Mr. Rippen. Gotta be careful here - don’t wanna give anything away here regarding Rippen in Season 2…
These are all rough designs by Joe Moshier, who was the lead character designer in Pilot phase. Tim Moen was Lead Character Designer in series, now he’s lead on Duck Tales.
From the start, we wanted a character who looked formidable - physically dangerous – like he could inflict serious damage on our heroes. We wanted big muscles and an intimidating figure in a suburban world… Dangerous spiky hair and sharp angles on his shoulders, cheekbones and his fingers and feet. And also we wanted some sophistication to his costume, facial hair and the way he carries himself. Almost a refined 19th century quality to his clothes. His outward appearance would suggest all that he sees himself as - all that he wants to be; a full-time villain. (and the comedy, for us, would be that his inability to achieve those evil things successfully, would be in stark contrast to how he looks – almost like he’s a Lamborghini that can only get to 40 MPH – unless of course he digs deep and gets real evil, then his evil engine revs… – “SAVE THE WORLDS” was an example of that… and Season 2 will explore where he’s willing to go, to get what he wants…. But those elements were part of the design process from the start. Character Design is informed by story, and what you’re trying to achieve…
Maybe it’s a cliche, but it’s one that Alfred Molina happily embraced… The notion of a refined villain with a proper British accent. Fred wore it as a badge of honor, something he always wanted to play. It definitely informed the design even before we offered the role to Fred. Always knew he should be English…. In a lot of ways - the notion of this series was to play with heroic and villain archetypes – Heroes, Villains, Sidekicks, Wise Mentors and Minions. Each of our lead 5 main characters were intentionally designed to speak to the conventional approaches…. When Fred accepted our offer to play Mr. Rippen, it only cemented further the visual ideas we had discovered in development – and we pushed it even further when he joined the team.
The design process in development was challenging, in that Joe Moshier’s time was limited, and I was doing a lot of organizing, cutting and pasting and “Frankenstein-ing” his designs -drawing rough cobbles in Photoshop, as springboards for Joe to refine and complete the design. I always consulted him, but he liked what I was doing - and it just condensed the time you usually have in features. It was fun for me, working with someone of Joe’s incredible talent, to be driving and distilling his many wild and varied ideas. If it were a feature schedule, I wouldn’t have taken such an active role - but given the TV schedule - that’s how it had to be done. And especially with Rippen, I’m very happy with the results.
You can see many ideas here (1st and 2nd pass designs) that made it into the final design. So fun to share these with you guys….
Watch Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero Season 2 - the world premiere is in just 8 days, July 10th on Disney XD - and the Disney XD App! It airs through the entire month of July… Giant finale July 28th!
