Trivia / Murder Drones

• Actor-Shared Background: Word of Saint Paul reveals Tessa is an Aussie, just like her voice actress Daisy Rose.
• Blooper: An attentive viewer can spot Thad's hand clipping through an armrest while talking about Uzi's reputation.
• Breakthrough Hit: For Glitch Productions. While Meta Runner and Sunset Paradise had decent followings, most of their initial hype came from the connections to SMG4, with the former having its protagonist inserted into the show to drum up interest, and the latter being a direct spin-off staring one of its most popular characters. Murder Drones, their first fully original IP made with a third-party creator, on the other hand, became a runaway smash that solidified their place as a major player in the indie animation scene.
• Colbert Bump: Approximately one week since its release, the Murder Drones pilot became the most viewed video on Glitch's main YouTube channel and Glitch’s most viewed single episode ever, and not only exposed fans of Liam Vickers and Glitch to each other's works, but drew the attention of viewers unfamiliar with either. Most notably, the popularity of Murder Drones caused the subscriber count for the Glitch channel to jump from 500k to 600k in about a week.
• Copiously Credited Creator: Creator Liam Vickers takes the cake in the pilot, in which he is credited for art direction, writing, Concept Art, voice direction, storyboards, animatics, greybox art, composition, VFX, and the voice of at least two bit parts.
• Creator-Driven Successor: To Liam Vickers' other web series Internecion Cube. Among the many similarities are robots with text appearing on their face-plates, horrific reality-warping Mechanical Abominations made of Body Horror that can seemingly turn ordinary people into more of themselves, a snarky loner schoolgirl who is one of said abominations, adult humans appearing with obscured faces and glowing eyes, and an Apathetic Teacher voiced by Vickers. IC-0n in particular is somewhat reminiscent of V, and the Absolute Solver's "Tessa" form resembles the cheerful murderbot as well, only with added Body Horror.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Lord Frumpterbucket is voiced by Jasmine Yang, a trans woman.
• Descended Creator: Series creator Liam Vickers voices some minor characters: the teacher, Riley, and Trevor.
• Fake American: The British Elsie Lovelock gives Uzi Doorman an American accent.
• Fake Russian: The Russian-speaking character Doll is voiced by bilingual American actress Emma Breezy.
• Flip-Flop of God: The stance on whether the series will consist of a single season or multiple seasons tends to change back and forth. While the original promotional banner stated the show was in "Season 1" and Liam Vickers has mentioned the show being in it's "first season", promotions from GLITCH have called Episode 8 the "final episode".
• Lying Creator: Liam claimed that the robots will never wear pants. In episode 2... then 3...
• Playing Against Type: Bianca Alencar's two best known dubbing roles are a benevolent princess and a happy, upbeat twin sister. Lizzy is about as far away from those roles as you could get.
• Referenced by...: Disassembly Drones are a Running Gag in R.A.M. the Robot. Notably, N appears in one comic and beheads R.A.M. offscreen, though the latter survives.
• Schedule Slip: It was originally announced that the remaining six episodes of the show's first season would air throughout 2023. In November 2023, it was announced that the final two episodes have been delayed into Spring 2024. Following this, Episode 8 was further delayed, though to when is unclear.
• Shrug of God: In the teaser video promoting the first season, Liam refused to questions such as whether J was Killed Off for Real, with some being answered as the show went on.
• Sleeper Hit: Despite the lack of connections to the main SMG4 series that Meta Runner and Sunset Paradise had on their side, Murder Drones became a runaway smash. Within two weeks, the pilot garnered more views than Meta Runner’s pilot did in two years (Murder Drones's 4 million against Meta Runner's 3.1 million), and hitting twice as many views in one month (5 million) than Sunset Paradise’s pilot did in 8 months (2.5 million). By October 2023, the pilot has surpassed 25 million views, still the most viewed video on the GLITCH channel by a huge margin… at least until the pilot for The Amazing Digital Circus surpassed that number in 10 days.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Pilot episode established that the Disassembly Drones are made by JC Jenson sent to kill the Worker Drones and Uzi going on a revenge journey against humanity. With the reveal in episode 8 many things have changed, where it turns out that the Disassembly Drones aren't made by JC Jenson but by the Absolute Solver for still unknown purposes and Uzi putting her vendetta one-sided to fight against the Solver. The story could have gone with Uzi forming a resistance group of Worker Drones and rogue Disassembly Drones to destroy JC Jenson or outright all of humanity.
  • N was originally going to be the only Disassembly Drone with clothes because he stole them from dead humans. However, the team decided to give all of them clothes to help play up their humanlike qualities.
  • V was originally toy sized, but her scale was increased to a more humanlike size for obvious plot reasons.
  • The robots were originally going to lack mouths to make their animation easier. Additionally, the designs of the robots were different; the disassembly drones looked fairly similar to their current designs but had spindly limbs, what appeared to be a holographic halo over their heads and Combat Tentacles alongside their wings, the Worker Drones on the other hand, looked completely different as they were Tin Can Robots with screens for faces.
  • Liam Vickers and Kevin Lerdwichagul revealed during Episode 2's premiere screening in Los Angeles that J was originally written as a male, and that Khan would have been the season's Big Bad. They also explained that the season was planned to focus more on goofy humor with undertones of "weird, eldritch shenanigans" that would never be fully addressed, namely the true nature of the Murder Drones, before deciding it would be more interesting to explore those elements.
  • At Glitch X, Liam revealed multiple changes to the story:
    • Thad was originally going to have a larger role in the series when it was going to be more of a slice of life series before the eldritch horror storyline became the main focus.
    • The Murder Drones lust for oil due to basically being robotic vampires was originally going to be a bigger plot thread during this phase before the storyline was altered between the pilot and the rest of the series.
    • When series production was much smaller, the Anti-Drone Sentinels were originally going to be just orb-shaped robots instead of their final Velociraptor-esque appearance.
  • Episode 2 was originally supposed to be about a Zombie Apocalypse where the worker drones would get a computer virus but was changed to the eldritch horror due to Vickers finding the whole thing to be too close to mind control, something that he dislikes.
• Word of God:
  • Liam Vickers himself provided some information about the drones on the Reddit QNA and a few tweets on Glitch Productions's Twitter.
    • The way that Worker Drones "reproduce" is that they messed with the assembly line for them to implement their code into pill-shaped drones before moving them into a fully-grown body once their A.I. develops.
    • The Worker Drones acquired their clothes and hair from human corpses. Also qualified as Shrug of God, since Vickers says he'd "like to think that they did" until he confirmed it in this video.
    • If Vickers' words are anything to go by, the lore behind how the Disassembly Drones work is unpleasant. He was right.
    • Vickers also provided several Shrugs of God, like how everyone has a "suspiciously half-censored" photo in their room obscuring their missing family member (based on a Freeze-Frame Bonus of the inside of Uzi's personal closet in the Pilot, a photo showing Uzi as a baby being held by her parents that lacks the part with her mother, either due to burning or melting), and how there's definitely no significance in whoever killed Uzi's mom.
  • The name of Uzi's mother, Nori, was revealed by Liam during Episode 2's first screening in Los Angeles before showing up in Episode 3.

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