There’s a lot of strange things in this world, and a lot of strange series with combined genres. I’ve seen a band take on a demonic entity, Japanese highschoolers go on the craziest universal adventures, and saw a short film with a Christmas theme take a dark turn (which I quite enjoyed compared to other seasonal smut). But there’s one thing that constantly comes out, and it doesn’t often end up being a blend: Buddy Cops. I have seen this in a variety of styles. Not just two buffoon cops, but I’ve seen unemployed buffoons, broadcasting buffoons, and at one point, a friend of mine has considered making a series of an agent/lawyer duo starring himself and me. We have differing opinions on the premise, but one thing’s for sure: It would probably be something for other critics to blab about and publish essays worth of text online. 
But let’s talk about this series, PSI Cops. As you may have guessed, it’s 2 buddy cops and their investigations into the stranger mysteries of the world. Like does Bigfoot exist, why don’t aliens contact/visit us, or is Bloody Mary actually worth summoning? It would be important and beneficial to find these things out, as I haven’t been very successful at finding out these things, especially since my last Bigfoot expedition. Luckily, we can find these answers out through the magic of animation that looks so life-like, you’d think it actually happened. Bart Batchelor and Chris Nelson have recently started this series and it has made its way onto Adult Swim already as the first Canadian animated series. A good thing too, most adult animations/sitcoms on Adult Swim are just getting dumber these days.
Speaking to these two men really answered a lot of questions, not questions like “Where’s the best place to look for Vampires?” but questions about the show and all their amazing efforts. You probably have a lot of questions about these questions and you’d be right to do so. Read on, you have the right to remain interested.
HNMAG: So, it’s one of those buddy cops type of series, are you big fans of those?
Bart Batchelor: You know, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I think about it, we haven’t been asked that question. I think so many of our favourite comedy shows are usually comedy duos.
Chris Nelson: It is funny because comedy duos are often cops. Think of Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, even Lethal Weapon which I would call a comedy in its own right. We were just watching clips from Bonne Cop, Bad Cop last night, and even the ones where it’s a solo cop, like The Naked Gun. Cops are just funny.
HNMAG: And is humour why you chose to go with such a concept?
Bart Batchelor: Yeah, the idea of mixing police with investigating the supernatural is sort of a silly paradox in itself. You really don’t need police to look at ghosts and vampires, so in its form we find police makes it quite fun, them constantly pulling their guns out. Almost everything supernatural, you can’t hurt what they got, it’s completely unnecessary.
Chris Nelson: Yeah, shootin’ a skeleton. (laughs)
HNMAG: So it’s mostly about ghostly crimes and urban myths. Why did you choose to have those as a main subject matter? Is it because you think more shows should cover these topics?
Bart Batchelor: Our whole shtick is we love making cartoons about people with cool jobs. We’ve done international doctors, con-artists, and the reason being is there’s so much material to play with in the comedy space. Supernatural and Urban Myths, I mean there was 9 seasons of X-Files, there’s so much content there for unlimited supply of fun. I feel like other shows using it would be super cool because the more mythos, the more world around it I think the funner the space is.
Chris Nelson: Yeah, and let’s find Bigfoot. Come on, it’s 2023. Where is he? Let’s dig him up, why isn’t there a series that digs him up yet?
HNMAG: Are Kydd and Felixx doomed to botch things continuously or do you feel they’re successful?
Chris Nelson: They succeed a lot! They get what THEY WANT at the end of every episode, and that’s all that matters to them.
Bart Batchelor: Yeah, but the truth is when Kydd and Felixx do succeed, it’s usually by a fluke or not their intent, in the 24 episodes they succeed quite often. There is a season finale and we’ll figure out if they succeed there or not.
HNMAG: Will we be seeing more works involving them, like longer episodes or different formats even?
Chris Nelson: Let the record show that I’m crossing my fingers, really hard right now. All of them. We want more seasons, and it was a blast as Bart and I were making the first 24 episodes, we did tear through it as we were making the show. We want to do that again, but quickly, so I don’t know. I want season 2 to happen immediately, I’d do a movie. Bart, would YOU do a movie?
Bart Batchelor: I guess, Kydd and Felixx and their office mates have so much, we could live in this universe forever. Movies, podcasts, anything at all…
Chris Nelson: Spinoff Series! We’ve got in a lot of our favourite comedians and people from Vancouver. They came in and it just blew us away with some really amazing character work and we would think “Could THIS guy be a spinoff character?”, “Could this duo be a whole spinoff show?”, “Do we have the fairy cops next and could it be a whole other series?” Whatever we can do, we would love to play in this world more.
Aside from playing around in that world, Chris also felt there should be more series talking about these happenings in the real world. It just so happened by coincidence that there was a UFO sighting the other day before I conducted this interview, and talk about UFOs in the news. Personally, I agree people should look further into these myths and the greater mysteries of the universe. Maybe they will be proven by some of the most thorough investigators. Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out how I find lil’ Phoenix to be so tolerable compared to other kids.
HNMAG: You made the series during COVID, did you have to learn a lot of things while doing so or was it relatively easy?
Bart Batchelor: It was a strange one, the writing was a lot more focused because of it. I will say though when you’re making a comedy hands down everytime being in the room with people and hearing the laughter and feeling the humour is always beneficial. For the first bit, when we couldn’t do that was a bit of a struggle. But it definitely repeated it for a bit.
HNMAG: But you still managed to get through it just fine?
Bart Batchelor: In the end, it’s our favourite thing we’ve ever made, so sometimes a bit of restraint on you makes you a bit more creative and find new ways. We found a couple things that are extremely better on Zoom. One of them is detailed editing because you can draw on the screen and your editor can see it. (laughs) You can be like “Move this clip here, cut this one out!” and it goes a lot faster.
Chris Nelson: What we’re saying is you can really micromanage people over Zoom. I’m sure it was annoying many times but we got to where we needed to get. It was really quick and handy for that. When we scale up what used to be a 4-person team max in our little office to the height of maybe 50 people working it, at any given time, obviously we all had to learn Zoom very quickly but it became a tool that’s indispensable now. I can’t imagine business without Zoom anymore. Even if everyone went back to the office.
HNMAG: And how does it feel to be the first Canadian animated series on Adult Swim?
Bart Batchelor: It feels amazing, we’re extremely grateful for this awesome opportunity and we’re hoping to take advantage the best we can.
Chris Nelson: We’ve always loved the Adult Swim branch, it’s a true inspiration for us since we first started out. Back when we were in art school, we liked stuff like Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. It’s kind of always been a lifelong dream to join the party and now we have. With the added bookmark of being the first original Canadian Adult Swim production is very cool.
HNMAG: Do you think you could pull it off if it were a live-action series instead?
Bart Batchelor: That’s a fun question.
Chris Nelson: You know what’s funny, I was literally thinking of that the other night, because that’s a dream we’ve always had. We do some live action stuff and one thing was this show called Night Spuds where we really got as cartoony as we possibly could. It would cost us a lot more money, and it would be pretty intense. But it would be possible and awesome.
Bart Batchelor: Interesting though, I really like that question. Partially because the animation of the show is really naturalistic, it’s based on humans, human proportions, it’s not big eyes or big heads type of stuff. Everyone looks quite real and we pull a ton of inspiration for that show. I’d say almost all the inspiration is pulled from live-action so an episode about a haunted house, we’re pulling from the best Haunted House movies ever. It’s not live action in any way, but very inspired by it.
A huge part of the tool kit they use in their day-to-day work on production is experimental editing and you can see that coming through in PSI Cops when you watch it. They like to make things super shocking as much as they can, and there’s always an interesting to make both live editing and animation look cartoony. It’s amazing.
HNMAG: Are there any other projects you have in mind for the future?
Bart Batchelor: We have MANY that we are writing right now. We have a feature in the works, fingers crossed that it goes over well. We’re in an interesting spot right now because PSI Cops is really the highlight of what we’ve been doing and want to do as many seasons as possible. We’re in a bit of a limbo as we wait for the show to get out to the American market and write itself. Whatever happens, we will find out if we get more seasons. We’re going to be building other projects, but we want to make more PSI Cops.
HNMAG: You must’ve had to study a lot of legends and myths for this series. What’s your favourite one by far?
Chris Nelson: There was a few that we weren’t able to get to, not just because we couldn’t wrap our heads around how to make it work in the Universe but because it’s such an absurd legend. There’s a giant moth-man. That’s all you need to know. He flies around and predicts horrible events. If you see Mothman, you go home and hide because something bad is going to happen. A weird one.
Bart Batchelor: What’s kind of interesting about that one is the show relies on the classic tropes of all these myths. We’re not reinventing them, we want the audience in real easy. Like haunted house, you get that in 1 second, crop circles, you get it real quick. Because they’re 11-minute episodes, we don’t have a lot of time to explain the mythology of something. Some of our favourites like Mothman need too much explanation to really just leap into the fun and comedy of. I’m sure the more obscure ones are what we get excited about.
HNMAG: Would you ever hope to come across any of them in the future?
Chris Nelson: I’d love to meet a vampire. I mean, a traditional vampire. There’s all sorts now, really scary types.
Bart Batchelor: I feel like I would have an existential crisis the moment I met something supernatural. Everything would unravel, I wouldn’t care about existence anymore. It might be too much for me.
They made some very valid points, and now you can experience their phenomenon too. Saturdays at Midnight (ET) on Adult Swim, or if you’re not a night owl, watch live and on demand with STACKTV.