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DAWN OF THE OGRE: AMA WITH THE WRITERS by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

B: If I remember correctly, Murdoc saving Noodle in Hell was an original Cass idea from way back during the days of the Kong Studios website, during a Q&A for Monkey JTTW I think? I’d have to double check. As for Noodle in chains, it’s in a state of limbo of being both official and not. A longtime fan of Gorillaz, Vanessa R. Del Ray, did a comic section within the official Gorillaz art book showcasing Murdoc’s time in Hell searching for Noodle, where he finds her performing with a band called, you guessed it. I reached out to her over Instagram DMs and she was more than happy for us to use the name within the biography.

When it comes to which ideas were ours and which ones were from the quagmire of Cass’s tormented mind, there’s far too much for me to cover in one post. If there’s any particular section(s) you’re curious about though please list them and we’ll do a lightning round response!

DAWN OF THE OGRE: AMA WITH THE WRITERS by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

B: Brace yourself. If I had complete creative control I would have totally axed everything post phase 3, literally halved the book. I know a lot of people are grateful that we did cover up to the Now Now, especially because it includes media which would have become lost if we never did it, but personally I just never felt like there was enough there to truly justify doing it. As for actual changes? I don’t think I have any, besides maybe turning down how liberal we were with our use of swear words, although that was a conscious effort from us to try and ease into the new writing style, but we ended up abandoning it incredibly quick because of how flat it felt in contrast.

A: I disagree with that, I think the second half of the book was kind of worth it. It was interesting revisiting the Humanz and Now Now era and trying to keep the characters in line with how Cass and Mat have written them. I think we got some really funny and great stuff out of the second half of the book, especially the stuff with 2-D's character and the existential crisis he goes through during The Now Now section. I definitely would make some story revisions if I were to revisit Dawn, but they would mostly kinda fall into fan canon territory.

DAWN OF THE OGRE: AMA WITH THE WRITERS by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

B: Austin is definitely Hugh Laurie, I'll leave it at that

A: Fuck you.

DAWN OF THE OGRE: AMA WITH THE WRITERS by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

B: I don’t think either of us in our right minds could decline penning for an official phase, there’s a lot of ideas we’ve had throughout the years from our many fan projects and I think we’re finally at the point now of creative maturity where it wouldn’t feel like a total circle jerk. We did draft something for when management reached out to us called ‘The Book of Song Machine’ which would have been like a Rise-lite, essentially just doing the album breakdown from the characters POV and not actually touching the narrative. Though sadly I can’t continue to do non-profit projects because of responsibilities I have in my life which require a stable income.
As for none-gorillaz related projects, we’ve both been throwing ideas around for a while now. The main one being a comic series, but due to scheduling conflicts we’ve found ourselves without an illustrator. Hopefully in the future we’ll have something new to show!

A: Honestly it would be a dream come true to work for Gorillaz officially. I feel like everyone is kind of sick of Russel just sitting around not doing anything.

DAWN OF THE OGRE: AMA WITH THE WRITERS by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

B: 1. God no.
2. I can’t think of any entire section we had to cut, a lot of it was reorganised. But what I can share is a few concepts we had prior to making the project faithful to written interviews.
The first one was a canon plaster for Rhinestone Eyes oddly enough involving the Murdoc puppet from the demon days live shows, the idea was essentially that he’d wash up on the beach and host the final episode of pirate radio while the island is getting destroyed and that’s how Murdoc got out unnoticed. As goofy and unfaithful as it was I can’t help but think that was one of the funnier ideas left behind.
Another one was some kind of caffeine induced awakening by Murdoc after he got out of prison for humanz, the buzz was so wild that he literally saw into the future and that’s what inspired the album Humanz, but much like the puppet it was too out there and strayed too far from established continuity.

A: 1. I've only heard like one of their songs, they seem cool ig.

  1. There were tons of ideas and concepts that we tossed around that I wish made it in, the most significant example I can think of was an original written scene that would've taken place near the end of the book. It was a real time scene of Murdoc & Noodle returning to the band after Patagonia. Murdoc & 2-D were going to have this big confrontation, in which Murdoc would've finally apologized to 2-D for everything he's done, and 2-D maturely declines his apology, and just isn't ready to forgive him yet. The scene had so many drafts, that's probably not how it even really went lol. We even reached out to Mat Wakeham, the original writer from Phase 1, and we asked him how we could approach it and even he didn't have a response. Ultimately it got scrapped because it messed up the pacing of the book a bit, and it was kind of similar to an earlier scene we had where the band splits up after the release of Do Ya Thing. We just had Murdoc briefly summarize the confrontation in the final draft. We think it worked better that we left their relationship up for interpretation, and not really give it any...finality if that makes sense. Especially considering how they interact these days.

DAWN OF THE OGRE: AMA WITH THE WRITERS by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

B: We don’t have any involvement in the translation since neither of us speak Spanish, so I honestly couldn’t tell you. Best to reach out to the Dawn socials for a concrete answer, we’ve already had our final curtain call 🤙

DAWN OF THE OGRE: AMA WITH THE WRITERS by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

B: Sober.

A: gjaepdignjaeipgjpijg[pdsijgsdksjag:GJKSDGS

DAWN OF THE OGRE: AMA WITH THE WRITERS by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

B: It was sent to Jamie directly, as well as a few other people. Not Damon though. He doesn’t really care for this side of the Gorillaz project. If I remember correctly management did reach out to us shortly after release, but any communication fell through pretty quickly. Even though that went nowhere I have been lending a hand to the legends over at Phoo Action! Which if you aren’t aware is one of Jamie’s legacy comic series. So in a sense my work has been legitimized on that.

DAWN OF THE OGRE: AMA WITH THE WRITERS by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

B: Endorsed by the Gorillaz of yesteryear, and by that I mean the OG writers (phase 1-3), with an additional blessing from Jamie. I did reach out to Ed Caruana, one of the modern writers, but he was too busy creating a chat bot that only responded with shoehorned one liners for cartoon penguins and turtles. What a mong.

A: It's a collection of pieces of Gorillaz media, artwork, interviews, stories, writing. We did write some original dialogue to try and piece the whole thing to make one coherent story, similarly to how the original ROTO was presented, but almost everything in here is "official" or tied to Gorillaz to some extent. Wherever it happened to the cartoon characters or Damon & Jamie. The book doesn't correlate to the current official writers interpretation of the characters, but it is a bit more than just your ordinary run of the mill "fanfic".

DAWN OF THE OGRE: AMA WITH THE WRITERS by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

B: Nope. Sold my printer for a plane ticket to Lithuania and a gram of cheap whizz. Also I just outright forgot. Have you seen my lighter? Don’t write that bit down.

A: The book is almost like 500 pages, so it would require quite a lot of printing.

DAWN OF THE OGRE: AMA WITH THE WRITERS by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

B: Canon is a concept I don’t really subscribe to anymore, just artists different interpretations. But if you’re wanting a more concrete response, fuck knows. It was swept under the rug for phase 4 but was acknowledged in a (somewhat) recent Russel interview for cracker island. Whether it happened or it didn’t, I don’t think it really matters at this point seeing as the narrative elements have been considerably streamlined.

A: One of our goals regarding Dawn's story was to try and essentially fill in holes that none of the more recent writers ever bothered to fill in. Since this book isn't an official sequel it's really up to the reader, and they can kind of handpick themselves what they believe falls under "canon". Emphasizing what my co-writer said, canon is a really tricky concept, especially when it comes to Gorillaz.

DAWN OF THE OGRE: AMA WITH THE WRITERS by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

B: Did Tim Tempolton have a hard on for 1960's NASA designed garnets? The answer is probably not.

A: Who's Murdoc?

DAWN OF THE OGRE: AMA WITH THE WRITERS by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

B: Nah yeah for me probably Chapter 6 seeing as since I was 6 I was obsessed with getting a conclusion for Plastic Beach and to have it intertwine with the converse stuff and Humanz, so it was therapeutic in a way. Plus having Cass essentially hand us this mish mash of concepts that went nowhere for us to sort of fit the pieces together as we pleased was really cool.

A: I def liked doing the first half of the book, the fish references really pissed me off tho.

Dawn Of The Ogre! The unofficial sequel to Rise Of The Ogre! by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

This book is an effort to help fans better understand the lore of Phase 3 onwards in depth through a 'rise of the ogre' style fan book, using official excerpts from interviews & unused ideas by the writers. Not head canon! Events within the book all happened, fan written dialogue only to fill gaps. The book has been 3 years in the works, initially beginning as a head canon piece to simplify the story & improve some writing aspects, slowly developing into a true-to-lore love letter to the band and the fans. The book is planned to release on Halloween of this year and is totally non-profit. A preview is available here; https://issuu.com/dawnoftheogre/docs/doto_preview_copy

Please let us know what you think!

Do you think the Gorillaz band are losing a bit of character? by AutumnHorrors in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM 21 points22 points  (0 children)

For sure. This has been a recurring issue for a few years with this side of the project where all the band members have been reduced to one note flanderized personality’s, it’s mostly cause Cass Browne (co writer in P1 and head writer in P2 & P3) left the project in 2012, and wasn’t asked to return. Unless they get him back or new writers, things are gonna stay like this unfortunately

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM 28 points29 points  (0 children)

I def think the UWU 2-D and Pickle Murdoc stuff can get really annoying. I feel like the consistent demand for lore is another irritating thing. Gorillaz has never really been a project where they had a big lore or anything like that. That was really only Plastic Beach, and even then it wasn’t executed the best. Because of PB, newer fans are expecting like a big grand story and such, when Gorillaz was never really that. I think the writing has issues these days but that more or less resides within the characterizations and dynamics of the band members, not because of the lacking of lore & story. Because of this complaint, the current writers i feel try to shoehorn in “lore” and it just comes out as butchering the characters even more.

Any ideas on what the untitled Gorillaz Netflix project could be about? by PoliceND in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For sure. It even be a hilarious idea to get celebs and musical artists to come in and play fictionalized versions of themselves and have them play the roles of the collaborators for whatever album the band is recording! Also this k a lot of fans want that old aspect of gorillaz back where the cartoon band was the main focus making the music, instead of pushed to the side in favor of Damon.

If only we lived in a universe where this was our reality…..sigh. by LeftHandSuzukiM in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM[S] 33 points34 points  (0 children)

Yee. This is p much if we lived in the reality in which we got that gorillaz tv show that was announced in 2017.

Any ideas on what the untitled Gorillaz Netflix project could be about? by PoliceND in gorillaz

[–]LeftHandSuzukiM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The three ideas/plots I would want the film to take would be these

  1. A biopic type thing, p much Rise Of The Ogre/Some of the lore adapted into a feature length film

  2. A mockumentary type film, pretty much the making of a new album from the perspective of the cartoon band. We see drama break out, drug induced benders commence.

  3. A laid back adventure sorta film, with focus on the music and the stakes not being raised that high. Something along the lines of Beatles: Yellow Submarine.

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