Not long after Clash of Clans launched, Rob LaZebnik’s then 12-year-old son introduced him to the mobile strategy game. LaZebnik, a writer and producer on The Simpsons since 1999, was hooked almost instantly. Like the flu, the game spread amongst the show’s writers, and like the flu, it crated work responsibilities. The staff formed a Simpsons clan in the game, and regularly sent each other messages during the workday to initiate battles. It almost became an obsession — one that may have impacted their day job. “I’d say any bad joke that’s been on The Simpsons for the last four or five years,” says writer Joel Cohen, “you can attribute to Clash.”
Eventually LaZebnik, Cohen, and fellow longtime Simpsons writer John Frink took on a new side project to turn their obsession into something more productive. Inspired by the game’s cartoonish fantasy world, the trio set to work doing what they do best. They devised characters based on Clash units like the barbarian and archer, and created new situations to put them in. The writers pitched the idea to Supercell, the Finnish studio behind the game, and the result is Clash-a-Rama, an ongoing series on YouTube that turns the world of Clash of Clans and its follow up Clash Royale into an animated show.
New episodes of Clash-a-Rama are being released weekly, with the fourth — a holiday-themed show called “12 Days of Clashmas” — launching today. Each clocks in at around ten minutes and touches on a variety of stories from the Clash universe. It’s a look at familiar characters on their off time, when they aren’t building defensive walls or raiding villages. The show was inspired in part by Portlandia, a sketch show that crams in lots of different topical bits, often about the mundanity of day-to-day life, and stars a number of recurring characters. In Clash-a-Rama, for example, overly-competitive archers have petty squabbles while a villager spends time trying to teach goblins that there’s more to life than stealing gold.
While its characters are fairly well-known, thanks to the game’s massive popularity (Supercell’s lineup of games are played by an estimated 100 million people each day) and plentiful TV commercials that air during high profile sports events, Clash of Clans doesn’t actually have much of a story. That is, the writers claim, part of what made creating a series like Clash-a-Rama so appealing. “There’s not a ton of backstory to the game and characters, so it was great for us to say ‘This is our take on their universe,’ and be able to define who some of these characters are,” explains LaZebnik. “On one hand, you do have character rules about how they fight, how they interact with other troops. But beyond that, we were able to sort of really attack it ourselves creatively.”