Comic-Con@Home 2021 continued this afternoon with a panel discussion of FOX’s animated sitcom The Great North, featuring creators and executive producers Wendy Molyneux and Lizzie Molyneux, executive producer Loren Bouchard, and cast members Nick Offerman (who voices the character of Beef Tobin), Jenny Slate (Judy Tobin), Dulcé Sloan (Honeybee Shaw), Will Forte (Wolf Tobin), Paul Rust (Ham Tobin), and Alanis Morissette (as herself).
In the bullet-point list below, I’ve enumerated many of the most interesting tidbits and factoids to come out of The Great North panel during Comic-Con@Home 2021.
Watch The Great North | Comic-Con@Home 2021:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmkQTWbrvpA
- The panel opens with a “best of” montage of clips from the series so far.
- Wendy Molyneaux says she and the other members of the creative team were really excited about the possibility of going to San Diego, but they’re happy to be doing the virtual Comic-Con@Home.
- Will Forte is participating in the panel while in his car with his dog.
- Production got shot down partway through season one, and for the remainder of the season they had to work remotely.
- Alanis Morrisette had to cancel her concert tour last year because of the pandemic, but now she is planning to go back on tour.
- “Global pandemics have almost no effect on animation,” says Molyneaux. They did table reads over Zoom.
- Dulcé Sloan talked about participating in the table reads and how it was actually a step up for her, because previously she had to call in from her office at The Daily Show in New York. But they all missed the reactions of doing them in a big room full of people.
- All of the cast members had to do their own sound engineering at home. Jenny Slate says her home in Massachusetts has really bad internet and she’s not very tech-savvy, so she panicked at first. But it worked out once she got set up inside her closet.
- Will Forte recorded from New Zealand where he was working on the show Sweet Tooth. And his closet at home has toxic black mold in it.
- Loren Bouchard talked about the difficulty of getting an actor to sound like they’re outside while recording in a “pillow fort.”
- The upcoming season of The Great North will have the series’ first Halloween episode. They showed a clip from the episode where Will Forte’s character tells a story about “Lumber Zombies.”
- They talked about the fan reactions to the show. People seem to have fallen in love with Ham and Crispin’s relationship. Fans also responded really well to the emotion in the wedding episode that served as the first-season finale. Sloan talked about the messages and fan art she’s received from viewers.
- At this point the panel seems to get cut off before the end.
The Great North returns for its second season this fall on FOX.