigo Ballroom. We also showed them a montage of OK K.O.! from conception to now. I’m pretty sure it will [make its way online] eventually. It was great. It was a really, really fun experience. I could tell that, for a lot of the audience, this was their first time even seeing anything from the show. Playing the episode was nerve-wracking, but as it was playing, I could hear people start to get engaged and really pay attention to what was going on on-screen. Toward the end, they were laughing along and they really got into it.

Inspiration and Development

It's tough to pin down OK K.O.! when it comes to the series' look, feel, and vibe. Jones-Quartey connects the dots by revealing some of his inspirations:

For me, one of my biggest inspirations are classic cartoons. I always look at Looney Tunes, because they’re these really crazy, outlandish characters, but when you look at what they’re doing you can always understand what they’re thinking. That’s sort of something that I always wanted to pull across. It’s so broad and so crazy, but you can feel like every character has their own thought process.

 

For me, stylistically and in terms of specific things that I look at, I look at Dexter’s Laboratory a lot. It’s kind of got that style of Hanna-Barbera meets 70s anime that I really just enjoy.

It's been a interesting road for both Jones-Quartey and his creation, one that started a few years ago:

 I created a pilot called “Lakewood Plaza Turbo” that was released in 2013 and I’ve been working on the idea since then. You can look at the pilot and you can look at the show and it’s obvious that things changed in between. One of the biggest things that I learned from working on Steven Universe is approaching it from character first. Steven Universe is really good at creating lovable characters. That’s something that I really tried to continue on.

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Image via Cartoon Network

Jones-Quartey not only drew on his previous work experience for the show, but also some early life experiences as well:

When I was really young, I used to tag along to work with my mom. This is based on being a kid in a space that’s not super meant for kids and how magical that feels when you’re young. Also, when I was a teenager, I worked as a clerk in a supermarket. It was work, but we were kids and it was super fun and I worked with a bunch of other highschoolers; that feeling of being three kids working in a store is just something that I really like and I’m totally nostalgic for.

 

When I was a storyboard supervisor for Adventure Time, Cartoon Network asked me if I had any ideas for a show pitch because they had seen some of my work and knew that I had a lot of ideas. I sort of just sat down and threw everything I liked together in a big bucket and shook it around; that’s kind of how it feels. I took those life experiences and then I also threw in everything I love about comics and animation and video games. I wanted to make something that was really fun and, selfishly, I wanted to make something that I would have really liked as a kid.

It might sound counter-intuitive that the much-maligned studio system seemed to work so smoothly in this case. Jones-Quartey explains that:

Cartoon Network has been really good at working with the creativity that they have inside of their walls. They’ve been really receptive to seeing what people are making and getting excited about it; that’s something that really helped out in the creation of this show. There are several other Cartoon Network shorts and new series that are created by talent from existing series. They’re really good at finding the talent and finding the good things that are being made and giving people a chance to expand.

An Evolving Animation Style

If you've been following K.O. since the "Lakewood Plaza Turbo" short, you'll have noticed that the animation style has changed significantly over the years:

It’s been really fun especially because … the short was out, and then we made a game, and then we made a couple more shorts. I’ve gotten a chance to work with so many different designers and so many different animation studios, and through that process, when you work with that many people, eventually you see things come together. People start to latch onto certain things about the characters’ design, and those were things that we just decided to emphasize in the final product. Once we realized that no matter who draws him, if K.O.’s sort of this small square, it’ll always feel like K.O. So we play around with that a lot; we push and pull with the designs but still make them recognizable so you still know who everybody is.

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Image via Cartoon Network

I was particularly curious about how K.O.'s top-heavy design came to be:

A lot of the designs are like that because I wanted to choose, to make the characters extra reasonable, things about the characters that are very obvious to them so you can sort of tell what their powers are just by looking at them. So K.O., in the pilot and the series, his trademark move is a fireball, and it’s all very fist and arm-based. He’s got this recurring sort of theme of punching bad guys, punching robots. I wanted to make sure that the most important thing about him was his low frame, his stocky frame, and his huge arms. To do that, I had to de-emphasize other parts of him.

 

You can see this in other characters, too. For instance, Enid’s main powers are derived from these fireballs that she kicks from her feet, so in contrast, Enid has a heavier frame lower, in her legs. That started to involve the characters in the way they look and how they act. With K.O.’s frame, even though he does have to be strong and muscular in his arms, he still gets to have spindly legs and look like a little kid.

Another example of using animation for emphasis is Jones-Quartey's use of non-sequiturs and varying art styles throughout in order to keep everything feeling alive and unpredictable:

I don’t like when cartoons stay on-model and become static and lifeless. The most fun thing, for me, about cartoons is that these are characters made of drawings, and it’s one of the oldest magic tricks out there, convincing people that a drawing has come to life. But I do want to embrace the fact that they are drawings and they were drawn by human hands. I want to have fun with the fact that, depending on the characters’ emotions or what they’re going through or what they’re saying, that the characters’ proportions and facial expressions and designs, everything can change based on that. To me, it keeps the show feeling alive. I always agreed with the idea that it’s not fun to see the same expression twice; if the character’s feeling two different ways, you should definitely draw them differently, two different ways. That’s something I’ve really tried to push hard on with OK K.O.!

A Disco-Inspired Theme Song and Unconventional Video Game

Another striking aspect of OK K.O.! is its catchy, fantastic theme song and outro song. The inspiration behind them might surprise you:

It was a very in-depth process getting there. For the theme song and the outro, I worked with composer Jake Kaufman who works at Mint Potion. He’s very well known from doing tons of video game soundtracks. He’s best known now as the composer of the “Shovel Knight” game. He’s someone I’ve always been a fan of. We worked together on the pilot, which had more of a sound of a throwback to a specific Super Nintendo [or] 80s video game feel. However, for the show, I really wanted to evolve the feeling of the world and the universe and also the soundscape.

 

We got to talking about disco. One of the things that’s really important to me about the sound of the show, disco historically was a movement about everybody getting to dance together. It was about everybody getting a chance to have fun together. It was a movement that crossed racial lines, it worked its way into different places in society; that sort of feeling of togetherness and everybody having this beat that’s fun to dance to and fun to be around was very important to me. That’s why we ended up landing on disco. Jake Kaufman has a real soft spot for disco melodies and I love how it feels in the world of the show. So Jake created this theme song, which is sort of based on our original theme, and we created the whole thing and I wrote a lot of the lyrics. They’re basically just about being together, fighting together, and that it’s important to have a best friend and be part of a group; you make everyone stronger when you’re together.

 

It was something I felt really strongly about. After that song was created, we actually gave that entire track to one of my favorite animators, Hiroyuki Imaishi, who is well-known as one of the co-founders of Studio Trigger, the [director] of [Tengen Toppa] Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill, one of my favorite animators of all time. We got the chance to work with him and he created a storyboard based on the soundtrack that we then animated. It’s basically a huge explosion of everything that the show is all about.

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Image via Capybara Games

Additionally, Jones-Quartey and the OK K.O.! team were able to take a not-so-conventional path to creating their own tie-in video game for the show:

One of the best things about the video game is that it’s not being produced in the traditional way a tie-in video game would be made. A lot of times with tie-in video games, the developers just sort of watch a couple of episodes and then try to come up with something based on that. Instead of doing it that way, we actually engaged Capybara Games, one of my favorite developers, before the show had even been created, and we gave them an overview of the world, we showed them who the characters were, and we really just set them loose to create a game that they would want to play. I specifically told them, “Don’t worry about tying into the show at all. If things don’t line up, that’s totally okay.” What they did was create a game that’s fun and stands on its own. It’s an entry point for people to learn about the show and the characters, but really it’s its own thing, which is what I really wanted.

Trivia and the Future of 'OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes'

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Image via Cartoon Network

Here's a little more trivia concerning OK K.O! Let's Be Heroes and Jones-Quartey. Early on, you'll get to see K.O. come across a power-level describing POW card; how that works in the world is as follows:

The actual levels on the show don’t really correspond to how powerful the characters are. It’s possible for a Level 1 to beat a Level 5 if they’ve got the strength and the smarts to do so. It’s really more about that character’s standing in the world. In this world, too, your power level is sort of a part of your calling card; it’s something you can say about yourself and the acts of heroism that you’ve done. K.O. is always trying to increase his level.

Did you know that both Jones-Quartey and Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar appear in the anime series Little Witch Academia?

One of the creators of Little Witch Academia is Takafumi Hori. I got a chance to work with him on Steven Universe. Hori was one of the lead animators on Little Witch [Academia] and he was a big fan of Steven Universe. He actually worked myself and the creator of Steven Universe [Rebecca Sugar] into some of the background characters, which was really cool.

Should OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes see more adventures in the future, here's what fans can expect:

The first night, we’re going to show an hour’s worth of episodes, but then we’re going to keep showing more episodes as the month continues. People are going to get to see a lot of the world. We start small. We start just talking about the characters and their relationships with each other. We really have fun with the chemistry between all the crazy characters in this universe, but if the show goes on, you’ll start to see that the universe is even bigger than just this little strip mall. Things start getting peeled away. You start to learn that these characters all have these fun, interconnected histories and backstories; it’s just all the things that I loved with superheroes as a kid.

OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes also stars Jones-Quartey as the voice of Rad along with Courtenay Taylor as K.O., Kate Flannery as Carol, Ashly Burch as Enid and David Herman as Mr. Gar. Check it out tonight at 6:30pm ET on Cartoon Network!

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Image via Cartoon Network