Creators Chris and Shane Houghton and executive producer Anna O’Brian discuss the fifth season’s production firsts, including finally getting Stephen King in an episode after years of referencing his work with Easter eggs; debuts August 21 on Disney Channel.
Big City Greens might have been born out of brothers Shane and Chris Houghton’s own experience moving from their rural hometown of St. Johns, Michigan, to the big city of Los Angeles, with the series’ own characters even inspired by the brothers’ real-life family members. But, after five seasons, the 2D cartoon characters of Big City Greenshave taken on lives of their own. And we’re not just talking about main character Cricket’s rising social media stardom.
“We have the opportunity as a long-running show to watch certain characters, like Chip Whistler and Gloria Sato really grow and take on a life of their own,” says Chris, who along with his brother, created the series and serve as executive producers. “We expanded the show to Smalton in Season 3. In Season 4, we had this big crazy celebration of our 100th episode with Chip…”
Shane interjects, “We saw the culmination of how evil Chip could get with that big revenge special. He started out as just another antagonist to Cricket and Tilly, but grew into a super villain. That was a big surprise.”
Chris continues, “And in Season Five, Doug Perkins, Bill Green’s best friend, gets his own episode. That’s something you can’t do in a Season 1 or 2, doing an episode about the dad’s best friend. But, in Season 5, we get a chance to play in a way that we haven’t been able to before. And that’s been really fun.”
Premiering its fifth season August 21 on Disney Channel, with the first five episodes airing at 8 p.m. EDT/PDT, streaming on Disney+ the following day, the Emmy-winning animated comedy series from Disney Television Animation, which debuted in 2018, follows mischievous and optimistic 10-year-old Cricket Green (voiced by Chris), who moves from the country to the big city with his wildly out-of-place family — older sister Tilly, father Bill, and Gramma Alice — after the family loses their Smalton country farm. Cricket’s natural curiosity and enthusiasm lead him and his family on epic journeys and into the hearts of his new neighbors. Disney calls the show its longest continuously running animated series and puts lifetime viewing at more than four billion hours across linear and streaming, plus nearly a billion views on Disney-owned YouTube.
Check out the new season trailer here:
Season 5 follows the family and their friends as they navigate some of their biggest adventures yet, including an ice skating episode with character Gloria that Shane calls “our most stupid and beautiful episode yet.”
“There are a lot of episodes in Season 5 where we take our own personal passions and turn them into episodes, which I always really like because, when I see the episodes, I feel the personalities of our writers, our board artists, and everybody contributing to the episodes,” says Shane. “Our executive producer Anna [O’Brian] ice skates and she came in and was like, ‘We’ve got to do an ice-skating episode.'”
And when story editor Mike Trapp and co-producer Kenny Byerly came up with a personal story centered on character Gloria, O’Brian got even more excited.
“Gloria has become an honorary part of the Green family unit,” says O’Brian, also an LA transplant from a Midwest small town, specifically Washington in southern Indiana. “She’s become a fan favorite and a crew favorite. When you watch the first season, you don’t really feel that at all. It’s something that totally happened organically.”
Shane adds, “Gloria starts out as an antagonist, hating the Greens. And over the course of many seasons, all the way up to the premiere episode of Season 5, titled ‘Gloria Green,’ she’s become part of the family. And since Anna came on to help executive produce and showrun for the new season, that was something she was really pushing for exploring. There’s a fun arc to Gloria’s journey, continuing her relationship with the Greens and also her own internal struggles. She has many, many internal struggles.”
The ice-skating episode was also the first time the team used rotoscope animation on the show. “I did do some choreography for the episode, and it was a total dream fulfillment because a lot of those moves I can’t actually do in real life,” says O’Brian. “And, coincidentally, at the time we had an intern on the show who had done Disney On Ice for years as a professional ice skater. So, she sat in on a lot of our meetings and gave us little tidbits and helped with some of the choreography. And then the design team and the board artists took it to the moon. It turned into something so special and beyond all of my expectations.”
As beautiful as the episode turned out, Chris says incorporating new animation techniques so late in the life of the show did introduce a bit of nervousness. “We’ve got other episodes with trippy scenes where we use CG animation or real photos, which we’ve also never done before,” he explains. “And when you introduce something like that kind of late, there’s some hesitancy. It’s like, ‘Are we breaking something? Or are we just expanding the look of the show?’ And it definitely fell into the latter category. It’s been fun to explore different looks and different ways to make episodes. We’re always trying to keep it exciting for us and surprising for the audience.”
One of the biggest surprises of this season was that, after many seasons of incorporating Stephen King references and Easter eggs into the show, from The Shininghotel carpets to reciting lines from “The Gunslinger,” the brothers actually got the world-famous author to make an appearance. “I’m a very big Stephen King fan and we were kicking around an idea for a haunted Kludge Halloween episode,” says Shane, referring to the Green family’s pickup truck. “We really liked the idea of The Kludge becoming possessed. And I was like, ‘Man, that’s such a Stephen King premise because his book ‘Christine’ is about a haunted ’58 Plymouth Fury. And the movie he directed, Maximum Overdrive, is also about possessed vehicles. And I’m like, ‘Can we make the most Stephen King type of Big City Greens episode?’ We put it all together and then we were like, ‘We gotta get Stephen King in this.’ So, we did, which was just an absolute dream come true.”
Among the wish-fulfillment and big swings, the production team also wanted to get the show back to basics after their massive feature film, Big City Greens the Movie: Spacecation, focused on building impactful, entertaining stories out of simple ideas.
“I think we were all just like, okay, let’s go back to our roots with really simple, strong premises with bite that the board artists and the writers can just run free with,” explains O’Brian.
Shane chimes in, “Like, Bill has to trick Cricket into a cage to get him to take a bath, brush his teeth, and go to the doctor.”
Chris adds, “Yeah, we give great parenting advice on this show. There’s also an episode where the kids get a metal detector and another where Tilly starts her own newspaper that’s about the family and distributed only to the family. Tilly also falls in love with a really attractive-looking potato, voiced by Chad Michael Murray, who is a delight.”
O’Brian continues, “It’s all produced just a really funny season. I think some of our funniest episodes ever are in this season.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She’s reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
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