Writers Joe Bennett & Sean Buckelew

In 2016, Adult Swim aired Scavengers, an eight-minute animated short about a pair of human survivors on a hostile alien world. It wasn’t long before co-directors Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner and production company Green Street were given the green light to make the short into its own full-fledged show, Scavengers Reign, which will soon air on Max and Adult Swim.

Like the original short, Scavengers Reign follows a handful of survivors of a downed interstellar freighter ship looking for a way off the alien planet they crashed on (or at least a way to stay alive). Even though it’s technically a Max original, it’ll feel right at home to those who watch it on Adult Swim: it’s appealingly gross in a way that defines some of the more out-there shows on the late night Cartoon Network block, and sports a simplistic art style that gets more detailed during key moments. Both elements are present in the original Scavengers short, where you can see the bones of what’ll eventually inform the 12-episode show. But even without the context of its source material, Scavengers Reign is an impressive show in its own right, with great visuals, an incredibly creepy alien vibe, and great atmosphere. It all comes together to provide what’s easily one of the best animated series from Max and one of 2023’s strongest animated outings.

Ahead of its premiere next week, io9 spoke with Bennett and writer (and Green Street co-founder) Sean Buckelew about how the show grew out from that initial short and what went into creating the alien fauna that help (and harm) the human cast, as well as building an alien world that’s as beautiful as it is gross.

Justin Carter, io9: What were some of the lessons you learned in creating the show with the short film as a jumping off point? How much did the reality of making the show change from your original expectations?

Joseph Bennett, co-creator: For starters, the original Scavengers short has no dialogue. There was a second where I thought it would be similarly sustainable for the series, but then I realized quickly it wouldn’t work. It’s hard to create a visual narrative for 22 minutes that can hold people’s patience, and I think even with that short, we were testing it. Having actual dialogue allowed for more story arcs and threads that we wanted to bring forward.

Sean Buckelew, writer: From the perspective of when we first started writing the show, I felt like the short showed us what could work and be compelling on a visual level. I think if you didn’t have that, and were going to write scripts, we wouldn’t have had that confidence. When we were writing, we had these big visual set pieces that we put in with more assurance that it’d work in execution. The short’s visual language inspired how we can approach writing and the kind of set pieces we could have.

io9: While your show is airing on Adult Swim, it’s first and foremost a Max original series. What’s it been like, working with the streamer on the show over the years?

Buckelew: We often had the refrain of, “If this is bad, it’s 100% our fault,” meaning we can’t cry foul on anyone else. And we had a fear these scripts would be unreadable: they were a word jungle of things that would have a shorthand in visuals, but could be tricky to read for someone who’s unimaginative. When we describe a creature from scratch, how it looks is essential to how it functions in the episode.

Bennett: Back then, we got really lucky, our key people were Billy Wee and Aaron Davidson. (Note: Wee and Davidson departed Max in 2022 and have respectively gone on to Netflix and Prime Video.) They really understood and nurtured us, from a creative standpoint. In a lot of ways, they were hands-off with certain things, but when they gave notes and suggestions, you could tell they were paying attention. Sometimes, if you’re coming from a more visual place and write a script—when it’s read by an executive or a network, it can feel like it’s missing that visual element, especially when the script has sparse dialogue. From the get-go, they were very in tune with what we were trying to do and our sensibilities.

Buckelew: Billy and Aaron were so in tune with us, and gave such meaningful feedback. And we were allowed to do what we were wanted to with full support from them, which I think is exceptionally lucky and rare for a show that’s a little bit odd at times.

io9: The Scavengers short features a pair of characters who seem like they’re early versions of Sam and Ursula, two of the show’s main characters. Were Kamen and Azi (the show’s other two leads) ever considered for that short, or were they made up during the show’s production? 

Bennett: Both Kamen and Azi were made for the show, but I wouldn’t even say Sam and Ursula are the two humans in the short. Nothing from Scavengers Reign is pulled directly from the Scavengers short, even though they both share the general vibe of an inhospitable, unforgiving nature on this alien world.

Buckelew: A key question we asked was, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if these characters who were totally separate and were in a long con as far as when they’d actually bump into each other?” Structurally and narratively, we talked a little bit of something like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones in terms of hopping between different storylines in a single episode. They’re all set off on this path with a center point, but you don’t know how their individual stories intersect. But by doing that, we were able to jump between these different thematic environments to see what a character is going through in these different instances. We got to have a “tense and release” structure to the episodes: maybe one character’s getting attacked by a monster, while another is having a fairly easygoing time.

Bennett: All the characters are struggling through some kind of inner turmoil; as you’re exploring the planet, you’re exploring their inner psyche. Some, like Azi, Ursula and Sam, can use the planet like a utility, where they can fashion things on the planet into a tool, while someone like Kamen is just completely lost and vulnerable.

io9: To me, Scavengers Reign feels like it’s drawing on video games, particularly The Last of Us with its body horror and idea of a hostile, beautiful world. Was that intentional, and were there any other games or sci-fi media you were pulling from? 

Buckelew: We didn’t really pull from any big games specifically. But for me, I’d say we were probably responding to the bigger indie game movement of exploration, or maybe even the recent Zelda titles that are more about the world’s vibes over a real structure. We watch live-action movies more than anything, so they were a big frame of reference for us. Animation naturally lends itself to the imaginative, and so for character arcs and drama, we looked to those to help ground things and make them more human.

Bennett: I don’t know much about sci-fi, so for me, it was just a coincidence that Scavengers Reign became a sci-fi show. Really, I look at it more as a nature series. But we were definitely inspired by live-action movies like Interstellar or (the 1995 anthology film) Memories by Katsuhiro Otomo.

Buckelew: Akira was another one, even though it’s kind of low-hanging fruit. When we were coming up with things, sci-fi wasn’t really our main source of inspiration. Instead, we talked about the William Freidkin movie Sorcerer as a much better comparison point than something like 2001 or other future-set media. To me, the real story was humanity surviving on this crazy alien planet, but it wasn’t necessarily rooted in science fiction. It’s an old story, but it was fun and let us do imaginative things with that concept.

io9: The alien world of Scavengers Reign has a bio-organic feel to everything, and it can get pretty gross, in a good way. Were there any ideas or concepts that you pulled back on because they may have been too much?

Buckelew: We talked a lot about phalluses popping up subconsciously. I don’t know where that comes from, so maybe we all need to go to therapy (laughs). There was also so much goop that we eventually went, “What’s intentionally gross and what’s accidentally gross?” We were trying to be intentional and contextualize the grossness within the natural world. Animals do gross stuff, but is it actually gross?

Bennett: I don’t think it’s any more gross than what you see in nature already. There’s plenty of gross or upsetting things that exist in nature, and for our world in the show, we were just trying to emulate that.

Buckelew: We’d been looking at Werner Herzog’s approach to understanding nature. Predators, prey, parasites, and symbiotic relationships are all normal in that ecosystem. But once you put a human in the middle of it, it can be uncomfortable or appear evil, when it’s really just neutral. A good example is the creature that gets paired with Kamen: it’s not fully thinking things through in a vindictive way like humans would. It ensnared this guy who’s been psychologically damaged from being stranded on the planet. So those two things meeting creates a real tension, but it could also be considered a natural process working itself out.

io9: Each episode is helmed by a first-time director. What was it like working with newcomers and onboarding them onto your show?

Buckelew: We gave them a long leash to be creative, which could potentially be daunting. But if you enable a lot of really great artists with faith and confidence, they surprise you. And in hindsight, it felt like the best choice, because every director wowed us and did incredible work.

Bennett: We knew these artists beforehand and what they were capable of, and they each came to the show in their own unconventional way. They were excited, and I think because they were first-timers, there was incentive to really knock their directorial debut out of the park. They each had their very unique sensibilities, which we knew about going in.

During production, it felt like each director brought something totally different and amazing to the table. And in addition to directing, they were also storyboarding and animating their own episodes. They were very hands-on in a way that feels like a very unorthodox approach to western animation.

Buckelew: Each director also engaged with the story in a way that felt like a dialogue between them and the writer. There were a lot of ideas from a director flying at us, asking if we could rewrite scenes or asking for feedback on their ideas. It felt like everybody was open-minded and there was a real meritocracy of “best idea wins.” Sometimes in the script, we’d have to tell the director to interpret something in an imaginative way.

For example, in one scene early in the season, the writing only indicated the magic of that particular moment. It was really figured out by the episode director Vincent Tsui, and was 100% driven by the director boarding and then reworking it. Those scenes became the anchor of the show—even though it’s being driven by a lot of creative forces, it isn’t just a top-down thing. The directors would see potential in something to be a showstopper set piece and wanted to be ambitious with it. Some of it was a real challenge, and I think that led to some of the best stuff in the show.

Scavengers Reign premieres Thursday, October 19 on Max.

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