Nearly three years later I finally came up with a new scheme. Which is not to say I couldn't have thought of something sooner, I've just had a lot of other projects and ideas that I've been exploring in those years.
My key problem with this new episode was that the Underdog theme license with GoAnimate had expired - and with it, Simon Bar Sinister's availability as my original star.
There was also the problem of the Super Rica and Rashy theme license also expiring. Rashy had featured as a supporting character in both of the previous episodes and, whilst this new episode didn't really require him, I thought it would be funnier if Simon still had his monkey army around (having had it returned by Evil Witchy).
This all got me started on the challenge of seeing if I could recreate a new Simon Bar using GoAnimate's Comedy World Character Creator and a new Rashy-like monkey using the Lil' Peepz Character Creator.
You can see the results in Episode 3 below. Thanks to professional voice actor, Dan Lawson, for his fabulous talent as the voice of Simon Bar Sinister.
Behind the scenes, Dan was awesome. He kindly donated his voice talents before I ever asked him to be involved in this project. (Another reason to make your work the best it can be - great people will want to be a part of your next project if they enjoy watching your work).
Dan really delivered, giving me a choice of four different voices for Simon including one that sounded identical to Simon's voice in the original Underdog cartoons. I went with a version that was exactly how I imagined Simon would sound - which is a little higher pitched and slightly faster tempo than his voice from the cartoons.
After that Dan provided me with 2-3 takes of every line and even included some improvised coughs, chuckles and effects (such as the echo of the loud speaker) that I didn't ask for but really added to his performance.
The idea of Simon obtaining an army of bunnies to view his animations does come from the original forum post I wrote that inspired the series right from the start. The post was a joke on how some of the top animators get their views. In it, I said this about former Top GoAnimator, Random Girl:
Random Girl has an underground lair where she has networked 3000 computers and 3000 robotic rabbits who watch her animations continuously. In their spare time the rabbits plan world domination and hope Random Girl will lead them to salvation and electric carrots.When I first had the idea for Episode 3, Simon's rabbits were going to be robotic rabbits, using the Cyborg Bunny Character I created for The GoAnimate Complaints Dept. Cyborg Bunny episode. However I couldn't envision robot bunnies using bunnysingles.com so I ended up having them as real bunnies instead.
As I said the monkeys didn't really need to be in this episode but I thought it would be funny to have them there as a kind of secondary opportunity for humor. It's not particularly funny when Simon pushes the monkey out of the way the first time but when he does it again over the credits - even I laughed out loud at that.
I hope it won't be quite so long before the next diabolical scheme, though at this time I don't have any ideas for another one. If you're reading this and you do have an idea for an outlandish scheme, feel free to suggest it in the comments. You may just inspire the next episode.