The Road to ‘Kite Man: Hell Yeah!’ Was Paved by a Defunct DC Streamer
When “Harley Quinn” debuted in 2019, it did so in a vastly different landscape for DC and for Warner Bros. The show was part of the then-new DC Universe streaming platform that also gave us “Titans” and “Doom Patrol.” But that streaming platform is now defunct; every other show that debuted on the platform has ended; and Warner Bros. merged with Discovery. But “Harley Qwuinn” continues on, even spawning the animated spinoff “Kite Man: Hell Yeah!”
“We were on a streaming service that barely had any subscribers, and somehow we kept surviving these giant media bombs being dropped all around us,” “Harley Quinn” and “Kite Man” co-creator Justin Halpern told IndieWire. “Part of that is that we got a fan base that stuck with the show wherever it went, but also every regime that came in liked the show and let us keep doing it, which was definitely shocking.”
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For Halpern and co-creator Patrick Schumacker, the fact that DC Universe was a brand new, very niche streamer came as a benefit for their animated adult comedy following known villains of the DC comics. Schumacker explained that the streamer didn’t even have a broadcast standards and practices executive to flag things, which helped get many of the more violent, disturbing, and vulgar elements of “Harley Quinn” to the final episodes undisturbed. Even when the executives poked their heads in, they were “overwhelmingly positive,” which eventually led to “Kite Man: Hell Yeah!”
The show follows Kite Man (voiced by Matt Oberg), a powerless villain and Poison Ivy’s former fiancé, as he buys a bar called Noonan’s. While dealing with becoming a business owner, he also has to deal with his own issues with his rich banker father, his relationship with Golden Glider (Stephanie Hsu), and a franchise restaurant and bar that opens across the street and threatens to take away his customers — and also the occasional unannounced visit from Darkseid, the ruler of Apokolips.
It was after “Harley Quinn” moved from the defunct DC Universe to HBO Max (now just Max) that Halpern and Schumacker were asked to pitch another story set in their animated superhero universe. “We pitched several different ideas,” Halpern said. “But it was pretty unanimous from the streamer’s perspective that they all wanted Kite Man.” For the co-creator, who also wrote the pilot episode with Schumacker and showrunner Dean Lorey, it is ironic that Kite Man has taken on a life of his own, considering he was initially meant as a one-off joke character. “He’s just this representative of the toxic male D-list supervillain who can garner a following just because they happen to be male,” Schumacker explained. “He then became such a fan-favorite in the writers’ room that we kept bringing him back and now he has his own show.”
If “Harley Quinn” was born out of a desire to do “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” but with a psycho killer supervillain, then “Kite Man” was born out of conversations between Halpern, Schumacker, and Lorey about sitcoms. “We wanted it to feel like it is, in its bones, a sitcom,” Halpern said. “We started talking about our love of ‘Cheers’ and remembered that there is a bar in the DC Universe called Noonan’s, a place where all these losers hang out.” The pitch essentially wrote itself, and it seemed like a no-brainer to center the spin-off show, then called “Noonan’s,” around Kite Man acquiring this crappy dive bar that supervillains frequent.
But it’s not A-list supervillains like Lex Luthor, Sinestro, or Two-Face who show up. The only widely known character to frequent the bar is Bane — who is mostly the butt of the joke in the “Kite Man: Hell Yeah!” universe — while the rest of the patrons comprise characters like the disembodied head of Queen of Fables and Sixpack (an actual character from the comics). They don’t talk about their latest triumphs but instead, come to drown their sorrows and be miserable together. “We wanted to center the show around these characters that everyone else has kind of given up on, but they have each other,” explained Schumacker.
A big part of their goal with “Kite Man: Hell Yeah!” was to showcase the mundanity underneath the big world-ending superheroics. The duo, together with Dean Lorey, worked on the short-lived live-action sitcom “Powerless,” about an R&D team at Wayne Security who worked on products to help normal humans avoid becoming collateral damage whenever heroes and villains battled in the middle of the city. It doesn’t matter whether we see Batman beat the crap out of Joker; what matters is where Joker goes to get his coffee. “In our pitch [for ‘Kite Man’], we talked about making a show where henchmen talk to each other about their bad takes on the ‘Jurassic Park’ films while waiting around for their boss,” Halpern said.
Much like the flagship “Harley Quinn,” “Kite Man” also includes plenty of gory fight scenes, and we do see some heavy hitters show up, like Darkseid. What makes a difference is the tongue-in-cheek humor that permeates every aspect of the animated show. Even when Darkseid shows up, his menacing aura is countered by the fact that he has a literal choir following him around all day. “That’s the bane of his existence,” Schumacker jokes. “We wanted to de-deify these characters a bit, to lower their god status to find the comedy, to focus on the humdrum in-between the world-ending action.”
Though they developed the show and wrote the pilot with Lorey, Halpern and Schumacker left “Kite Man: Hell Yeah!” in the former’s hands. “We always feel like you got to let them put their creative stamp on it. We’ve got to let them cook,” Schumacker said. The duo sat down with Lorey during development and pre-production to discuss ideas and the tone of the season at large, and Halpern and Schumacker continued to be privy to all ideas and story beats — though they missed a good chuck of production on the later episodes of the season due to the strikes. “It was when I saw the finished episodes that I realized they had added some stuff to them and I was pleasantly surprised with what they put in,” Halpern said. “We’re in good hands, and the audience is in good hands.”
Though “Kite Man: Hell Yeah!” is separate from “Harley Quinn,” Schumacker teases one big connection in the season finale that hints at what’s to come in “Harley Quinn” Season 5. “We want to remind people that these do take place in kind of the same universe,” the co-creator teased. “People will know it when they see it. They’ll recognize a — let’s just call it a vehicle, a literal vehicle that they will recognize as something that is very noticeable and memorable and an important part of the DC universe. That is a hint of things to come in Harley.”
The first two episodes of “Kite Man: Hell Yeah” are now streaming on Max. New episodes premiere every Thursday.
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