Yoppaman
In conversation with Juliyen Davis
Zack Fox, a musician and actor known for his slapstick personality, and Chibu Okere, an artist who has done work for Virgil Abloh and MTV, have a new animated project together: YOPPAMAN. Think of YOPPAMAN like Power Rangers, but swap out the superhero’s control center for Waffle House — it’s a big gumbo pot of 90s Cartoon Network nostalgia, southern folklore, and scenes from the real-life “anime” they both witnessed while growing up around Atlanta. Fox’s involvement makes this project part of a recent wave of work by Black creatives with come-ups in music who are now turning their focus toward worldbuilding in TV and film: think of Kid Cudi’s Entergalactic and recently announced project, Slime, made alongside long-time Okere-collaborator Jeron Braxton, or Donald Glover’s Atlanta, Guava Island, Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse, Swarm… To be honest, Glover’s is a long list, and even includes support for YOPPAMAN via his creative studio, GILGA. YOPPAMAN is just one of many signs that something big is bubbling up in the culture.
Zack Fox, a musician and actor known for his slapstick personality, and Chibu Okere, an artist who has done work for Virgil Abloh and MTV, have a new animated project together: YOPPAMAN. Think of YOPPAMAN like Power Rangers, but swap out the superhero’s control center for Waffle House — it’s a big gumbo pot of 90s Cartoon Network nostalgia, southern folklore, and scenes from the real-life “anime” they both witnessed while growing up around Atlanta. Fox’s involvement makes this project part of a recent wave of work by Black creatives with come-ups in music who are now turning their focus toward worldbuilding in TV and film: think of Kid Cudi’s Entergalactic and recently announced project, Slime, made alongside long-time Okere-collaborator Jeron Braxton, or Donald Glover’s Atlanta, Guava Island, Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse, Swarm… To be honest, Glover’s is a long list, and even includes support for YOPPAMAN via his creative studio, GILGA. YOPPAMAN is just one of many signs that something big is bubbling up in the culture.
You guys are both from Atlanta, right?
I say I’m from Atlanta, but I’m really from Macon, Georgia. There’s no record of me going to school in Atlanta, but I would go every weekend./n
What was Atlanta culture like when you guys were growing up?
I got to Atlanta right at the turn of the millennium when Freaknik and DJ Smurf and all that shit was still imprinted on the culture. But there was a shift happening — crunk was starting to take hold. If you gave me money, I wouldn’t pick another place to be an adolescent though. That was the best place in time.
How did you guys connect?
I’ve known Chibu for five years now. He had a digital billboard on Peachtree in Atlanta in 2019. I saw the artwork and that’s how we got connected.
And is Yoppaman the first thing you’ve collaborated on?
The year Zack saw the billboard, we started working on another project that was supposed to be a show with our homie, Jak Knight. How long did we work on that for?
I want to say two years. But when Jak passed, the third component was missing. It was like the Blue Man Group wasn’t the Blue Man Group anymore, and we had to pick a new color.
What are the inspirations for Yoppaman? I was reading something somewhere about how it was inspired by Waffle House, which is crazy because at one point Waffle House was supposed to be added as a level in the new Tekken game.
We were seeing all that and hoping that our short would be released so the Tekken creator would see it and be like, “Oh, niggadry, I get it now.”
Boondocks, Afro Samurai, and Black Dynamite are the big series that we looked at. But it’s been almost a decade since Boondocks and we have a new zeitgeist to speak to. So what can we add to that? How do we push the conversation on Black anime or anime-inspired animation forward?
I look at Black dudes my age who were into anime as kids and you can tell that the way they think about right and wrong was heavily influenced by the way Goku acted or the way Naruto thought about life.
I look at Black dudes my age who were into anime as kids and you can tell that the way they think about right and wrong was heavily influenced by the way Goku acted or the way Naruto thought about life.
Black Otaku niggas have never seen a show where they were reflected in the material, but an anime nigga is a real type of person. I look at Black dudes my age who were into anime as kids and you can tell that the way they think about right and wrong was heavily influenced by the way Goku acted or the way Naruto thought about life. It informs how you think about justice, how you think about life, how you think about the world, how you think about order and loyalty.
Boondocks, Afro Samurai, and Black Dynamite are based on the types of Blackness that you’d see at the time, but what does a Black world look like right now? When we made Yoppaman, it felt like the characters were people that you probably see in everyday life. Everybody probably knows a quiet nigga that has dreads covering his face.
It’s almost like you have to have an entire Black universe to see the different Black archetypes and to create something that different kinds of Black people can relate to. Seems like most of these shows are trying to fit too much into the one Black person that they’ve saved room for.
Exactly. And he has to be a super nigga.
Outside of the shows and stuff you grew up on that you already mentioned, what are some of the other things from your childhood that are baked into Yoppaman?
Cita’s World. And when I was a kid, I had to go to T.D. Jakes’s Manpower Convention.
You went to those? I used to listen to the radio ads for those.
My mom made me go when I was a kid. I had to put on a suit and hang out with a bunch of single fathers and shit. But I think the thing Chibu and I talk about the most is how Tim Robinson and certain white comedians have been given space to dig in and make fun of little nooks and crannies of whiteness that are so offbeat and otherworldly. But when you grow up in the South and you get a second to take a step back and look at that, you’re like, “Holy fuck, no, that was weird.”
In Macon, there’s a whole cult-like religious movement. I had homies that were a part of it — the Nuwaubian Nation.
A dude really said, “I’m about to create a pyramid in Macon and get niggas to be in a cult. I’m gonna tell them that I’m an alien emperor and that I’m here to save them.” That’s literally what happened. We grew up in an anime world — that’s what it felt like growing up around all of these larger-than-life Black characters in the South.
I can’t get the Hot Grits song that’s featured in the Yoppaman short out of my head. Who made that track?
That was Devin Morrison. It felt like some Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson type thing because Zack had talked about it very casually, saying, “I got a little idea in my head. I’m gonna hang out with Devin real quick.” But when I listened to it after, my eyes were glazed — it was so spot on. I feel like Zack and I wear multiple hats and we send each other on missions, so it’s always fun when we see the other person come back, always with way more than intended.
That’s how I know we have a hit, because Chibu and I won’t talk for a whole week and then he’ll be like, “I did all of this stuff we didn’t even discuss,” and it’s all perfect.
I saw Donald Glover’s name mentioned too — the group was already crazy, but that might make this the collaboration of the century. How did that come together?
Six Point Harness is the animation studio that we’re working with and they also did the animation for Guava Island. They said, “We work with Donald. Would y’all want to pitch to him?” And we were like, “Yeah, why did it take y’all this long? Nigga, we’ve been struggling. Hit them up right now. Get them on the phone.” At the time we didn’t have any animation yet. We just had the character designs, the world and its rules, ready to pitch to Donald. But he immediately understood it.
I feel like animation’s been dead for a while, at least compared to when I was growing up with Cartoon Network. But it also feels like the next Cartoon Network is being built right now. What is this moment? Does it feel special to you as well?
There’s a whole artistic renaissance happening, and it feels like we’re on the precipice of the same thing that was happening in the late 90s to early 2000s, when we had Codename: Kids Next Door, Dexter’s Lab, etcetera. At that time it felt like a cartoon renaissance because before then Hanna Barbera had a chokehold on everything and the styles weren’t as vast.
There’s a whole artistic renaissance happening, and it feels like we’re on the precipice of the same thing that was happening in the late 90s to early 2000s, when we had Codename: Kids Next Door, Dexter’s Lab, etcetera.
There’s a whole artistic renaissance happening, and it feels like we’re on the precipice of the same thing that was happening in the late 90s to early 2000s, when we had Codename: Kids Next Door, Dexter’s Lab, etcetera.
I think what’s cool about this moment too is that people aren’t waiting on the networks. People are saying, “Fuck it, I’m gonna do it myself if the networks don’t want it. I’m gonna put it on Instagram, YouTube, Patreon, whatever.”
I feel like that mentality has always been embedded in the Black American experience. Because if you’re Black and creative, at some point you’re going to run into a wall, and, when you do, you’re either going to bang your head against it until it starts to chip away or you’re going to go around it. Suppa Ray 14k in my opinion is the king of comedy right now, and he’s doing all of it with a headphone mic on social media.
I feel like his non-Black counterpart would have been in a writer’s room already — people would have been throwing writer positions at someone like that or putting him on stage.
Zack, between you and Kid Cudi and Donald Glover — you’ve all gone from music to film. Is that a natural evolution?
I always wanted to do everything I’m doing right now from when I was a kid and watching FLCL, Dead Leaves, Gurren Lagann — I was always looking at them thinking, “Damn, I want to make something like that.” And then, I went to art school and I was like, “This is how I’m going to do it.” And then I dropped out.
I don’t want to bring it back to a race or a class thing, but growing up on some destitute country shit, you have to learn to work with what you have available, and at every stage of my career I was just using what I had in front of me — doing the best that I could to show people even a part of my sensibility. Even back when I was Bootymath, I was doing that as a cartoon character. I’ve always wanted my humor to feel cartoonish and slap-stick and goofy, like Bugs Bunny. I’ve always centered my humor around animation, but I couldn’t go straight into making a cartoon because there are levels of power to overcome in order to do something like that. I had to prove that I can be a multihyphenate, just so white people would be like, “Oh, wow. He’s for real. He can read. He’s articulate.” Now I have a resume where people take me seriously, but me and Chibu have been serious the whole time. I don’t think any person should ever feel like, “I have to zone in on this one thing and if I don’t lock in, I’m going to die.” That’s not true. I might say fuck all this and start making sports bras for plus-size Black men. Why should I let anything stop me?
Hell nah.
That shit called Brah™. B-R-A-H. Hey, Rick Ross. Hit us.
AA:
what does the revolution will be televised mean to you
Chat GPT:
The phrase “the revolution will be televised” originated from a 1970 song by Gil Scott-Heron. It suggests that the struggles for change, especially political or social revolution, would be broadcast on television—though not in the way activists or revolutionaries might hope. Instead of being directly engaged in or informed by the grassroots movements, the media would likely sensationalize or commercialize the event. It captures a tension between the authenticity of grassroots struggle and the way it might be mediated or controlled by mainstream media.
To me, the phrase also speaks to the idea of spectacle in activism—how movements might be commodified or reduced to entertainment or soundbites when presented through media. It’s a reflection on how technology can both connect people and distort the realities of social change.
AA:
no, gil scott heron said the revolution will not be televised
Chat GPT:
You’re absolutely right—Gil Scott-Heron’s poem/song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” actually emphasizes that real, transformative social change won’t be captured or sanitized by the media. It warns against the idea that media coverage will authentically represent or convey the true nature of a revolution or movement. The revolution, in Scott-Heron’s view, will be a grassroots, lived experience, not a spectacle for consumption or commodification on TV.
The phrase “The revolution will be televised” is often used ironically, referencing the disconnect between the real struggles of revolution and the way they are typically portrayed by mass media, which can dilute or distort their meaning. So, when people say “the revolution will be televised,” they may be acknowledging that, while media will likely cover it, it will never truly capture the raw, genuine heart of a revolutionary movement.
It’s a critique of the media’s role in shaping narratives and a reminder that meaningful change happens beyond the reach of spectacle.
AA:
so what would the revolution WILL be televised mean to you
Chat GPT:
“The revolution WILL be televised” flips the original idea on its head. If we take it literally and in a contemporary sense, it could suggest that social movements or revolutions are now not only covered by media, but actually shaped and influenced by the media itself. In the age of social media, live streaming, and 24/7 news cycles, revolutions and activism are happening in real-time, and the narrative is often driven by the visibility they gain on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok.
In this sense, the revolution could be televised (or streamed, or shared) in a way that amplifies voices and causes, helping them to spread globally. However, there’s still the question of whether such media coverage is accurate or authentic. It might be more about spectacle or performative activism than genuine, transformative change.
So, to me, “The revolution WILL be televised” could mean that while media and technology can give revolutions unprecedented exposure, it also raises questions about the impact of that exposure. Is the revolution being commodified? Is it truly transformative, or is it just another trend being broadcast for consumption?