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Sherlock Holmes is right up there with Jesus as one of literature’s most frequently depicted figures. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories about the world’s most famous detective have been retold and reinterpreted for over a century, to the point that some people think Holmes and his associated characters were real people. Holmes, his sidekick Dr. John Watson, and crew have been everything from mice to Muppets, with Lisa Edelstein’s Dr. Lisa Cuddy on House standing as one of the best Mrs. Hudson roles to date.
Blocks, though, are still relatively new territory for the occupants of 221B Baker St.
Fogtown, a new TV and video game series from Hapstance Films, will screen its pilot episode at Tomorrow Theater on Thursday, Aug. 22. Its toy-scale world should charm the audience’s kids, whether they’re young or young at heart. They will also get to play A Rum Case in Fogtown, a “choose your own adventure” video game, by shouting out the choices their heroes should make. Fogtown co-creator Sean Parker says the audience’s loudest voices will win out, to avoid counting votes all night. Fogtown blends live puppetry with 3D animated backgrounds, a method Parker says is also used in Disney+’s The Mandalorian series.
Fogtown follows Sherblock (voiced by Chris Yamez) and his best friend, Blockson (Fogtown co-creator Austin Hillebrecht) through a cutesy toy-scale world. Yanez and Hillebrecht are joined in Fogtown’s pilot by the voices of Rizwan Manji (Schitt’s Creek, The Magicians) as animal-loving Inspector LeFraude, Tricia Brioux (children’s series Creative Galaxy and Massive Monster Mayhem) as Mrs. Hud, and Stephen Russell (a voice actor in the Fallout video game series) as the mysterious Moth Napper.
Parker and Hillebrecht were inspired to make their own Holmes series in the early 2010s, respectively influenced by Jeremy Brett’s and Benedict Cumberbatch’s turns as Sherlock. Fogtown was originally meant to be a live action series, but the pandemic inspired them to turn to puppetry.
“We’ve never looked back,” Parker says. “It’s like we found the form it was always meant to be.”
Instead of using stop motion animation, Fogtown’s live puppetry methods allowed Hapstance Films to prepare the pilot in a far shorter amount of time. Parker says Fogtown’s motion matches Jim Henson more closely than Wallace and Gromit, though the puppets’ 3D-printed parts like facial expression still have to be swapped out. The virtual backgrounds are rendered on scaled-down versions of the same LED screens used to film modern Star Wars productions, with their galactic sets rendered by video game engines.
“I hear it’s common for a unit to make three seconds of stop-mo in a day, but [on] our best days we’re getting several minutes per day,” Parker says. “Live puppetry lets us get to a volume of material more like a live action pace.”
The Fogtown video game series started as a perk for the show’s crowdfunding campaign, but Parker says gamers have expressed more enthusiasm for it than the TV series. Parker was inspired to make a story-driven video game after playing choose your own adventures on Discord servers during the pandemic. He says additional voice talent has signed on for A Rum Case in Fogtown, including actors from the ‘90s series Gabriel Knight and the 2019 game Disco Elysium. Parker says A Rum Case in Fogtown isn’t technologically far removed from the Netflix series Black Mirror’s choose your own adventure episode. In both cases, Parker hopes the upcoming Fogtown showcase attracts an investor who can help him and Hillebrecht realize the project’s full potential.
As with some interpretations, which have emphasized Sherlock’s substance abuse, or leaned into more overtly gay iterations of his relationship with Watson, Fogtown chooses to highlight a neurodiverse reading of the detective and his deductive reasoning skills.
“Sherlock Holmes is an extremely neurodivergent character, living in a world that doesn’t know how to define it, and that’s similar with Sherblock, but the element we wanted to lean into is that his brain is making so many connections, faster than he can process, and he tends to get easily distracted and thrown off track and makes connections that only a total genius could make, even if they’re completely off-base,” Parker says. “If he were in our world, he would probably get diagnosed with ADHD, but he lives in a world that doesn’t have the framework to support people like that, so he uses mystery-solving as a tool to keep his brain engaged. His brain is his superpower, but also the cause of a great number of his struggles.”
SEE IT: Fogtown Grand Showcase screens at Tomorrow Theater, 3530 SE Division St., 503-221-1156, tomorrowtheater.org. 6:30 pm Thursday, Aug. 22. $15.