To Ecuador with Love: ‘Women Wearing Shoulder Pads’ Creator Gonzalo Cordova on His Wild New Adult Swim Show

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What would you get if you merged the madcap, surreal frames of ’80s-era Pedro Almodóvar movies with the beautifully art-decorated stop-motion world of Mexico’s Cinema Fantasma studio? The irresistible result would be creator Gonzalo Cordova’s brilliant new quarter-hour Adult Swim comedy Women Wearing Shoulder Pads, which premieres on August 17. The series follows the adventures of an arrogant, rich Spanish woman named Marioneta who moves to Quito, Ecuador, to exploit the region’s guinea pig population and turn them into a lucrative business. Along the way, she meets a wild range of eccentric and ambitious women who are all trying to navigate the fast-changing worlds of love, family and business.

This clever fever dream of a show all began in Cordova’s head, first as a simple title. During a recent interview with Animation Magazine, the creator says he was unemployed at the time and was riding a bus when the title simply popped into his head. “I had recently been to the Bob Baker Marionette Theater in Los Angeles,” he recalls. “Around that time, I was obsessed with a Pedro Almodóvar collection on the Criterion Channel. I watched that entire collection very quickly. So, all I really had at that point was the title and the vague idea of mixing marionettes with Almodóvar’s ’80s melodramas.”

In Search of the Right Project

A while later, Cordova found himself very frustrated with three development projects that had landed on his lap but with which he felt no real connection. “They were adult animated comedies about Mexican families living in Boyle Heights or East L.A.,” he says. “I had nothing against those projects, but I felt like I was being approached solely because I was Latino. But I did need the money, so I said yes to one of these projects. Within a few hours, it started feeling really wrong. I’m Ecuadorian and the majority of my childhood was spent in South Florida. My experiences are very different from the shows I was being asked to develop. But more importantly, the projects themselves were not really well suited for my writing style and my comedic voice. I wanted to make something much weirder and much more specific and personal.”

That’s when he began writing the pitch for Women Wearing Shoulder Pads. “I wrote the pitch on Friday, and by Monday morning I had something I was really happy with and told my agents I did not want to take that other job,” says Cordova. “A few weeks later, I pitched it to Adult Swim. My gut instinct told me it was the only possible home for this show. I had recently worked as a writer on Tuca & Bertie, which was originally at Netflix but moved to Adult Swim for the second and third season. It was already such a unique and original show, and it was refreshing to see Adult Swim wanting us to lean into that. The majority of the notes from Adult Swim for that show were to make jokes and stories more surprising. I felt like with Women Wearing Shoulder Pads, I had something that could surprise them!”

Cordova’s original pitch and pilot came from trying to figure out what an Almodóvar film from the 1980s would look like if it was made with marionettes. “Adult Swim had some concerns about the feasibility of marionettes, so the idea shifted to stop motion,” says the creator. “The rest of the show came from developing based on that idea, but I think it also ended up becoming a very strange brew of my childhood memories of Ecuador mixed with my lifelong obsession with melodramas, specifically from the ’40s and ’50s. The plotline of a Spaniard coming to Quito, Ecuador, to breed cuyes [guinea pigs] was really me trying to ask myself, what would happen if a main character from an Almodóvar film stepped into the world of my childhood? In 1986, my family lived in Ecuador, and the family stories I grew up hearing about that time were so exaggerated and melodramatic, it felt like a good world for an Almodóvar character to step into!”

Cordova made his famous pitch back in August 2020, and he began work on the pilot for the show with Cinema Fantasma in Mexico in the summer of 2021. When they delivered the pilot, they had another long wait until the writers’ room officially kicked off in September 2022. “There were some delays while we waited for a production order,” he says. “During that time, we were approved to work on designs and storyboards, but we finally officially started production sometime in the fall of 2023. From that point on, we worked consistently.”

Cinema Fantasma to the Rescue

The show creator praises the work done by Cinema Fantasma in Mexico City. “They are currently also debuting I Am Frankelda, their first feature film and the first stop-motion feature made in Mexico,” he says. “We also recorded in Mexico City and in Quito, Ecuador. Other than me, the writers, my wife, Rachel Kinnard, who designed costumes, and the folks from the Adult Swim side, this show was almost entirely made by people living in Latin America.”

The stylish puppets created for the show were about a foot tall, made for a 1:6 scale production. “When you hold them, they really feel like dolls,” says Cordova. “Every time I visited, I was too much in awe. The sets ranged from 4×4 feet to 12×12 feet, depending on the need. For example, in the fifth episode, we feature a big and extravagant New Year’s Eve party. That set was really big and impressive in person. I remember also finding some of the big, expansive exteriors kind of humbling, realizing that a team of artists went through so much effort for a scene that was ultimately me and the writers being silly.”

Cordova says that the very human, handcrafted aspect of the show is what really warms his heart. “The show is wacky and big, but it’s also very personal,” he notes. “I put a lot of myself into it, but that’s true for so many people on the team. I think the initial drive to make this show was to make something totally unique and new. And I really think we achieved that by being very true to our own artistic instincts, and as a result, I see so many people’s fingerprints on this.”

One of the biggest challenges for the show was that Cordova had to work remotely from his home in Pasadena, California. He says, “I visited as often as I could, but I had to really trust the team. We met frequently over Zoom and talked constantly on WhatsApp, but it was hard for me not being in the mix. The writers’ room also took place at the tail end of the pandemic, so we did that all over Zoom as well. By the end of it, I really missed being able to just stroll up to an actual human and ask them if they had a nice weekend.”

Las Mujeres en Español

Another reason the arrival of Women Wearing Shoulder Pads is cause for celebration is that it is the first Spanish-language, all-women-cast series in the 24-year history of Adult Swim! Cordova says that element was intentional from the very first pitch. “In melodramas, the men often recede into the background, and it becomes almost funny,” he explains. “I wanted to heighten that with a hard-and-fast rule that we’d never hear a male voice in the show. At some point during the pilot, I casually mentioned to Adult Swim that I wanted it to be in Spanish. I think I was trying to pull a fast one on them by treating it like it was no big deal. Surprisingly, Adult Swim let me make the pilot in Spanish, and then when we got a series order, we just kept going in Spanish and no one stopped us. We did have a few conversations about it, but every time, I was like … I guess we can keep going in Spanish.”

“In melodramas, the men often recede into the background, and it becomes almost funny. I wanted to heighten that with a hard-and-fast rule that we’d never hear a male voice in the show. At some point during the pilot, I casually mentioned to Adult Swim that I wanted it to be in Spanish. I think I was trying to pull a fast one on them by treating it like it was no big deal.” 

— Series creator Gonzalo Cordova

Cordova and his team wrote the scripts in English, and he worked closely on the translation with the show’s voice director, Mireya Mendoza, and their Ecuadorian consultant Pancho Viñachi. “My Spanish is pretty good, but I grew up in the U.S.,” he adds. “Without them this show would not feel as authentic to the way Spanish is spoken in Latin American countries.”

Now that the world gets to experience the wild adventures of Marioneta and her friends every week on Adult Swim, Cordova hopes audiences will enjoy the wild spirit of adventure and fun he and his team were trying to convey. “I hope everyone has fun,” he concludes. “We built the show to be as fun as possible. Anything else they take away from it is just a bonus!”

Women Wearing Shoulder Pads premieres on Adult Swim on August 17 at midnight.