Last September, the cast and crew were filming an episode of the show here at the Apache Studios, which was swarming with producers, puppeteers, artists and deep-pocketed Kickstarter donors. (In one month, more than 48,000 backers contributed $5.7 million to the cause.) Outside the soundstages, freshly painted brains were drying in the warm California sun; in a nearby prop room were extra robots — full-color ones for the skits, all-black ones for the signature theater scenes, when the characters are shown in silhouette.

The featured movie is top secret (the showrunners would rather that viewers come to the movies cold), but it involves a large reptilian monster (not Godzilla) trashing a large metropolitan area (not Tokyo). The three rehearsed a related skit in which Servo tries to persuade Crow to help him open a monster-themed nightclub, complete with monster-created disasters. Crow is skeptical. “People don’t want to be crushed to death,” he countered, sensibly.

Servo and Crow were controlled by puppeteers beneath the stage, while other crew members moved bits of scenery to “animate” the action. Offstage, Mr. Vaughn and Mr. Yount read their lines, opening and closing their characters’ mouths remotely by pressing the triggers on jury-rigged model-car controllers. Working the robots is so complicated that the needs of the human actors often go unnoticed. “My performance is kind of low on the list of things that they’ll go back and fix,” Mr. Ray said. “I’m like, ‘I flubbed my line,’ but they’ll be like, ‘Yeah, but that was perfect for the bots.’”

Although the show often feels as if it were created on the fly, all the episodes are scripted. “A lot of people assume it’s improvised, which would be crazy, because we’d just be talking over each other all the time,” Mr. Yount said.