Welcome to the pre-production blogs and website for The Cabonauts – thanks for coming!!! Before I go any further, a massive thank you to Gennefer Snowfield for designing the site and getting it up and running for me. Yay Genn!!!

It’s a work in progress, but that’s what we’re here to celebrate. With behind the scenes videos and peeks at the creation of the CGI and expert design work, the casting process, the recording of the songs, etc, we’ll cover it all. Well, everything the bloody lawyers will allow anyway!

So where are we at the moment?

Let’s start with the basics.

The deal with Daily Motion is now officially signed (pause for roars of excitement – oh, wait, that’s just me). Two very British signatures (their CEO is English and if you don’t know me, now you know I’m English, too) now sit on the paperwork, and so we’re off to the races. Although, to be honest, we set off on this journey almost a year ago, and that’s where this blog shall begin…

(Making wavy shapes to denote a flashback.)

The original script was written back in May 2008 back when I hadn’t thought of making it a musical yet. That came when I cast the very handsome, square-jawed Norm Thoeming as Harry. Norm performs weekly at I.O. here in Los Angeles, in an improvised musical. You yell out an idea at the beginning of the show – and I tried it myself, so I know it works – and the team launches into a wholly original, one-hour improvised musical! It’s absolutely hysterical and the entire team (that, comedy fact-fans, comprises Shulie Cowen who co-stars in both Goodnight Burbank and Abigail’s Teen Diary) works wonders.

I was sitting with Norm at Burbank’s own Bob’s Big Boy over a ‘getting to know you’ lunch (Shulie had introduced us), when I began wondering aloud how we could incorporate Norm’s singing into the show. Ironically, my first thought was just to have him sing original, improvised songs for fans as an interactive add-on – but it was so incongruous. I mean, okay, I could make his character a wannabe singer who’s become a cab driver because he can’t catch a break, but it still felt fairly shoe-horned in. Watch the show about two guys driving a spacecab then have one of the main characters sing you a song? Weird. Norm, bless him, was up for it but then, he’s up for anything, or so his wife tells me. So after a month or so of thinking about it, I had this other, rather crazy idea.

What if I made the show a musical?

Oooh.

You feel the excitement, too?

It took another few weeks whilst my head came to grips with the idea. A musical sci-fi comedy? A comedy sci-fi musical? A sci-fi comedy… you get the idea. It was like holding a square peg and a round hole and wondering what to do with them. But one morning, I woke up and it fit. Perfectly. The only problem now was writing music because I’d never done that before.