Some spoilers ahead for both The Walking Dead and the upcoming Robot Chicken special.

If you're not excited by these two facts, you might be an undead Walker: 1) Robot Chicken and The Walking Dead are teaming up for a most excellent, hilarious, and fanboy-satisfying crossover special. 2) The incredible cast and creative teams from both award-winning shows have been assembled for this must-see special. Just take a look at everyone who's involved:

The Robot Chicken Walking Dead Special: Look Who's Walking is an animated zombie apocalypse special from Robot Chicken’s Seth Green and Matthew Senreich and their Stoopid Buddy Stoodios partners, John Harvatine IV and Eric Towner, along with The Walking Dead creator/executive producer Robert Kirkman and showrunner/executive producer Scott M. Gimple. The half-hour special will feature original talent from The Walking Dead lending voices to their characters including Andrew Lincoln, Norman Reedus, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Danai Gurira, Melissa McBride, Lauren Cohan, Steven Yeun, Sarah Wayne Callies, and more. Chris Hardwick and Breckin Meyer will also be among the cast.

I had a chance to chat over the phone with two of Robot Chicken's co-creators/executive producers--Green and Senreich--as well as two members of the show's creative team--Meyer and director Tom Sheppard--all of whom also write and act for the long-running show in addition to overseeing all sorts of aspects of the production. In this interview, we talked about the upcoming one-off episode, The Robot Chicken Walking Dead Special: Look Who's Walking, the nuts and bolts of how their collaborative productions come about, and even teases for the show's upcoming ninth season.

The Robot Chicken Walking Dead Special: Look Who's Walking premieres on October 8th at midnight (ET/PT) on Adult Swim. Check out this San Diego Comic-Con trailer for the special before getting into the interview below:

Now that the creative team can finally talk about the special, here's how they're feeling:

Tom Sheppard: It’s exciting. We’ve been living with this thing for almost a year. We started writing it last October.

Seth Green: We had a ton of fun making it, we just want people to like it.

While a Robot Chicken / The Walking Dead crossover might seem like a no-brainer considering how many pop culture parodies the animated comedy takes on, this opportunity came about in a curious way:

Sheppard: Matt Senreich […] is old friends with Robert Kirkman, so apparently it happened over a dinner. They made a little handshake deal and here we are.

Matthew Senreich: That’s basically what happened. I’ve known Rob for a while now and it was really as a joke … We were at this dinner and we were teasing each other about how Geoff Johns had said to me that he wanted to do a DC special, so with Kirkman, I joked about would he ever to do a Walking Dead one. He said, “Yeah, let’s do it!” It was really just that casual. And then it was amazing to watch how fast it was up and running.

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Image via Adult Swim

Here's how the Robot Chicken writers room shaped up after the special had been annoucned:

Green: We organized a group of writers based on their interest and appropriateness for it. Everyone knew that the special had been announced before we hired the team, and that was what we tried to do was assemble the right group for this special. That’s why there’s guests on it.

Senreich: What’s weird about the writers room is Kirkman came in and talked to the writers the first day like, “High-five, guys. Let’s have some fun.” And then Scott Gimple, who showruns The Walking Dead, pretty much sat in the room with us. We were joking around with him and having fun and making him laugh. Just the fact that we were all playing together made the special even more fun to write.

Writing and Animation Process

Once the team got down to working on the special, here's how their scheduled played out:

Senreich: The dinner had happened and then it was about Adult Swim and AMC working out their lovely arrangement. Again, it was amazing to watch these two giant corporations just high-five and say, “Let’s do this thing!” And then from that, we started writing in October, and it’s probably 16 weeks to do it start to finish, but we shoot multiple episodes at the same time. So, it’s a long process. We don’t finish this season until March. So from October of last year to March of next year, we’re working on this special and then the rest of this season.

Green: This special was done in advance; we had a standalone writing period for it and then we started this season right after that.

Breckin Meyer: Our day starts at about 9 or 10, we all write til about 3, and then we hand it in. And then Matt and Seth go through it all, and then as a group we sit down and decide what works and what doesn’t. But, initially with this special, being fans of the show, I think we all came with, “Hey, I always wanted to do this.” Initially, we had a whole bunch of Negan ideas. [laughs] It’s whatever the current thing was on the show. It took us a while to realize, “Hey, let’s go back six or seven years and find the really fun stuff there.” Initially, I think we were very Negan-heavy.

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Image via Adult Swim

Sheppard: I think there were a lot of flights of fancy based on our fanboy nature with the show, where we wanted to see certain things. We wanted to do the crazier Robot Chicken stuff, but as the show came together and was shaped, it kind of took on its own life and dictated what we would end up putting in the final product.

I remember I had a stupid sitcom sketch about Daryl and Dwight opening a sandwich shop based on the dog food sandwiches that Dwight made. There were things that felt like, “Oh, we went too far, it doesn’t feel real, it doesn’t feel right for the show.” So that all gets whittled down over the four weeks that we work on the script.

The writers themselves might ax an idea that doesn't quite work thematically, comedically, or practically, but I wanted to know if the network executives nixed anything:

Senreich: Oddly, they were having a really good time with it.

Green: Nothing got vetoed like that. We didn’t actually start cutting things until we were in the final days of our document, and then we made more cuts once we’d recorded. It’s a process to cut stuff, but we didn’t get any restrictions or limitations from the companies.

In the special, the meat of the story is Robot Chicken's typical stylish clip show while also having a loose narrative the show's specials are known for. However, there's also an interesting frame story at work: It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where citizens are viewing a museum dedicated to the walking dead:

Meyer: I think that the framework, the bookends of the show, came after we were done writing our sketches and all the fun stuff we wanted to do. Again, our show is ADD theater, so there’s a linear story to the specials, but even that, it’s a loose linear story. But once we came on to the museum idea and the idea of Carl being the one who’s recounting this tale, it kind of fell into place. It just became a really good framework for it and, also, we just got giddy about what we could put in this museum about The Walking Dead.

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Image via Adult Swim

That setting works great for the frame story, but it also features the incredibly detailed and specific visual gags and references to the Walking Dead series. The Robot Chicken team goes far behind just writing and performing their scripts, however, taking a vested interest in the animation process:

Sheppard: We’re pretty heavily involved day-to-day with it, so it was intense. It was probably one of the biggest builds we’ve ever done for Robot Chicken for one episode. Usually, we’re dealing with a lot of toy properties and things we can pull from eBay and from existing puppets that we had. For this, we had nothing, so we had to start from scratch and build everything from sets to props to characters. It was intense, but we had a lot of Walking Dead fans working on the show, so people got to go crazy.

Green: [We work] very, very, very closely. There’s nothing that isn’t reviewed by all of us at every point.

Senreich: We’re a well-oiled machine. We live in that building.

Green: We’re literally saying, “This jacket… This paint application…” We have a lot of leeway for our artists to do their own innovation, but we’re also meticulous and crazy about detail. And it’s not like a process where we say something and then ship it away to Japan and then they animate it for three months and we don’t see it. It’s in the building with us. We can literally sit over an animator’s shoulder and watch them frame-by-frame if we wanted to.

Senreich: If you look in the museum, you can see the detail of just some of the little things, the nuances that we wanted to put in there just as callbacks to certain moments and scenes.

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Image via Adult Swim

It's that attention to detail that makes this special so much fun to watch again and again, and it makes the jokes all the funnier:

Green: But it’s the specificity of like, what kind of process we’re going to use to make Carl’s hair, or which of the Walkers is going to be in this scene. If you look at all the background Walkers, they’re all hyper-specific Walkers that have appeared in the show, either what McFarlane made toys or what somebody reported on the internet as being a significant character, we tried to use those kinds of costumes, those kinds of pieces, to make all the props look specific … We want everything to look exactly like the show, just a Robot Chicken version of it.

Senreich: If you walked into our set department, they’ve called up specific images from the actual show, whether it be Terminus or the actual sequences, they’re looking to map it out as specifically as possible.

Green: That’s what [makes] the joke, you know? The audience clearly recognizes something, and then give an alternate perspective on the scene or intent, that’s where it’s funniest.

The Incredible Cast

This cast for this is ridiculous. Here's how nearly every major actor on The Walking Dead past and present came to reprise their roles for this special:

Green: I don’t know that that’s ever happened before. People go on SNL all the time to parody a show that they’re currently doing, but I don’t know that there’s ever been a situation where the entire case of a currently successful show all participates in a parody version of that same show. We were knocked out, obviously. We were thrilled about it.

Senreich: When we first started, we weren’t sure if we were going to get any of these actors.

Green: Breck and I were both practicing our best Rick Grimes.

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Image via Adult Swim

Senreich: All I kept saying was, “Be patient. I think we’re going to get Andrew Lincoln.”

Meyer: We knew with Scott Gimple and Kirkman that we had their stamp of approval, and AMC was great with us, but you never know which actor’s going to suddenly go, “I hate that show,” or, “I love that show.” So we wrote it not knowing anything. Seth and I were lobbying about who gets to do whose voice. I was saying, “No matter what, if we don’t get Jeffrey [Dean Morgan], I’m going to do Negan.” And Seth and I were both battling with our very bad Andrew Lincoln impressions for who got to do Rick. Then Matt became the parent who walked into the room and said, “You guys stop fighting. We got Andrew Lincoln to do his voice.”

We always knew we could do the show with everybody or with none of them, but we also knew, as fans of the show, it would be so much better if we really had everybody, if you have Norman [Reedus] do Daryl, and Glenn … you wanted Glenn to do that voice, you wanted Glenn to say, “I’ll find you.”

Sheppard: I don’t think we learned until we were done writing.

Meyer: Yeah, we were done writing before we knew we had the cast. It was icing on the cake. We loved doing the special, we had such a good time, and then to know that the cast is going to come and play. Anytime an actor comes on Robot, during a special or during the regular season, the fun thing is … actors get pigeon-holed and they don’t get to play certain characters. With Robot, every actor does three characters. If Chris Pine comes in to do Kirk, the other two characters are the more fun ones for him. It really comes through for the audience because he’s getting to play, and he’s getting to play people he never would get to play normally.

So far, so good. Michael Rooker is on the show as Merle, obviously, and he seemed to have a good time. [The Walking Dead] is a tough show to film. They’re sweaty, and bug-bitten, and covered in shit all the time, and to get to come into the booth and poke fun at the thing you’ve been sweating and crying about for the last seven years, it’s fun.

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Image via Adult Swim

One thing that stood out for me while watching this special was just how much fun the cast of The Walking Dead had while parodying their own characters:

Sheppard: We had a moment when we were recording Jeffrey Dean Morgan and we were asking if he was cool with the “Negan Dip” song. He said, “Yeah, yeah. I think it’s great. I didn’t even know I was doing that dip. We do four solid pages of dialogue for my character and I have just enough time to learn the lines and get on stage. We’re shooting and it’s a couple weeks in and somebody pointed out I was doing this dip after every line.” He was more than willing to poke fun at it and have fun.

Senreich: A lot of them leaned into the over-the-top personalities that we gave them to the point that they were ad-libbing things in the booth for us. That’s what made some of the nuances even better for us.

Green: They know things about their characters that we can’t possibly infer, and so they’ll bring that point of view to this interpretation, which makes it all the richer.

To that point, some of the cast members really got into their performances and even offered input and feedback:

Sheppard: Everyone on Robot is given the freedom to improvise and play around, so if something doesn’t feel right… Andrew Lincoln, for instance, we encouraged alternate lines and reads. He was hilarious. We had him on a Skype call from London and we told him our general spiel is that we only do three takes of every line and then we move on. And he said, “Yeah, you won’t be able to only get three out of me. You won’t be able to stop me.” And he was right! He would just keep going, and going, and going until he was satisfied that he’d gotten what he wanted to do with the line. He was just as committed to this as he’d be to anything. It was fantastic.

Green: He’s an incredibly intense and committed actor, and he brought that same level of commitment to all of his dialogue for our show that he does for scenes of The Walking Dead, which is incredible to watch ... I’ve been so impressed by all of these actors’ performances over the years as these characters. It was amazing to get to play with them in this way.

When Melissa [McBride] was doing Carol for us, Carol’s such a complex character and Melissa was tremendously detailed in her performance of it. She just had a tone, a way that she said stuff that was so funny; it’s hard to explain the specific thing that she brought to her performance that made our jokes extra funny.

Senreich: For me, it was Chandler [Riggs]. Carl doesn’t curse on the show. He just has these quirky little changes of the word to make it work.

Green: There’s the idea that Carl’s never had a formal education. He was a little boy when the Walker apocalypse happened, so he hasn’t been taught any etiquette, any proper grammar, he doesn’t know math … When you really think about what this kid has had to handle, the idea of him growing up and becoming an old man, where his blind spots would be, that just made us laugh like nobody’s business.

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Image via Adult Swim

Riggs, now 18 years old if you can believe it, not only got to do his youthful version of Carl, but a more grizzled version as well:

Green: Yeah, Old Man Carl.

Senreich: And then, Young Carl I think we might have pitched up, but yeah, it’s all Chandler.

Green: That kid’s terrific. He’s so great on that show and he really crushed it for us.

Senreich: Yeah, for me he’s the star of the show.

As for other cast members, George Lowe reprises his role as one of the most "wrong" characters ever to appear on Robot Chicken:

Green: George has been with us since the first season; he plays Space Ghost, obviously, and we cast him as the unicorn on Robot Chicken. When the opportunity was presented to put that unicorn in the Walking Dead universe, A) We couldn’t resist it, and B) There’s nobody else who could play that character but George.

Senreich: When we knew we were going to do this specific episode, we knew that the one thing we were going to do, the only specific, was that the unicorn had to be that horse from the first season walking into Atlanta.

Green: That pilot where you see Rick on that horse and walking down that deserted highway … We knew the crossover between Robot Chicken and The Walking Dead would involve that, that scene, that horse.

Oh, Daniel Radcliffe also appears, though I couldn’t pick him out initially:

Senreich: That’s what makes it so great!

Green: He plays Gareth in the Terminus musical. So he’s the one that sings the “Welcome to Terminus!” song. One of those weird random things where we know Dan and he’s unbelievably talented and he likes to do silly stuff in between all of his nominated stuff. [laughs]

Deleted Scenes

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Image via Adult Swim

While the special includes a ton of hilarious and referential moments, some stuff inevitably had to hit the cutting-room floor:

Sheppard: Just by the nature of these types of shows and sketch stuff, we write way too much stuff for the show, so things definitely fall. In this case, things that fell weren’t falling because they were terrible, it was just because of time, so we had a few sketches that got cut. A couple of very short sketches were cut that were animated, so those will show up if there’s a Blu-ray. We’ll probably put the entire animatic up so you can see all the sketches that were initially there.

Senreich: One of them that actually got shot and will probably end up on a DVD at some point, it’s so stupid, but it has the barn from Season 2.

Green: That’s what you’re pulling out? [laughs]

Senreich: I know. It made me laugh and I was sad to lose it.

Green: You know that sequence where they discover that Hershel’s been keeping all of his dead relatives that have turned into Walkers in a barn because he can’t kill them? And so he’s feeding them and hoping that they’re still retaining their humanity.

Senreich: The same sequence, they chop open that barn and then discover that [the Walkers] are square-dancing.

Green: So Rick is like, “No! No! No way, Hershel! No, man! No!”

Senreich: So Hershel’s like, “You can’t hold me back from the square-dancing. I’ll cut my leg off before I ever quit square-dancin’.” It was such a dumb … It’s probably like a 15-second gag, but it just made me laugh. And his performance is fantastic. We actually animated it, but we were a little too long, so that was a thing that died.

This special is certainly a fun one-off, but it may raise some debate: Is this actually the 100th Episode of The Walking Dead?

Senreich: No, this is the Robot Chicken special as Kirkman and Gimple said.

Green: I don’t know, as Chris Hardwick pointed out: Math!

Senreich: That was one of those jokes that we didn’t realize until towards the end, we just knew that we wanted to do a Talking Dead sequence. And when we realized that this was coming out before [the 100th episode], we couldn’t not make this joke.

We can split the difference and call it the 99½th episode. What's not up for debate is that Season 9 of Robot Chicken is on its way:

Sheppard: For Robot Chicken, we’ve got our whole new season coming up. Lots of insane new properties. Some we know, some we don’t know so well.

Green: We’re deep into our ninth season. We’ve been working our way through that, but we’re still full in production on it. We’re having a really good time.

Senreich: A lot of fun stuff. There’s a lot of goodies coming in 9. 

Season 9 is set to arrive later this year. Get a glimpse of what some of those goodies are in this Robot Chicken Season 9 trailer from San Diego Comic-Con: