The Nacelle Company Bringing 'RoboForce: The Animated Series' To Tubi In April
Tubi digs giant robotic obscurities from the ‘80s, will you?
Back in August 2023, it was reported that The Nacelle Company, a multifaceted media company probably best known for docuseries like The Toys That Made Us and Behind the Attraction were rebooting Biker Mice from Mars and Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa, two animated series from the 1990s that hadn’t really been touched much for reinvention aside from a 2006 continuation of the former. It’s Biker Mice that’s even being produced with Ryan Reynolds’s production company Maximum Effort. However, it turns out they gave a straight-to-series order seven months earlier to a cartoon for another probably forgotten property: RoboForce, a robot toyline from the ‘80s they acquired the rights to in 2021. On Tuesday they announced that RoboForce: The Animated Series will be premiering in April on Tubi, The Fox-owned free ad-supported streaming service.
RoboForce: The Animated Series is being cooked alongside Seven Bucks Productions, the production company of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. It is set in Detroit in the year 2089, when Soraya Aviram launches the RoboForce to help a new intergalactic society on Earth. On the same day, her rival Silas Duke unveils his own line of robots, Utopia Aegis 1010 which make RoboForce immediately obsolete. So the team is quickly broken up and integrated as regular workers for 15 years. That all changes when the 1010s rebel and the RoboForce are the best choice to stop them.
While it’s only a 6-episode first season, it’s still more than the property has gotten previously, a 1984 special made by Ruby-Spears Productions called Robo Force: The Revenge of Nazgar, which featured Michael Bell, Rodger Bumpass, Alan Young and, funnily enough, Peter Cullen. It was allegedly released three months after he debuted in the role of Optimus Prime on the original The Transformers. Tubi’s scripted originals in general are overwhelmingly movies that largely range from Lifetime-esque to The Asylum-esque, but can boast being the home of the Wynonna Earp revival special, subtitled Vengeance which premiered in September. Its first original series was The Freak Brothers in November 2021, before becoming where the rest of The Nevers landed in February 2023 after HBO abandoned it. The second season of The Freak Brothers premiered that June, but that’s been it. Things have been picking up however as the Lauren Graham workplace comedy The Z-Suite will be its first in-house live-action series when it premieres February 6.
The series is directed and executive produced by company founder Brian Volk-Weiss. It’s written by Gavin Hignight whose work includes Nickelodeon’s first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series and Transformers: Cyberverse and Tom Stern, who did Freaked. The other executive producers do indeed include Johnson, as well as Dany Garcia, Hiram Garcia, and Brian Gewirtz for Seven Bucks, as well as Cisco Henson, Matt Kravitsky, and Michael Goodman on the Nacelle side. The series’s composers include Matt Margeson, whose work includes Kingsman: The Secret Service, and Rocketman, and Andrew Brick Johnson, who has worked Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures. The lead animation studio is Cartoon Conrad, which has worked Teen Titans Go! and Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie.
“When we started working on RoboForce almost three years ago, it never dawned on me that we’d be able to partner up with the best-in-class companies like Tubi, and people like Dwayne Johnson!” said Volk-Weiss. “All of us have worked hard to make a show that the audience falls in love with, and as MAXX 89 says, ‘Let’s proceed!’”.
“I’m so excited for this series to be released on Tubi in April,” said Garcia, Seven Bucks’ President of Production. “We’re pleased to have another collaboration with Nacelle, resulting in a nostalgic yet fresh story about a group of funny, persevering robots with a second chance to achieve greatness and save the world. I was a fan of RoboForce as a child and look forward to captivating new and old fans alike while building upon the strong momentum of our animation division.”
RoboForce: The Animated Series is considered a “Nacelleverse story”, with a logo included. It’s best exemplified by the appearance of the Biker Mice in the trailer. Their series is apparently next in the first phase, which will also include Moo Mesa, as well as Sectaurs: Warriors of Symbion, The Great Garloo, and Power Lords.
Source: Deadline