Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone couldn’t stop adding jokes to Knuckles’ dream musical

polygon.com:

The nonsense was all there on the page — Adam Pally in an echidna costume, Julian Barratt rocking out in an owl headdress, an enormous puppet hell demon, a black-box-theater-worthy interpretation of a Sonic stage — but when director Jorma Taccone began orchestrating the hallucinatory musical tucked inside Knuckles’ fourth episode, his impulse was to pile on even more.

“Toby [Ascher, the showrunner], right from the jump was like, Look, I was raised on Adult Swim, I want to make this weird and push boundaries and make this as interesting and different and unexpected as possible,” Taccone tells Polygon. “And obviously, that’s up my alley.”

The episode, “The Flames of Disaster,” is not just up Taccone’s alley — he built the dang alley. After breaking out with Digital Shorts on Saturday Night Live, the Lonely Island member applied his go-hard-or-go-home comedy stylings to feature work like MacGruber and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. While, on paper, a spinoff of the Sonic the Hedgehog movies may not have immediately called for his established skill set, his longtime collaborator Brandon Trost, the director of photography on Popstar and Sonic the Hedgehog who pivoted to directing on Knuckles, convinced Taccone to step in for a one-off.

Thanks to a lo-fi approach to executing on the musical concept, Taccone could basically do whatever he wanted, and with the resources of a major motion picture crew; Knuckles employed most of the same crew from Sonic the Hedgehog 2, that would eventually go straight from the series into Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

“My goal for the episode was honestly to have this be something that you watch and are like, Whoa, what was that? — it’s so packed for 21, 22 minutes,” Taccone says, still sounding as giddy as he was on set. “When I showed it to my wife, her response was, ‘I don’t even know what to say about that.’”

“The Flames of Disaster” picks up the morning after a raucous Shabbat dinner, as bounty hunter Jack Sinclair (Barratt) kidnaps