After the 2017 Showcase, Dollars & Donuts started looking outside itself a little more. One of the people in the audience that night was writer Mike Bedard, who connected with the company’s strange mix of genre filmmaking, stupidity, and something close to an Adult Swim sensibility. Not long after, he sent Daryl a folder of short scripts.

In February 2018, Daryl gathered the core group for a table read. One script immediately stood out, called Dawn of the Planet of the Monkeys. The premise was ridiculous, the jokes landed, and underneath all of it was exactly the kind of challenge Daryl wanted at the time. The visual idea was simple: shoot sketch comedy like an expensive prestige drama. Mike offered to shorten the title. Daryl went the other direction. Dawn of the Planet of the Monkeys became Dawn of the Rise of the Battle for the Conquest of the Planet of the Monkeys. If the joke was already stupid, there was no reason not to make it longer.

Hank Della had been the company’s primary writer for years, and bringing in outside material marked a real shift in the way projects were beginning to develop. Hank wasn’t thrilled by that change.

Daryl wanted hard shadows, saturated color, serious performances, and the visual grammar of a war movie applied to bananas, tiny hats, cymbal-playing monkeys, and people sincerely discussing the fall of civilization.

The cast also reflected how much wider the company’s orbit had become. Gino Vigil and Sasha Boggs were already part of the growing Los Angeles connection. Sasha brought in her friend Tara Erickson, who joined the production as Eliza and immediately fit into the heightened seriousness of the piece. The casting of Mitchell Martin as Peter was less smooth. As usual, Michael Martin strongly opposed putting his own brother in the role, always jealous. Daryl disagreed, having heard how funny Mitch was at the table read and pushed the casting through anyway.

Pre-production became another example of how badly Daryl and Michael’s instincts were diverging. Daryl wanted the characters dressed in clearly differentiated colors, almost like Scooby-Doo, so they would pop against the industrial darkness of the location. Michael dismissed the idea as dumb because he couldn’t see the finished image in his head. Daryl could, and that difference kept surfacing.

Daryl wanted to work from a shot list and shape the visual language on set, trusting instinct, performance, location, and the camera. Michael wanted everything translated into literal pre-visualization before he could understand it. Without Daryl’s approval, he hired a storyboard artist. The result wasn’t more clarity, but more friction. For Daryl, the problem was becoming familiar. Michael could understand a production once it had been broken down into charts, boards, schedules, and boxes, but he repeatedly struggled with the intuitive part of filmmaking, the ability to look at something unfinished and understand what it could become. The art. Michael kept arguing with ideas that only made sense once they were on screen. Daryl kept making them work.

One thing everybody agreed on was the monkey. Becker Von Felsburg brought in his friend Aaron Van Lieu to handle the makeup for Bobo, transforming Becker into the fez-wearing monkey who finally appears inside the bunker. The design deliberately leaned toward the prosthetic work of the original Planet of the Apes films rather than anything sleek or contemporary. When Daryl sent Mike Bedard a photograph of the makeup test, Mike responded that it looked remarkably close to the original ape makeup, which was exactly the reaction they had hoped for.

Production took place over two full nights and days in the East Bay, an unusually generous schedule for a crew accustomed to squeezing entire films into a single day. The additional time, professional locations, lighting, makeup, and larger crew gave Monkeys a visual confidence that suited Daryl’s original premise. The joke might have involved bananas and monkeys in tiny hats, but the photography was never supposed to wink at the audience. Everyone approached the apocalypse as though civilization really had fallen.

Daryl had hoped to push the scale even farther with an animated sequence depicting the enormous monkey army gathering outside the survivors’ bunker. It would have given the unseen invasion a visual payoff and allowed the film to suggest something far beyond what could physically be staged. Time and money ultimately killed the sequence, leaving the enemy army offscreen. The finished film instead relies on sounds, drawings, bananas, eyewitness accounts of monkeys riding tiny pigs, and finally Bobo himself to suggest the catastrophe outside. It wasn’t the grand reveal Daryl had envisioned, and the film suffers because of it.

The film’s original ending was much smaller, and much closer to the stage-sketch structure Mike Bedard had written. Peter is dragged offscreen by Bobo, presumably to be killed, and the scene simply ends there. On the day, Becker Von Felsburg felt the payoff was too slight for the movie they had actually made. After two days of treating the material like a serious apocalyptic drama, he wanted one last visual punchline. His suggestion was immediate and ridiculous. Bobo should rip off Peter’s cock and balls. Daryl approved it just as quickly.

With no elaborate effect prepared, the crew improvised one from whatever was available, using oranges, bananas, fake blood, and a hastily assembled makeup appliance to create the impression that Bobo had finished Peter in the manner of a particularly vicious chimp attack. It was exactly the ending the movie needed.

To sell the aftermath, the crew sprayed Tara Erickson and Gino Vigil with blood until the final image looked considerably more savage than anything the original sketch had called for. That decision also started an accidental visual tradition. At the time, there was no plan to connect Monkeys to a larger horror cycle, but the blood-drenched final tableau became the first in a loose run of similarly excessive endings that would continue through the other Welcome to the Strange shorts. What began as a last-minute gag became something close to a house style.

The more consequential development came after filming had finished. The cast and crew returned to San Francisco for a wrap party at the Old Ship Saloon, where Ray Revello joined the celebration. It had been an ambitious shoot and, by all appearances, a successful one. In the middle of the party, however, Michael Martin pulled Daryl aside and told him he was finished producing for the year. Daryl had been talking about an aggressive slate of additional films for 2018, and Michael wanted no part of it.

In earlier years, Michael withdrawing from production could effectively bring Dollars & Donuts to a halt. This time, Daryl was almost relieved. He had grown increasingly frustrated with allowing Michael’s interest level to determine whether Dollars & Donuts moved forward at all. So instead of abandoning the slate, Daryl walked across the bar, found Becker Von Felsburg, and asked him to take over as Lead Producer for the rest of the year. Becker agreed.

What followed was one of the fastest bursts of production in the company’s history. Monkeys wrapped during the final weekend of June. By October, Daryl and Becker had completed three more horror shorts, shot the wraparound material, finished post-production, and assembled the entire package for premiere as Welcome to the Strange.

That turnaround changed something. For years, Michael’s reluctance had functioned as a kind of brake on the company. If he was not ready, interested, or convinced, projects could stall indefinitely. The summer of 2018 proved that the work did not have to wait for him. Daryl had expected Michael stepping away to create a problem. Instead, it created momentum.

At the premiere, Michael pulled Daryl aside again. “Let’s not ever let this happen again,” he told him. “I was joking when I said I didn’t want to produce.” Nothing about the original conversation had sounded like a joke. To Daryl, the reversal was obvious. Michael had stepped away, the company had accelerated without him, and now he wanted back into the position he had voluntarily abandoned. By October, Becker had filled the gap, the films had gotten made, and Daryl no longer needed Michael’s participation to keep the machine running.

In hindsight, the stretch from the Monkeys wrap party to the Welcome to the Strange premiere marked the beginning of the end of Michael Martin’s place at the center of Dollars & Donuts. For years, his reluctance could slow a project simply because Daryl kept waiting for him to come around. The summer of 2018 proved there was another option: stop waiting. The realization was liberating, and once Daryl had seen how much could get done without Michael setting the pace, there was no putting the old arrangement back together.