Metallica's documentary Some Kind of Monster came out in 2004 and it's crazy to think that happened almost twenty years ago. The movie gave an incredibly honest, fly-on-the-wall insight look at Metallica as they picked up the pieces after Jason Newsted left the band and battled through addiction, fan backlash, personal turmoil, and near-disintegration, only to end up back together to record St. Anger. You would not think of the documentary as a particularly inspiring piece, yet it was.
Brendon Small, co-creator of Metalocalypse, recently appeared on the latest episode of Nu Pod and revealed how Some Kind Of Monster became an important part of the genesis Metalocalypse: "Preparing to make a show like Metalocalypse, I tried to do as much research as I could; I tried to find every rock and roll, heavy metal documentary about creativity and musicians. I think that's one of the best ones. It came out around the time when we were developing it anyway, and heavy metal was seeing this kind of major resurgence, or at least I was seeing it from where I was sitting. And that movie showed something that was really important."
“And you get to see how this record — love it or hate it — was made and what the trajectory was and the crazy maze of logic that got us to this place. And you got to see Metallica go through all that stuff and have to audition a new way of communicating with their own band. Or they were all gonna lose each other, because Jason Newsted walked out and they were a little confining and, I'd say, jealous of any other projects. But they came back and they're still together and they found Robert Trujillo, and Robert Trujillo is a monster. And Jason Newsted gave so much to Metallica as well. But it's brutally honest, and I think that takes guts — just crazy guts."
"Metallica is such a monumental band to me because they were inventing their own genre as they went," Small continues. "And when I think about the ultimate Metallica, like Master Of Puppets and …And Justice For All because that's the age that I was when I was discovering heavy metal and …And Justice had just come out. And so, I could not believe this through-composed, non-repeating kind of maze of riffs that were just all one compelling idea or ideology of one riff to an iteration of another, to another, to another, to another. And that, to me, is some of the coolest and such creative and melodic and brutal and tumultuous thrash, epic metal all in one place. And then the Black Album comes out. And the Black Album is, like, 'Okay, let's bring this to everybody'. So Metallica, without a doubt, is a huge influence to the sheer notion of Dethklok and Metalocalypse."
