Magnus, Mani and I worked seven days a week for months, and our days began early in the morning and ended past midnight. We brainstormed ideas from Iceland to Germany to Denmark, over to Beverly Hills and New York. We brainstormed in the office, on planes, in Magnus' house, in restaurants, hotels, in the gym. We came up with dozens of ideas for every one we agreed on - so there were lots of ideas floating around Reykjavik.
You never knew where an idea would come from. Sometimes real life would lead us to the best ideas. We were having a conversation about finally taking a vacation - and that led to an idea about Sportacus on holiday, as a gift from the kids in LazyTown. Eventually, that idea turned into LazyTown's New Superhero.
Rottenbeard began with an old idea Magnus had from years earlier, about the kids finding buried treasure. Rockin' Robbie started with a single line: "puppets with guitars."
Of course, many ideas started with Robbie Rotten's evil schemes, and it was always fun to come up with crazy costumes for Stefan to wear. There was a time when, for some reason, we had to kill a script at the last minute, but we needed something to shoot right away. So I stayed up all night and wrote Miss Roberta - we barely had enough time to make copies of the script pages, give them to the actors and start shooting on Monday morning. Thanks to Stefan's amazing acting skills, and a crew that really came through for us, the episode turned out well.
Sometimes we came up with scenes that we knew would get us into trouble. The Christmas episode had a night sky - usually all LazyTown scenes were daytime scenes - and so the production staff had to create a new computerized sky background. Fortunately, they were great and the night sky looked beautiful. But those issues were always on our minds when we were thinking of new
episode ideas.
Little Sportacus was another example -- we knew that finding a young actor to play young Sportacus would be a challenge, but once we had the idea,
we couldn't not make the episode, it was too good of an episode.
There were a few ideas that made it all the way to script stage but were never filmed. There was one about a bully, and I remember one about Bessie starting her own business. Maybe those will be filmed some day, who knows?
