What’s In A Name?
I was recently asked if the name of my comics website Yay Robot refers to Robot Chicken.
The answer is no. I did work as a writer on Robot Chicken, and was even just up for an Emmy award for writing on the show — and I’m very proud of both of those facts — but this website is not associated with the show and has nothing to do with the show. We simply have the word “Robot” in common.
As some of you probably know, finding a name for a website is difficult because so many good names are already taken. I was looking for a name that was funny, easy to remember, wasn’t already taken, and had potential in terms of a logo or character. Some (bad) examples of rejected names included Good Lemur, Funny Sherpa, and I Heart Bagels. There are a bunch more better ones as well, which I’d rather not list because I might use them someday.
Ultimately I liked how easy yayrobot was to type and to remember, and I also had a concept of a heroic robot that I developed. Coincidentally, Marc Stoksik, the artist on the two comic strips, had been independently drawing pictures of a heroic robot figure. We put the two together and used those drawings as the Yay Robot robot character. So it turns out that a closer comparison would be to J.J. Abrams’ production company name — Bad Robot. Boy, these robots are popular, huh!
On a related note, the name Celebrity Rocket, which is the name of my online t-shirt store, is also the name of a Robot Chicken episode. Now that isn’t an accident. I had already started my t-shirt store prior to working on the show, and when they gave me a chance to name one of the episodes, I chose to give it that name as well — partially because the name had relevance to me at that moment, and partially because I was curious to see if having an episode with the same name would lead to an increased exposure for the t-shirt store. It hasn’t really panned out that way so far. 
Although there are a number of popular selling t-shirts on the site, it doesn’t appear that many people are coming to the t-shirt store via the episode name.
Anyway, hope that answers the question.
