'Q&A with Director Brad Goodchild' -- Round II.

We continue to re-post the first four fan-questions and the director's answers to them as promised in an announcement this morning. Look-out for the next two sometime tomorrow (Monday).

This second question was originally posted on the TV.com forum on June 11, 2006 and answered by director Brad Goodchild on June 12, 2006. You can read the relevant original posts here. The only changes made to the responses were to fix minor technical errors and remove time-relevant comments that no longer apply in the re-posts.

We also ask that you please do not re-post these questions and answers on your own personal website, unless you run the FAQ, director's blog, etc. Thank you.

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Q: Characters go through a lot of changes throughout production. For example, you previously mentioned that Odie was originally NOT African-Canadian, and that you made the change in order to have more diversity among the main heroes. What other major interesting changes did some of the other characters go through as they were being designed?

A: Before I was on board the project, the characters were all designed by Kenny Park. There are incarnations of his early designs around. Theresa wearing a cap and stuff like that. Also, different characteristics were developed. Herry was originally going to be a real germaphobe, he is still to a certain extent, but not really played out as much. Example is seen in 'See You at the Crossroads' when he says he hates zombies, you know, dead things, yew....

Neil was originally supposed to already live in New Olympia. He was supposed to be a rich kid. Born lucky and a model. We never really find out too much about the kids past as this might paint us into spots that we don't want to really explain. Logic plays havoc sometimes on plot lines in an action adventure series. We really went over the 'Chaos Trilogy' quite a bit to get a nice clean story and lost a few characters along the way.

Costume changes were also made at my decision. Odie and Herry had a design on their T-shirts...too hard to animate. Simpler is better.

The Gods were also designed to have some fun. I had a hand in designing quite a few. Mr. Suez is my best one I think. We didn't know what to do about Zeus. Since he is such a big persona in Greek mythology, he has to be there. In 'Chaos 101', we needed a way to get the kids into the school. I came up with the idea of a school janitor, named Mr. Suez (Zeus) backward. He leads the kids to the door where they figured out what to do with their pendants. It was fun and we now had a character that could walk the halls of the real school and no one knew who he really was until Show 26, 'Time after Time'.

The other gods were fun also as we tried to come up with designs people would not normally associate with the Greek Gods and Goddesses.

Heph was designed around my idea of what he would be if he was like Jesse James, the chopper dude. Hercules was designed as a God who let himself go to pot...he also originally was supposed to be covered in body hair...but we could not find a good way to show this, so hence the undershirt, and socks.

There are alot more stories. I could write more, but I think you get the drift of what goes on in the process.