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DC’s Legends of Tomorrow was an oddity in the crowded field of mid-2010s superhero TV. Spinning out of the mega-hits Arrow and The Flash on The CW, the series was seemingly envisioned as a dark, high-stakes superhero epic. The network unapologetically nodded to the huge box office success of Marvel’s The Avengers, suggesting that the burgeoning “Arrowverse” could use a team of its own.

After struggling through its first season, the series never lived up to the lofty ambitions of overtaking The Flash as The CW’s top show. It also never became The Avengers, opting instead to take on the “lovable losers” vibe familiar to fans of Guardians of the Galaxy.

(In fact, Guardians director James Gunn eventually chimed in on the series…we’ll get to it.)

Here’s a (very abbreviated) look at some of the insights from cast and crew of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow and the spinoff animated special Beebo Saves Christmas, from my upcoming book Time To Be Heroes: A Totally Unofficial Oral History of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.

Kevin Mock: I remember Grainne [Godfree] and James, who were the writers on “Beebo, the God of War,” came to me when I was still in L.A., and they said, “Hey, this is the episode we’re thinking of doing,” and they wanted to talk about the practicals of how much could we make a doll, if we built a doll, how much could it do, as they were writing it.

I just immediately fell in love with the idea and was like “Well, this is insane, the idea that these Vikings are going to be worshipping this stuffed animal.” So I was sort of on board from the beginning, but I have to say that when I went up to direct the episode in Vancouver and we were staging the scenes, the cast was not in love. I think they were all afraid that we had jumped the shark.

So they were game, and they were playing along – and I had done a couple of episodes with them, so thankfully I had a little of their trust. But I think, especially when we were in the viking longhouse and the Beebo doll has to say that they should burn Rory, everybody was calling their agents in between takes. It felt like, “We’ve got to book a new job, because this one is going to be cancelled.”

Brandon Routh: I think the first time I was really Beebo on set was — we were shooting a night scene, where we come up to the big campfire in the Viking village, and Heatwave gets thrown into the fire pit. Nora [Darkh] comes out with [Damien] and [Nate Heywood and Mick Rory] are stealing Beebo.

We were all going, “Well, I don’t know. This could work, might not.”

But I think, I think because of episode three, “Phone Home” –- one of my favorite episodes, but I’m partial -– we were already starting to push the envelope. [In “Phone Home”], the Baby Dominator stuff that we added on the day. When we were doing that scene where we’re rescuing the baby Dominator from the agents, Glasses comes in with two other agents, and Zari and Ray in the ATOM suit and little Ray. They’re about to take him and then the song starts.

I was like, “Hey, Jack [Fisher, who plays young Ray], let’s do this fun. What if you think about this thing?” So they start doing the music, and we start bobbing our heads together, because we’re the same person. And then they animated the Dominator doing it. And then I added little silly dancing out at the end, and Ray just really going into that love of Broadway, and that’s one of my favorite scenes, because there’s so much life in it.

Anyway, I think we kind of pushed that a little bit. Beebo seemed like a bigger leap, but I think what grounded that episode is how strong the beginning of it is. It opens great. It validates it so well with Young Stein in the toy store. It’s a great opening, and I think that that helps sell Beebo.

Kevin Mock: Credit to all the cast. They were all very afraid, and they would come up to me and express their concerns in different forms and in different ways. We had a puppeteer who was controlling the Beebo doll, and she would do a voice for Beebo, and it was hilarious. And Nick Zano came up to me and was like, “Can she just stop doing the voice in the scenes? Because I can’t keep a straight face.

I put that episode together, and I don’t know. It just felt so fun. I’m a  huge fan of Time Bandits, it’s one of my favorite movies, and I remember going into production on that, and I always ask the writers, tonally what do you think this is? And I remember James said, “I think this episode is like Time Bandits.” And I was like “Okay, good, I can understand that.”

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Following “Beebo the God of War,” the character appeared again in the season three finale, “The Good, the Bad, and the Cuddly.” In that episode, Beebo appears as a giant, psychic projection created by the Legends and the power of a number of supernatural totems. Essentially, this is their version of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man (although in-show, they reference Voltron instead).

A giant Beebo takes the fight to Mallus (John Noble), the season’s big bad, and the resulting scene is bizarre, exciting, and hilarious in equal measure. That’s where Gunn — now the DC Studios co-CEO — first chimed in on Legends:

Kevin Mock: The other main mission on “Beebo the God of War” was that the writers, we knew we were coming off of the crossover that season, and that Stein will have just died.

And we sort of felt like, the crossover kind of hijacks your show. I think our crossover episode in that season ends with the wedding, right? So, it’s not ours. Our show essentially becomes hijacked, it becomes someone else’s show, and I think Phil and Marc and the writers, they really wanted to reclaim our show and reestablish our tone, and they didn’t want it to be miserable and sad. That was the mission I was given. They were like, “This is why we’re doing this episode, and this is why it’s so off the rails.”

  And part of the reason also why the cast was having such a hard time tonally with that episode when we were shooting it, was we were shooting it at the same time they were shooting the crossover, because the crossover schedule really spreads out. So the cast would have been coming from doing a scene where Stein dies, and maybe sometimes the same day, they then have to drive across Vancouver, show up on the set, and I’m like, “Okay, here’s this stuffed animal that’s telling you that we’re going to murder him.” That’s why it felt so wrong, but in fact it was so right.

A similar thing happened with “Hey, World!” and “Meet the Legends.” “Meet the Legends,” we also knew was going to be coming after the crossover, so it was the same thing, which is, we need to reset our tone, re-establish our identity in a way, and that’s why they chose do to the documentary/reality-style episode.

I had come from the world of reality television. I had been a director and producer on America’s Next Top Model. So the writers wrote it knowing that I was going to direct that episode. They were sort of having some fun with that, and I understood that mission because I was like “Oh, I’ve done this before, where we’re trying to sort of not lose our identity to the crossover.”

But the hard thing was, we shot it well before there was even a script for the crossover. They had an outline, we had a rough idea of maybe what the crossover was going to be like, but we’re doing scenes where our characters are coming back from the crossover, and Dom and Caity and Brandon are like, “Well, what happened?” And we’re like “This is what we sort of thing is going to happen…!” Fortunately, they were game to play, even though they were not 100% aware of what had happened before that.

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Of course, it wasn’t just the show that changed after “Beebo, the God of War.” The series’ place in pop culture started to shift, too, leaving behind its ambitions of being “The Avengers of the Arrowverse” and instead embracing its cult-classic status.

Mark Pedowitz, who was running The CW at the time, was a big fan of Legends, and an even bigger fan of Beebo himself. And, since Beebo had first been introduced in a Christmas episode, the logical question became…”what would a Beebo Christmas special look like?”

Beebo Saves Christmas was designed as an in-universe special. In spite of Victor Garber serving as narrator, there were no cameos by Arrowverse superheroes or anything like that — it’s entirely the story of Beebo (Ben Diskin) and his friends from the Land of Bo, who have to help Santa (Ernie Hudson) rescue Christmas from an efficiency-obsessed elf.

Written by comics and animation veteran Kevin Shinick, the special was directed by Jojo Ramos-Patrick. It debuted on on December 1, 2021, and has been replayed a number of times since. Since it is owned by The CW, it has actually aired in the time since Legends went off the air, making it the final Legends “episode” to air on broadcast TV while the rest of the series was trapped on streaming.

Ben Diskin: I honestly was surprised that they even brought the character back for any additional episodes and crossovers and stuff. I was just like “Really? Wait, do people like this thing?” And then I was told “Oh yeah, at Comic-Con we had a bunch of gift bags, and they have Beebo all over them, and people like it.” I’m like “Really? But it’s a gag character. Seriously?” But just the fact that I got to keep playing is a complete and total mystery to me, and I’m just very happy that the tradition lives on with a special.

Kevin Shinick: I’m a big DC fan. I just came off of writing The Flash last year, and I go back and forth if I can between Marvel and DC. So I know the background of [the Arrowverse] shows.

The only real research that I had seen — I don’t think I saw all of them, but I had seen the original Beebo episode of Legends, and then they sent me, because another two episodes he’s in. It really became a question of, what are we doing here? We don’t want to include the Legends characters necessarily in this, because at first it was like, “Do we connect it to Legends so that people know where he’s from?”

But instead, we went the route of being like, “This is a special that would air in the world of DC in the Arrowverse,” so the characters in Legends of Tomorrow on Christmas, could probably be watching this special in their homes, which is why in that universe, a Beebo doll was created for him to then be bought, and then zapped through time, and back to the Vikings.

Jojo Ramos-Patrick: I got a call [in 2020], around the summer. I got a call from my line producer — just kind of, “there’s this show, would you want to work on it?”, and I was game.

Also in that same phone call, my line producer was, thinking back on it, there was just a lot to describe. I heard DC, and thought comic books, and then heard CW and thought live action TV show, and I realized I had a lot of catching up to do. I had to watch the show, and I delved into the fan-made Wikipedia’s about Beebo. There was so much to catch for me to catch up on. I started with no knowledge whatsoever and just immediately had all this homework to do.

I took a crack at preliminary design. When I was gradually learning about Beebo, he felt like in the world of Legends of Tomorrow, that there existed a toyetic kid show that they were making toys of. I really borrowed from my childhood, where I was watching tons of cartoons that were toyetic and Ninja Turtles or My Little Pony or Care Bears. I pumped in a little bit of that cutesy, brightly colored, Saturday morning cartoon-ness into it. As well as taking a page, because we were very limited in our time and resources, taking a page out of the Mister Magoo’s Christmas Special that UPA did. Keeping it really– especially in one of the songs — you really lean into it, where it’s really design-y, but at the same time, keeping it fun and cute.

Kevin Shinick: Ben Diskin, who’s a great voice actor, voices Beebo. I had worked with him in the Spider-Man animated series that I created. But what I loved about this was being able to call Ben and say, “Hey, remember that character that you were hired to literally utter five syllables — I lo lo love you? — Well, now we need you to carry an entire musical Christmas special.” And you know, God love him. He delivered.

I knew he would be able to do it, but there were some talks in the beginning where Ben was like, “Good God, can I even sing that well?” And I was like, I think you can Ben. He really pulled it off. He really nailed this special so well, he’s the heart and soul of it.

I just love that it came out of… you never know when one issue, or one role, no matter how small, is going to come back and be a huge thing. He’s hired to do this Beebo character that, in that first episode, it had about five syllables to speak. And here he is headlining his own Christmas special!

So, we knew it would be Ben, but then it was just a question of, who else? And so we wrote it up. This is a super tight schedule, especially for animation. We started this about this time last year, which is not a heck of a lot of time. So I think the first draft of the script was due — wait, the deadline says is due on Thanksgiving.

So we had to adjust it a little bit, but this was full steam ahead from the minute we got it. We had an idea, we had an outline. That was enough to say we knew what these characters were going to be. I remember we even had to create lines of dialogue for the auditions, because we hadn’t completed the script yet, but we knew where we were going. We knew from the outline what was happening.

We did that, and I met for all the roles, and what I’m really proud of too is the fact that so many great, talented people came and auditioned for us. Every actor who got the role, it was clear as soon as they opened their mouth — “Oh, this is that, this person is Sprinkles. This person is definitely Fleabo, this person…” It wasn’t like, oh gosh, I’m torn. It was very clear from the moment we got the auditions when we heard, oh, this is totally going to be that person.

And again, super lucky. We got Ernie Hudson as Santa. We got Chris Kattan as Sprinkles. We got Yvette Nicole Brown, Keith Ferguson, Kimiko Glenn, we got so many great people. So I’m very happy with that.

Ben Diskin: This special that we’re watching here in our world is something that would exist within the Arrowverse as a special. I feel like we could watch this through our TVs, with the camera pointed straight at a TV set inside of a shop playing it within that universe. It feels like there’s like multiple iterations of reality between this actual show and we, the viewers, watching it.

It feels like a straight-up TV special made based on a toy, not like “Hey, we made this specifically for Arrowverse fans, and if you don’t watch all of these shows, you won’t understand what’s happening”. No, it’s just a Christmas special.

Jojo Ramos-Patrick: The biggest challenge was just making sure that the Legends of Tomorrow crew was happy. I think I was maybe Beebo is super cute and I think of the people in charge that knew me, “Oh, Jojo can do cute. Let’s ask her if she’ll be interested.” I said, “all right, I’m going to do cute. I hope they’re okay with that.”

It was just a matter of just, “well, how about this?”, and I’d email it off, and then I’d get notes back, and then, “okay, I’ll try another crack at it. How about this?” I didn’t really get a lot of push back — in fact, my biggest note that I kept getting was, “make it more cute, make it more brightly colored, make it more Christmassy”, and I said, “all right, I’m down with that. Let’s do it.”

Tala Ashe: Beebo, man. Beebo is the biggest star of our show. Beebo has staying power, as it turns out. Hilariously.

Time To Be Heroes: A Totally Unofficial Oral History of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, is coming in March.