Well the character, Henry and I both worked for years on sound stages, I in fact produced a show called Harry and the Hendersons which was on stage 42 at Universal Studios. And when you’re a writer at Universal on a show you’re actually kind of part of the tour. So our bungalows where we wrote and produced the show was right next to the King Kong exhibition so every half an hour there would be a giant roar and the smell of banana breath because the tour bus was going by King Kong and when he roared his breath was scented like bananas.
So that became just kind of normal and then every once in a while you’d look back and you’d think well this isn’t normal, most people are in offices without banana breath, without tour buses going by. And so when we started to talk about what our next character would be after Hank we thought it would be wonderful to use our experience living, because when you’re doing a television show you’re essentially living on the backlot.
And it’s a little world unto itself. Universal in fact is called Universal City, the backlot is a city with a mayor and a population of one. So the idea that this stranger in a strange land, the Earth, would come to a really strange land, which is the backlot of Hollywood, was really appealing to us as a way to tell a story, a classic fish out of water story but one that we felt all our readers would relate to because nobody knows that world either.
And would like to be part of it.
Yeah.
It’s aspirational, you know children think about wanting to be a star, wanting to be on TV, wanting to be in a glossy magazine and you find out it’s not so easy. Not so easy.