Yahoo News There's a Walking Dead spin-off you didn't know existed
If you thought that The Walking Dead and its spin-off Fear the Walking Dead were the only two series to be adapted from Robert Kirkman's original comic book, then you'd be wrong. (Un)dead wrong.
If you're a proper Dead-head, you might well have heard of Flight 462, a web series released in 16 parts to AMC.com in late 2015. This spin-off's chief function was to introduce the character of Alex (Michelle Ang), a plucky survivor who we were promised would later reappear on Fear (she did) and make a big impact (she didn't).
But that's far from the only online exclusive series to be spun off from the flagship telly shows. Flight 462 was followed by Fear the Walking Dead: Passage the following year – a second 16-part series which followed two survivors, Sierra (Kelsey Scott) and Gabi (Mishel Prada), as they sought sanctuary in the zombie apocalypse.
There have also been four web series linked to the main series: Torn Apart (2011), Cold Storage (2012), The Oath (2013) and, most recently, Red Machete.
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Torn Apart told the story of Hannah (also known as "Bicycle Girl"), the first walker that Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) encountered after waking from his coma, while Cold Storage was about Chase (Josh Stewart), a young survivor hiding out in a storage facility. The Oath followed two survivors named Paul (Wyatt Russell, of Black Mirror's 'Playtest') and Karina (Ashley Bell) as they fled their zombie-overrun camp in search of a medical station.
But Red Machete, which dropped six episodes between October of last year and this April, was a different beast, breaking from the tradition of following a character or pair of characters as they sought shelter from the undead hordes.
Instead, this spin-off told the 'origin story' of the red-handled machete that Rick found in season five premiere 'No Sanctuary' and later used to brutally hack Terminus cannibal Gareth (Andrew J West) to death a few weeks later in 'Four Walls and a Roof'.
"The red-handled machete was a character in season four, and that is where the genesis of the story really started," director Avi Youabian explained to Deadline, explaining that the story was "a narrative that [executive producer] Scott Gimple wanted to be told".
Having directed one episode of The Walking Dead itself – season six, episode five 'Now' – and edited 12 more, Youabian teamed with writer Nick Bernardone, the script coordinator on both The Walking Dead and Fear who'd "cracked a killer story that was a purely visual narrative".
The pair devised a plan whereby Red Machete would follow its inanimate 'protagonist' from place to place, from owner to owner, eventually revealing how it found its way from a shelf on a hardware store to Rick's murderous hands.
The series did, however, revisit one character familiar to Walking Dead fans, with Jeff Kober reprising his role of Joe from the show's fourth season in the spin-off's third and fourth chapters. (Don't remember Joe? He was the uber-creepy leader of 'The Claimers' who Rick eventually offed by tearing out his jugular... with his teeth.)
Though the majority was live-action – though shot in LA, rather than The Walking Dead's Atlanta – one episode, Chapter Four, featured an animated sequence modelled after the artwork in the original comic series. "Every episode was different," Youabian explained. We have one episode that's animation, there's another one that's just a static shot... we tried to make every little chapter have its own unique visual style."
Though it leaves the fate of one character, Mandy (Anais Litt) unresolved, Youabian insists that "the Red Machete narrative is completely over", with the spin-off designed as a self-contained piece.
But this isn't the end of the road for the web spin-offs, with a plan in place for more outings in future. Even with the franchise's original leading man about to depart, the Walking Dead universe, like those undead hordes, looks set to continue expanding and dominating.
The Walking Dead: Red Machete is available in the US via AMC.com, along with the other web series listed above. Flight 462 is also available to watch in the UK via AMC UK's official site.
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