“He’s a meme factory!” David Reynolds, the screenwriter behind “The Emperor’s New Groove,” said about Kronk, the good-hearted himbo henchman in the now-beloved animated film, which turns 25 this month.
Voiced by the actor Patrick Warburton, the hunky Kronk has been key to the movie’s cult status among millennials. When it opened in 2000, the movie grossed $169 million worldwide, and since then, a new generation has discovered it on home video and online.
“The Emperor’s New Groove” started as a musical epic titled “Kingdom of the Sun,” inspired by the Inca Empire. But after a challenging production was overhauled, the film’s director, Mark Dindal, had only had 18 months (instead of the multiple years an animated feature entails) to reimagine it as a zany comedy.
It follows Kuzco (voiced by David Spade), a young emperor turned into a llama by his malevolent adviser and Kronk’s boss, Yzma, who was voiced by the larger-than-life diva Eartha Kitt.
“Kronk seemed to be a reticent henchman who enjoyed cooking. There’s not an evil bone in his body,” Warburton said in an interview. “I gave him that quirky, sweet, deeper, but not menacing voice.”
Reddit threads and YouTube videos dedicated to Kronk exemplify his enduring appeal (one titled “Kronk being an iconic legend for 5 mins straight” has 3.7 million views). And if you search for Kronk memes, the variety is as imposing as his size.
Not originally part of the cast, Kronk evolved from a sketch of a palace guard admiring his chiseled abs drawn by the storyboard artist Chris Williams.
From the moment Reynolds saw the hilarious drawing, his mind went to the character of Puddy, the himbo mechanic Warburton played on “Seinfeld.”
“When I was writing it all I could hear was Patrick Warburton’s voice,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds thought this comedy could benefit from having an evil genius like Yzma stuck with a sidekick who is not entirely on board with her villainous plans. “Kronk’s not evil, which is the worst thing if you’re trying to pull off a coup or a murder,” he said with a laugh.
First, the team had to convince Thomas Schumacher, who was president of Walt Disney Feature Animation. The tight timeline to complete the project made some higher ups hesitant to add more characters.
Picking up on an idea Dindal had, Reynolds wrote a dinner scene in which Kronk cares more about not burning his spinach puffs than about following Yzma’s plan. The next day he handed it to Dindal, who asked Williams to storyboard it. Within days they were in front of Schumacher and Peter Schneider, the head of Disney Studios at the time.
“Very quickly into the scene, Peter Schneider bursts out laughing, and he goes, ‘Oh my God, he is worried about the dinner,’” Reynolds said. Warburton then auditioned to bring him to life.
“They give you only a few pages because Disney is very secretive about their material, so all I have is four pages of a Kronk and an Yzma, at this point I don’t even know what a Kronk is. Perhaps he is a monster or an ogre,” said Warburton, who was new to voice acting.
Since the production of “The Emperor’s New Groove” operated without a formal script — the team devised sequences and animated them as they went along — Kronk served as a malleable comedic character that they could use to fill in any gaps.
“His sweetness contradicts who you think he would be if you saw somebody with that kind of build,” Dindal said.
When they needed the character Bucky the Squirrel to relay information about Kuzco’s whereabouts, they made Kronk a fluent squirrel speaker. And when ESPN (a division of Disney) needed to cross-promote a rope jumping championship, they added a scene with Kronk playing double Dutch. “As the story progresses, he’s more well-rounded and has more talents than anybody in the whole movie,” Reynolds said. “Everybody else is pretty one dimensional.”
In 2005, Kronk even got his own movie, but it was a direct-to-video release called “Kronk’s New Groove.” And while neither Dindal nor Reynolds were involved (Disney had a different division for video-only titles), it speaks to the beefcake’s lasting appeal.
“I am one of those voice-over actors who is not a chameleon,” Warburton said. “You can always tell when I voice a character.”
It has been a big year for Warburton, who continues to play a certain type of brawny male figure. He recently voiced the role of Mayor Brian Winddancer, a muscular horse and former action hero, in the recently released “Zootopia 2.” His other characters include the naïve police officer Joe Swanson on the long-running animated sitcom “Family Guy,” and he’s starring in and producing the indie sci-fi film “The Unearthly.”
Kronk, however, still holds a robust place in his career — and in his home.
“The producers of the film gave me a maquette of Kronk that animators used, and it came with papers that you had to sign saying you would never sell it,” Warburton said. “That’s a very special thing to have.”
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