Posted on June 19, 2024

Max Steel TV series, 2000-2002

It’s a Friday in fall 1998, and I’m the supervising director of Dragon Tales at Sony Animation Studio. Another exhausting week is behind me. About 15 minutes to Yabba-Dabba-Doo time, my desk phone rings. It’s the V.P. of production for the studio.

They’ve got a pilot in development for Mattel. They want to revive Big Jim. Remember Big Jim? He was Mattel’s answer to Hasbro’s famous 12-inch G.I. Joe action dolls. (Yes, I call them dolls. I had them when I was a kid too, so don’t @ me.) Someone at Mattel has decided it’s time for Big Jim to be big again, and the plan is to give him an action-adventure series as a toy tie-in.

“Can you help us out over the weekend with this?”

I look at the clock. Now it’s about 12 minutes to Yabba-Dabba-Doo. I like working on pilots, but the last thing I want to do right now is lose my weekend to one. So I politely decline and get on with my life. There’s some risk involved in giving this answer. It makes them less likely to ask again. But sometimes you gotta set some boundaries. Especially on Friday evenings.

End of prologue.

A couple years go by, during which time I finish Dragon Tales and shift over to Heavy Gear. Sony is becoming sort of a hub for CG on TV, starting with Starship Troopers Chronicles, then Heavy Gear, then something called Max Steel. It’s an action-adventure series and a toy tie-in with Mattel. As it turns out, this is what emerged from the opposite end of that development project for Big Jim.

Josh McGrath is a 19-year-old extreme sports star who was adopted by his father’s best friend and partner, Jefferson Smith, who works in a sports equipment company. It’s actually a front for a secret counter-intelligence agency known as N-Tek. During a fight with an evil cyborg named Psycho, Josh is “infected” with nano-machines that give him superhuman abilities, and he’s off to save the world with the help of his two plucky teammates. (It was later worked into the canon that Josh’s father was “Big Jim.”)

The series debuted on Kids WB February 2000 and ran for three seasons with a total of 35 episodes. I was content to let it be. Shows were being made at Sony without my involvement, and I had no problem with Max Steel being one of them. But fate had other plans.

When Heavy Gear wrapped up in 2001, I needed something new to work on. Right around that time, Max Steel was re-staffing under Supervising Director Bob Richardson for its third season. I’d been a director since 1997, so I threw my hat into the ring and was accepted. They gave me a start date and I showed up for work, ready to direct. But someone else was in my chair.

What they sort of forgot to tell me was that I was not going to be a director. Instead, I was going to draw storyboards for someone else. This was, as they say in the biz, NOT COOL. I put up a stink that got the Animation Guild involved as a mediator, but since there were no records saying I was supposed to be a director, there wasn’t much they could do. It was a big lesson in pride-swallowing.

As you can imagine, that wasn’t the best way to start a new project. It put me in a bad mood early on, and there was nothing in my first script to improve my outlook. The show was far less interesting than it sounded (which, okay, is already a low bar, but STILL…) and didn’t engage me on anything more than a superficial level. But it was a job and I wanted to be a professional, so I finished swallowing and got started.

I ended up drawing storyboards for a total of four episodes, and found nothing in them to change my initial opinion. Pure kidvid, designed to be forgettable. If you happen to have grown up on it and have the opposite impression, that’s cool. It’s not uncommon for those of us involved in making TV shows to not be fans of the product. The trick is giving it your best effort despite this.

When my work wrapped up in the late summer of 2001, I was set free into my first extended bout of unemployment. It was a slow year, and I didn’t have many contacts elsewhere, so I took it as a sabbatical. My bank account was doing fine, and I gleefully spent those months drawing my first Grease Monkey graphic novel. I didn’t work in animation again until the following spring when Sony launched their next CG show, Spider-Man The Animated Series. By that time, Max Steel season 3 had run its course on TV and vanished forever. I assumed that I was done with it. But Max Steel sure wasn’t done with me. Stay tuned to see what happened next!

Episode 301, Deep Cover

Finished footage

I didn’t keep my storyboard for this one, but I for sure got tapped to draw a large part of the action sequence for the climax. I had a season of CG boarding under my belt after Heavy Gear, so I knew some tricks for how to disguise the “phantom” nature of CG models. The character animation has not aged well at all, but the filmmaking techniques (composition angles, pacing, camera work, etc.) are still pretty much the same today.