Mike Milo's Journal

So it’s been a long time since I’ve updated this blog but this is big news so here goes!

I’ve been very fortunate over the years to work on some amazing projects, Pinky and the Brain, Chowder, Xiaolin Showdown and Phineas and Ferb being among my favorites. Now, I have a new project to add to that list in the form of Randy Cunningham 9th Grade Ninja which is set to premiere on Sept 17th at 7pm on Disney XD!

It’s a fantastic show created by Jed Elinoff and Scott Thomas who really have this show down. The multi-talented Jackie Buscarino is our able producer and our supervising director is Shaun Cashman who’s worked on everything from The Simpsons to Billy and Mandy to Penguins of Madagascar. You can see an interview with him on Animation Insider. The characters were all designed by Jhonen Vasquez of Invader Zim fame and I have to say they’re pretty amazingly done. Such a cool style!

I myself am one of the directors along with the incredibly talented Josh Taback and Chuck Austen. You can read Josh’s interview on Animation Insider here. We’ve also got some amazing storyboard talent on this show as well. Alex Almaguer, Dan O’Connor, Kim Arndt, Bob Suarez, Peter Ferk, Larry Houston, Scott Bern and Fred Cline all provide some amazing visuals for the stories. Otto Tang does some beautiful art direction and lead designer Junpei Takayama adds to the series with some truly awesome monster designs in addition to literally hundreds of incidentals characters as well!

You can read Alex’s Animation Insider interview here.

Voiced by the incredibly talented Ben Schwartz (Parks and Recreation) the show itself is essentially all about a boy who upon starting 9th grade discovers that he’s next in the line of  hundreds of Ninjas who have protected the world from an evil sorcerer who was imprisoned under ground 800 years ago by the original ninja. the sorcerer grows stronger the more chaos he creates and is always turning students at the school randy goes to into monsters. Add to that a billionaire industrialist who’s struck a deal with the sorcerer to help him get out of his prison and you a ton of ass kicking stuff going on for poor ol’ Randy.

Randy’s bro Howard Wienerman voiced by the amazing Andrew Caldwell helps out as well but honestly more gets in the way making room for a lot of fun as well as action.

It’s basically a recipe for ‘boy’ in the form of monsters, magic, robots, ninjas and fart jokes. Yep plenty of body humor here as well and that’s the way I like it. It’s in short a fantastic show which premieres Sept 17 on Disney XD and I hope you’ll come along for the ride that we all take you on.

Here’s a trailer for the series below:

You can download a free copy of the preview episode Last Stall on the Left on Apple iTunes.

You can read the press release at Kidscreen.com