Kevin Shinick Talks Scooby-Doo and KISS: Rock and Roll Mystery, Robot Chicken DC Comics Special 3 and More

Kevin Shinick is one of the busiest people in entertainment, with a dozen projects in the pipeline at any given time, including series that continue to take up time week after week and always at least a handful he has to dutifully kep under wraps.

This summer, he was the writer behind Warner Home Entertainment’s latest Scooby-Doo outing, which took Comic-Con by storm and brought the Mystery, Inc. crew together with, of all guest stars, KISS.

Shinick joined ComicBook.com at Comic-Con International: San Diego in July to talk about the then-new Scooby-Doo and KISS: Rock and Roll Mystery as well as to tease the forthcoming Robot Chicken DC Comics Special 3: Magical Friendship, coming to Cartoon Network in the fall.

Want to check out the Scooby-Doo and KISS: Rock and Roll Mystery movie? Retweet this story with the hashtag #ScoobyDooMeetsKISS or e-mail russburlingame@comicbook.com with “SHINICK” in the subject line, and you’ll automatically be entered to win a digital copy of the movie. Five runners up will get a Google Play/YouTube rental. You must be 18 to redeem.

You always have like six things going on. What can you talk about?

[Laughs] I do! Sadly, I have a lot of NDAs that I’ve had to sign, but I’m working on a lot of stuff. The thing that I’m so excited about is this Scooby-Doo and KISS: Rock and Roll Mystery movie that I wrote. So that’s what I’m really excited about.

My God, if I could go back and tell my 10-year-old self that I would be working with KISS…!

I joke because when i was like ten years old, I had and I still have, my mother has it, the Gene Simmons doll. And when I was a kid, I used to make him say things and I said to Gene, “It’s so funny that now, as an adult, I’m getting paid to make him say things with the real Gene in the V/O booth.”

So yeah, bringing those two iconic groups together was just a dream come true for me.

It’s such a weird pairing; they’re so disparate, the fan groups, that…

They are, and yet they share the same world so well, for some reason.

I set this at an amusement park, because its’ Scooby-Doo, and I think there’s certain tropes growing up, you know, it’s Old Man Johnson, the amusement park owner. And yet the one thing they did do many years ago, KISS and the Phantom of the Amusement Park, also took place there. So they share the same world really well.

With Scooby, that’s such a part of the property that when the live-action film happened, James Gunn I think wrote the establishing device as an amusement park, right?

Yeah, exactly. I like that. And I’ve got to say, the one thing that really made me happy was that afterwards, Gene took me aside and said that he was very happy with the script but that what he liked most about it was the fact that I kept the integrity of both groups.

And I try to do that, because I’m a fan of both. But you don’t want one to get lost in the shadow of the other and you don’t want to dumb one down or make something not who they are, you know? That happens a lot; it’s either a Scooby-Doo movie or a whatever movie, not the two of them together. And I feel like I really managed that.

It’s interesting to me that so many of the Scooby-Doo films are going that way They just did a WWE thing.

I know, but they’ve had a lot of success with that, too. And coming from MAD and all the mash-ups that we did for comedy purposes, when you get a mash-up that works as a movie as well, it’s like, “Alright, we’ve struck gold here.”

Taking about mash-ups, you work for Robot Chicken, which continues to make everyone fall in love with it. Did you get to see last year at Comic-Con that they had the Game of Thrones-themed costume contest across the street?

I remember it, but I didn’t get to go.

Well, you dressed like royalty and so of course there were joke entries. The guy who won the costume contest was the Robot Chicken with a crown on his head.

You’re kidding me! I didn’t know about that!

Anything new brewing on that front?

We’re doing our third DC Comics special, and these keep getting crazier and crazier and better and better in my mind.

Any more Booster Gold? You know I have to ask.

You know, sadly, I don’t think he’s in this one. I voiced him [before] and so when I cut him down, I’m like “Come on!”

But…

This one kind of involves everybody; it’s almost like a Crisis on Infinite Earths kind of thing, in a comical way of course. But the great thing about this was being able to incorporate a lot of the different versions of each kind of character because we do hit the multiple earths and stuff.

And cast-wise, we were able to get our normal guys back, Nathan Fillion and all these people, but we also got Adam West and Burt Ward to come in and do Batman and Robin, which was just great.

Don’t they have an animated movie coming up, too?

Now they do. It was so funny: I don’t think they were supposed to talk about it, but at that point they said they had another animated thing, which I think was hinting at Robot Chicken becuase we’d already had them in the booth. They’re both great, and again, for me, you get certain people to work on something, it’s a stamp of approval.

And they’ve also worked with Scooby-Doo!

Yes, that’s right! Some of my favorite Scooby-Doo episodes. They teamed up with everybody from Don Knotts to Sandy Duncan, but when Batman and Robin came on, I was like, “Yeah, this makes total sense!”

Are those the only two things you can talk about publicly?

Well, let’s see: I can tease that I’m working on something animated with one of the guys from KISS. We’re going to split off and do our own thing, and what’s not to like about working with any of those guys?

When I write these things, I write them as a fan. When I wrote Scooby-Doo and KISS, I didn’t hold back. I included as many classic songs as I could and at the end I was like, “Wow, I hope we can do these or I’m going to have to rework a lot of this,” and sure enough, they were so great. They were like “Use whatever you want.” There was an opportunity, a comical opportunity for another song to appear, and I was like, “Well, obviously we’ll get somebody else to do that,” but they said no, they’ll do that too.

It came out, in a good way, trippy and it harkens back to those early Scooby-Doos. It starts like a Scooby-Doo movie and then it starts to unwind even more. Then you introduce KISS and you introduce that world and it just gets crazy, which is what we were going for. You can put them in the most crazy scenario an it makes sense because they’re so over the top.

But yeah, I’ve got a couple of shows I’m developing with some major networks and stuff. I’m working with marvel on some stuff, talking to DC about some other stuff. Hopefully by this time next year we’ll have something big to announce.