Brendon Small Says Metallica Influenced Metalocalypse
Revered co-creator of Metalocalypse Brendon Small admits that Metallica, namely the Some Kind of Monster documentary, majorly inspired the show.
The movie, which came out in 2004, shows all the turmoil the band were famously going through right before they recorded St. Anger. Ironically, that controversial album probably caused even more backlash for the band, but love it or hate it, it has influenced a lot, including jokes and memes.
Smalls admitted on an episode of Nu Pod that the documentary was a major influence on the show and fictional band Dethklok:
“Preparing to make a show like Metalocalypse, I tried to do as much research as I could; I tried to find every rock ‘n’ roll, heavy metal documentary about creativity and musicians. I think that’s one of the best ones. It came out around the time when we were developing it anyway, and heavy metal was seeing this kind of major resurgence, or at least I was seeing it from where I was sitting. And that movie showed something that was really important.”
“And you get to see how this record—love it or hate it—was made and what the trajectory was and the crazy maze of logic that got us to this place. And you got to see Metallica go through all that stuff and have to audition a new way of communicating with their own band. Or they were all gonna lose each other, because Jason Newsted walked out, and they were a little confining and, I’d say, jealous of any other projects. But they came back, and they’re still together, and they found Robert Trujillo, and Robert Trujillo is a monster. And Jason Newsted gave so much to Metallica as well. But it’s brutally honest, and I think that takes guts—just crazy guts.”
“Metallica is such a monumental band to me because they were inventing their own genre as they went,” Small continues. “And when I think about the ultimate Metallica, like Master Of Puppets and …And Justice For All because that’s the age that I was when I was discovering heavy metal and …And Justice had just come out. And so, I could not believe this through-composed, non-repeating kind of maze of riffs that were just all one compelling idea or ideology of one riff to an iteration of another, to another, to another, to another. And that, to me, is some of the coolest and such creative and melodic and brutal and tumultuous thrash, epic metal all in one place. And then the Black Album comes out. And the Black Album is, like, ‘Okay, let’s bring this to everybody‘. So Metallica, without a doubt, is a huge influence to the sheer notion of Dethklok and Metalocalypse.”
Check out the new Metalocalypse movie to see if the band stay together like Metallica or meet a more sinister fate.
