Making Rayman a coke-snorting fascist mouthpiece in Captain Laserhawk was totally cool with Ubisoft

polygon.com:

After watching episode 3 of Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix and seeing a coked-up, half-naked Rayman — eating sushi off a fully nude cow-woman, by the way — scream at his television, I started to wonder how Ubisoft felt about this whole thing. Minutes earlier, Rayman had just called a superhero a “fucking red prick” on his nightly news show, and spent part of the episode swigging from a quart of whiskey in his tighty-whities.

According to show creator Adi Shankar, Ubisoft sounded just fine with this portrayal of its nearly 30-year-old mascot. Rayman as coke-snorting, cold-blooded killer who’s also the mouthpiece for a fascist dictatorship had been the plan from day one, Shankar said.

So too were Captain Laserhawk’s interpretation of the Rabbids, Ubisoft’s ostensibly cute rabbitlike mischief-makers that spun off from the Rayman series (and have recently co-headlined a couple of Mario games). In the Netflix animated series, Rabbids are presented as gruesome kaiju-sized monsters from a dangerous alternate dimension.

“It wasn’t like Netflix or Ubisoft came to me and said, ‘Hey, we want to do a shared universe, but have it be completely bizarro,’” Shankar said in an interview with Polygon. “I was already working with Ubisoft; they brought me on to work on a number of their franchises […] right after Castlevania.”

Shankar said that his pitch was reviewed by the Guillemot brothers behind Ubisoft, and that (at least) one of those men asked to meet with him in person. “‘We want to make this,’” Shankar recalled them saying, “‘and we’re going to clear the path so you can make this.’ I didn’t really believe it. But at the end of the day it was Ubisoft trusting this vision that I had seven-plus years ago.

“There was zero