The Geeks of Doom were recently invited to participate in a press conference call with Heroes creator and executive producer, Tim Kring, and star Masi Oka, who plays fan favorite Hiro. Kring, Oka, and the rest of the cast are currently filming Season Two of the NBC hit series, but took some time out to talk about the show, giving a few tidbits on what to expect in the upcoming season, and promote to the DVD release of Season One, which will hit store shelves on August 28, 2007.

Summer Vacation

The cast and crew of Heroes have been extremely busy this summer. In addition to starting production on Season Two, most of the cast appeared at Comic-Con in San Diego at the end of July. They made a big splash there last year when they screened the original pilot episode to excited fans. In fact, Kring credits those fans and the word of mouth that started at last year’s convention as being a large part of the show’s early success, which is why he wanted to make sure they showed their appreciation this year. “We looked at Comic-Con this year as a giant thank you,” said Kring. “We were very committed to the idea of bringing everybody that we could from the show down to show our appreciation to the fans, who I am convinced were very instrumental in making the show a hit last year.”

Of this year’s Comic-Con homecoming, Oka said, “It was absolutely amazing. It’s kind of like winning the Super Bowl and going back to your home city. It was a celebration of a great phenomenon that we have all created together: the fans, the writers, and the cast.”

In the end, the pilot shown at the convention last year was drastically cut from a 2-hour premiere to the 1-hour premiere shown last Fall. To this day, the lucky few in last year’s Comic-Con audience are the only people to have seen Kring’s original pilot. Until August 28, that is, since the original 73-minute pilot will be included in the Season One DVD, along with commentary from Kring.

Although Kring appreciates us geeks and our contribution to the show’s success, he confesses that he does not count himself among us: “I did not come from a comic book background…I was not a Star Trek fan, either. I saw the original Star Wars, but none of the other ones after that. So I have very little knowledge of the sci-fi world and almost none of the comic book world. My influences came from the idea of basic storytelling and character development. I chose to approach this material almost entirely from the idea of who these characters were. I created the powers to reflect who the characters were and not the other way around. So I didn’t start off saying I wanted a guy who can teleport, I started off by saying I wanted a guy who felt trapped in a life that was not his dream and what could be a power that would be most wish-fulfilling for that character. And that was the ability to transport out of that life.”

For his part, Oka flies his geek flag proudly. In addition to being an avowed manga fan since childhood, he is delighted at the following Hiro has developed and what he means to geeks around the world: “If I can represent the geeks, I [feel] very fortunate to be able to do that. For me, the notion of a geek has always been someone who is very passionate about something. Whether it’s computers or ant farms or musicals or storytelling or paperweights or whatever it is. It’s that you’re passionate about something and that’s what makes us human, it defines us as individuals, it gives us our uniqueness… It’s more commendable to be a geek and be passionate about something than to be apathetic about everything.”

Hiro isn’t just a fan favorite, he also seems to be one of Kring’s favorite characters on the show. In the original script, Kring says, “there were a number of characters who felt that these powers were an affliction. The cumulative affect of it at the end of reading this first draft was that it was kind of a downer, nobody seemed to have any fun with it. [Hiro] was really created to lighten up the initial script… I felt that I needed one character who embraced it in a very enthusiastic way.”

In addition to their triumphant return to Comic-Con, the Heroes cast is also embarking on a world tour. Kring recounts that at this year’s meeting of the National Association of Television Programming Executives (NATPE) in Las Vegas this January, a number of television buyers from overseas approached him and asked if he and his cast would be interested in visiting their countries. Heroes will be premiering in most international markets this Fall and the buyers were very excited about its blockbuster potential. Although it is extremely unusual for the cast of an American television show to tour other countries, Kring and Universal (the show’s distributor) saw it as a great opportunity. “The theme of this show has this … universal, global quality to it. explained Kring. “[Our tour] is sort of an embodiment of the message of this show.” The cast will split into three groups to visit New York, Toronto, London, Paris, Munich, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Oka and Kring will be together on the Asian leg of the tour and Oka promises a great show: “When we come to your city, we put on a full show. We’re gonna be a musical on ice skates, the Heroes Ice Capades.”

Season Two

Neither Kring nor Oka would divulge much about Season Two, which premieres on September 24, 2007, but they did let a few tidbits slip. Oka talked about filming the first few episodes in Ventura County, just north of Los Angeles, where the production crew recreated feudal Japan. We saw just a glimpse of this new location in the final shots of last season’s finale, but we can look forward to more of this new locale and time period in the first several episodes of Season Two. Oka reveals that the main characters he interacts with in feudal Japan are played by Heroes newcomers David Anders and Eriko Tamura. Anders, who played the popular character Sark on Alias, will play Kensei, the legendary samurai idolized by Hiro and whose sword was an important part of Hiro’s quest last season. Tamura, an extremely popular television, film, and music star in Japan, will play a new love interest for Hiro.

But it hasn’t all been pleasant for Oka in portraying this popular character. Hiro’s signature move– scrunching up his face in order to engage his teleportation and time-bending powers — takes its toll on the actor. Said Oka in an interview last year, “If we are fortunate enough to have a Season 2, I might have a brain anyeurism.” Luckily, this season Hiro is learning to master his powers. Says Kring, “Masi has perfected it, so it is a much smaller gesture than it used to be. We can assume the character, through the use of this technique, has gotten better and better.”

Season Two will also see some changes to the way the show’s writers structure the story. Says Kring, “Last year when the show was starting, for the first part of the season, it was very important for us to have every character in every episode because people were getting to know them. Now that people know most of the characters and are used to the storytelling of bouncing around from one story to another, I think we can expect to spend a little more time this year on fewer storylines per episode that allow us to highlight certain characters each week, and by extension some characters will be left out of episodes.”

Season One DVD

“We knew early on that this kind of show especially is designed to be watched on DVD,” said Kring. “So we started the planning of the DVD pretty much right at the very beginning in terms of a lot of the behind-the-scenes footage we shot and the commentaries … The core audience of a show like Heroes is very savvy about these kinds of things and wants a DVD that reflects the nature of the show that is always surprising and always state of the art.”

In addition to the standard DVD release, there will be an HD-DVD version with some pretty cool extras. “I can’t stress how cool the HD-DVD is,” said Kring. “[It] allows the viewers to, through a device called U-Control, allows them to follow various threads in the show. As you know, the show has a symbol that is found frequently in many of the scenes. And it highlights that and shows it to you — even in the most kind of hidden places in the scenes. There is even an extension that allows you to look closer at all of the artwork that Tim Sale did for our show; all of the paintings and all of the various artwork. So there’s just a tremendous amount of extra stuff for the fans to watch.”

This “extra stuff” includes cast and crew commentaries, as many as 50 deleted scenes, and documentaries about the score, special effects, stunts, and a profile on Tim Sale, the renowned comic book artist who painted Isaac’s artwork in the show. As mentioned earlier, it also includes the original 73-minute pilot with commentary by Tim Kring.

Both the seven-disc DVD and HD-DVD versions of Season One will be released on August 28, 2007. And later this Fall, look for the graphic novel compilation of Tim Sale’s Web comics. Previously only available on NBC.com’s Heroes site, the graphic novel will be published by DC imprint WildStorm, with covers by comic book icons Alex Ross and Jim Lee.