Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1542912
Order in the Court Having no boundaries means the risk of spiraling into complete chaos, and for this, the legal genre served a purpose. Crawford calls the law the show's "straight man," and one place they leaned on that concept was in the courtroom. "We wanted [it] to be very basic, bare bones," says Rice. "When we're in the courthouse, like when we're at the legal office, this is a very real place." The cases Lincoln Gumb brings before a judge are outlandish, like a male stripper forced to swallow key fobs as part of his act, and "if the courthouse is crazy, then nothing feels crazy," says Canobbio. Sure, there are ring girls, a big-screen TV for the jury to watch sports, and one judge who wears a Frankenstein mask, but the artists pared back the look of the courtroom so what was happening inside it could stand out. Essentially, the courtroom couldn't look like the Vegas Strip, and even when it came to the Strip, the team had to figure out how to tone it down. Describing Vegas as "completely dysfunctional," Canobbio says: "We knew it needed to be grounded." "We played with Vegas during the day being bland and sunbaked and low contrast, like you're hungover and crawling to Taco Bell," says Rice. "Then at night we had this high contrast, [with] glowing lights and lots of colors to really juxtapose the two moods." "I wanted to get the feel, basically, [that] at night anything is possible and during the day you remember what exactly is possible," says Crawford. "The more real and tactile the world seems, the harder it hits when something really wacky happens because it feels like it's happening to real people." Strip Law images courtesy of Netflix, Inc. SPRING 2026 29