CHRISTOPHER TOWNSEND: So we
literally had stunts go and rig up on our set with wires and
actually had these characters being slammed around and moved. [MUSIC PLAYING] Beware my purr. My tentacles bite. I’m Lorraine. I might have
fallen from space. I’m Langston. Ooh, and this is
Earth’s Mightiest Show. Where we talk about all
of the most ’90s stuff in the Marvel universe. Oh, and if we’re going to talk
’90s, let’s talk about this. Higher, further, faster, baby. Marvel Studios’ Captain Marvel
is now available on digital HD. And it’s coming to Blu-ray
and DVD on June 11. I’m obsessed.
– Oh, listen. I can’t wait for all the
extras, the blooper reel, deleted scenes, all the stuff. I want more, please. Oh my god. I flerken love this
movie, especially because of all the ’90s goodness. I’m talking fashion,
soundtracks. So good. Oh, the settings. Come on, Blockbuster Video. Gourmet choice. Oh, a delight. Bringing me back. And we’re going to be talking
more about the ’90s today. But I think first, we
should talk about the fact that I got to chat with visual
effects supervisor Christopher Townsend all about
creating Goose the Cat’s cool secret skills,
the Kree-Skrull battle, and Captain Marvel’s big fall. But spoiler warnings ahead
if you have not seen this film. But for those of you who
have, you are in for a treat. This is super cool. Let’s watch. Oh. [MUSIC PLAYING] I am here with visual
effects supervisor Christopher Townsend. Hello.
– Hi. How are you doing? I’m very well. So everyone has seen
the film by now. If not, what have you
been doing with your life? Get it together, people. I want to talk about some
of the visual effects that we can finally kind
of discuss, because it’s coming home for home release. So first of all, I
know we were all very excited to meet Goose the Cat. There’s a lot more to Goose the
Cat than maybe meets the eye, like a pocket universe
full of tentacles or something like that. CHRISTOPHER TOWNSEND:
Something like that, yes. As you’re starting to
create this alien creature, where do you start? I think with– as with most of these things,
with sort of these characters, you go back to the comics. And you look at the comics,
and you look at poster art, and you look at the art
that’s been done of, what is the flerken? So it’s this big gooey, goopy,
terrifically sized monster sort of thing that bursts
out of this cat, and then goes back inside again. And I think the
fun part was trying to have that juxtaposition
between the two. And when you’re bringing
that to life, obviously, the flerken will
interact with the actors. How do you get him to
interact with other characters and pull it all together? It’s all very carefully,
carefully orchestrated. We have one particular scene
where the elite fighting force, the Kree guards are coming in
and are being slammed around. So we literally had stunts
go and rig up on our set with wires, and actually
had these characters being slammed around and moved,
and flipped, and flopped, and things. All that stuff is
very carefully planned out in our pre-visualization
moment in our previous time. And we figure out exactly how– what the moves need
to be based on what the tentacles are going to do. So you sort of work backwards. That’s where visual effects
sort of fits in the middle, as it were. So speaking of the
Kree and the Skrulls, there is this large fight
between the two of them. And there are a lot
of characters there. How many characters
are being brought in through visual effects? And how many are actually there? We actually shot out– there’s a scene called
Torfa on the planet Torfa. And we went out and we
shot this at a quarry for a couple of weeks. Because of the complexity
of you’re shooting outside, you’re shooting at night, you’re
shooting in fog, which is never the same, all these
sort of things made it incredibly difficult to
actually do it, to pull it off. But I think what you see
at the end is this sort of big wide scope of things. There are maybe 40 or so
real actors in full makeup and prosthetic masks,
and helmets, and costume, and everything
else running around in that sandy sort of quarry. And then we’ve added easily
just as many characters on top in digitally. It’s really a mix
between the sort of the traditional sort of
stunt work and visual effects. There is an epic
scene at the end where Captain Marvel is falling. It is harrowing. How do you place that? Because obviously, we
can’t drop Brie Larson. Yeah, so a lot of– obviously,
a lot of what we do is you’re trying to make
the impossible possible, and also making
it, hopefully, look real so that an audience is
there and never questions it. And there are many things
we could have tried. We could have tried skydiving. We could have tried these
sort of wind tunnels. We could have
tried her on wires. We could’ve tried all
sorts of different things. One of the things we
realized very quickly was that for what we needed
for her in this very specific moment is to be able just to
use a digital double of her, and be able to just
close in on her face and be able to use her
face and her expressions where necessary. And there’s some other
performance involved, too, because there are some
folks in green screen suits as well. There are. There are people there
that are moving her around in the blue screen suits. And they’re using that to
try and puppeteer her to make it feel like she’s floating. Because one of the
problems is– obviously, when you’re literally
on wires, you’re being supported in a
cradle, or if you’re on a backboard where you’re
just being supported, your legs tend to go down. So you need to make
it feel like someone is moving around in a more
naturalistic way as you would when falling. We used a lot of
that, not only– some of it is actually
literally in the film. Also, a lot of it was
just used as reference so that we can see how Brie’s
body moves in a particular way and how the costume
moves in a particular way when she’s doing a particular
thing with her arms or legs. We also shot elements
just of her face. And so you can imagine we
were sitting in a studio with her sitting in a chair,
and she’s got the helmet on. And we’d say, OK, look scared! OK, look over to your left! Look over to your right! Oh, now this is happening! And she was a real
trooper and amazing to watch, a true
professional as an actor being able to react
to that, and pretend that they’re falling and
panicking, and looking. LORRAINE CINK: But
it’s just right here. CHRISTOPHER TOWNSEND:
And it’s just here. And all we’re capturing is
just her face and expressions. And we take all of
that information and then we would map that. We would project that
onto a CG version of her. So what you see in the
final film is generally a digital version
of her falling, but with her performance
mapped on her face, put onto the digital
version of her. So you also got
to create a very interesting realm
that we’ve never seen in the Marvel universe. And it’s hard to say. It’s more of a
consciousness, we’ll say, the Supreme Intelligence. How did you build that
interaction world brain space? What do you call it? We call it the Supreme
Intelligent Chamber– Intelligence Chamber. And I think it was a fascinating
sort of bit of storytelling that we were trying
to do in there. There’s a lot of exposition
that happens in that room. There’s a lot of sort of
definition of the characters that happen. But the idea was that the
room exists in a reality. It’s a virtual reality,
but it should never look like virtual reality. It should always feel
like a very real space. But we wanted to keep
it a little bit surreal. And we went through
many iterations from massive green hexagonal
blocks to liquid worlds to almost Salvador
Dali sort of art. We went through all
sorts of things, but eventually ended
up back at this very minimalist, sort of almost a
white room and a clean room. And the idea being
that you can almost– whatever you want to conjure in
that room, you can make happen. There’s obviously– there’s
a point in the movie where we twist, and
things get a bit more violent and aggressive. And then the room itself
begins to collapse. And it was a really
interesting challenge to try and figure out how
to create something which would sort of satisfy both
the serene and the violent all at once. Well, it is beautiful
and very serene. And I would very much like
to have that in my home. Not the latter half– Yes. But the first part, very nice. Yes. Thank you so much. You’re very welcome. Oh, my pleasure. You guys, be sure to watch
Marvel Studios’ Captain Marvel. It’s available for
digital download now. So many visual effects. The brains behind these
things are bigger than me. It’s mind-blowing. It really is mind-blowing. But you know what
else is mind-blowing? I’ve got one bit of itty bitty
kitty trivia for you guys. I was waiting for
the rest of that. I think this is so cool. You know, ginger cats,
IRL, In Real Life, tend to be genetically male. So our first hint that Goose
is a little bit different is that she is female. All the clues.
All the clues. Yeah.
Isn’t that good? You fine out
all the knowledge. I like that.
Yeah. Yeah. Listen, there are so
many more fun details from the comic books
about flerkens. – Sure.
– Let’s talk about those, right? Yeah. Why don’t we give
these guys four flerken facts from the comic books. OK. Number one, how
the tentacles work. So in the comics,
flerkens contain these pocket dimensions
that don’t just help hold those pink tentacles, no. They can also carry
anything up to the size of a whole dang universe. Simply put, flerkens are
bigger on the inside. Well, you know, in the
comics, these pocket dimensions are actually very handy for
teleportation and time travel if you don’t mind getting
covered in a bunch of pink goo. It’s damp. It’s a damp way to travel,
but it’s convenient. But also, that makes
sense of how a flerken could just end up on Earth. Yeah. Also, hey, check this out. Flerkens are oviparous. It’s a word for you, which
means like birds and reptiles, they lay eggs,
like lots of eggs, like a crazy amount of eggs. LORRAINE CINK: Yeah,
it’s a lot of eggs. But don’t say anything mean
about these cute little fluff fluffs, because they actually
have human level intelligence. So brains, and
beauty, and tentacles. LANGSTON BELTON: And tentacles. Watch out for the tentacles. See, you learn
something new every day. I love that.
Well, hey. Let’s keep the fun rolling with
more ’90s goodness, because it is Marvel’s 80th anniversary. And this month, we are
celebrating– you guessed it– the ’90s as we take
a walk down memory lane with our
friendly neighborhood toy hunter Jordan Hembrough. Oh, toy-riffic. Let’s check it out. [MUSIC PLAYING] Earth’s Mightiest
Show fans, what is up? I’m hanging out again
with my good buddy, pop culture expert, Marvel
toy hunter extraordinaire Jordan Hembrough. Jordan, welcome back, my friend. Thank you so much. I am happy to be here. I am happy that you are
here, because as you can see, in front of you are some toys
from a wonderful decade that we are celebrating here for
Marvel’s 80th anniversary, the ’90s. A decade that I grew up in. I was born in 1985. Oh, you’re in for a treat. Well, I cannot wait. You’re in for a treat. These are Sneaker
Snappers from the 1990s. This is what I love about these. Let me– no, no, hear me out. They snapped on the
front of your sneakers. And it was like really a
wearable kind of cool piece of fashion that you would
wear to tell everyone, I’m a Marvel fan. I will tell you right now. I owned these Sneaker Snappers. Oh, there you go. Really? Because my shoes would
always come undone. JORDAN HEMBROUGH:
In the industry, what we essentially
call something like this is it branches from
the toy category into something we call lifestyle. And that means that basically
you can use it every day. I’m speechless
because I owned these. These– what? These are yours. What? We talk about
the 1990s and toys. You cannot not talk
about the X-Men. Whoa! What? I definitely own this Wolverine. Definitely had Wolverine. Definitely had this one. JORDAN HEMBROUGH: These are
classic X-Men from Toy Biz. During the 1990s, these
toys ruled the toy stores. I’ve got to take a second
and talk about Rogue. LANGSTON BELTON: Yeah. JORDAN HEMBROUGH:
And you know what? They didn’t realize
how many females were actually playing with the toys. So what happened was Rogue
and Storm were shortpacked. And what that meant is there
was only one or two of them in every case of 12. Toy Biz started
realizing, look, we’ve got to start making more Rogue. We have to start
making more Storm. We have to start bringing
these strong female superheroes to life into the toy industry. And they started making
more and more of them. Jordan, I almost
don’t want to move on. Yeah. This is my childhood
sitting right in front of me. – I’ve got more.
– Yes, I know. So let’s do some more. Yeah, I’ve got more. All right. LANGSTON BELTON: Get in. JORDAN HEMBROUGH: Oh Are you serious? JORDAN HEMBROUGH: It’s the
Spider-Man Animated Series Daily Bugle Playset. This was on a Christmas list. Anyone who grew up
in the ’90s loved the Spider-Man Animated Series. Animated Series. It was a great piece. It was expensive. Yeah. That’s why I remember
the big thing. My mom was like, no. JORDAN HEMBROUGH: It was
packed full of as many factors as they can get in one playset.
– Look at this. If you look at all the
stuff that’s on the back, you see all the characters. JORDAN HEMBROUGH: The
idea behind the playset was to actually sell
more action figures, because you created
a play environment, and you created a
big play environment. Well, guess what. Now you’ve got to fill it.
– Yeah, right. What are you going
to fill it with? More toys. Exactly. I’d never, ever
thought I would ever be this close to one of these. My heart is always full
when you come back, and I’m taken back
into my childhood. This is so great. All right. LANGSTON BELTON: The Rage Cage. JORDAN HEMBROUGH: This is
one of my favorite toys from the 1990s. And essentially
what it is, is you put Hulk inside this giant cage. And he rages out and
bursts through the cage. And it’s pandemonium,
and fun ensues. I love when a toy says,
hey, we’re going to give you this cage with the Hulk in it. Yeah. I actually want to bring it out. LANGSTON BELTON:
Try to rage him. JORDAN HEMBROUGH: I want to
have you rage out with it. LANGSTON BELTON: Let’s try it.
JORDAN HEMBROUGH: OK. So we’re going to
rage out with it. Rage! [GROWLING] It’s amazing! Hours of fun! Hours of fun! That is– it’s worth it. It’s so worth it. Oh, the rage. Jordan, thank you so, so much. Ah, my pleasure. If I’m– if any of the
fans out there are like me, they’re going to
want to know more about where to
find out more about you and all these great toys.
Tell us more. Absolutely.
OK. Well, if you’re
interested in toys, you can find me on
Twitter, @JordanHembrough. Instagram, @JordanHembrough. Or if you feel so
inclined, check me out at www.hollywoodheroes.com. Check it out, because I’m
just going to stay in here and stare at these,
and weep into my hands for a couple of minutes,
because this is so great. Oh, that was such a delight. I feel like I was
transported to my childhood. I was for sure. And hey, shoutout to
Jordan Hembrough who let me keep those Sneaker Stoppers. Oh, really? Does this mean
you’re never going to learn to tie your shoes? Not for lack of trying, no. Oh. But hey, also, that
Spider-Man Daily Bugle Playset– Also tried to steal it. I– it’s too big. It wouldn’t fit anywhere. I couldn’t hide that. You need a better coat. I need a flerken. Full circle. You guys, you know what? You tell us what
you would do if you could spend a day with Goose
the Cat, a.k.a. a flerken. And use the hashtag
#earthsmightiestshow. We’ll see you next time. I’m Lorraine. And I’m Langston. And this is Marvel. Your universe. Meow. [MUSIC PLAYING]