Disney Channel is set to release the latest animated series from Disney TV Animation (DTVA) on January 11th, StuGo. This new series, one of the most unique in the 40-year catalog of the animation division, follows six middle schoolers who get tricked into attending a fake academic summer camp by a mad scientist. What started as three months of learning transforms into an adventure of a lifetime on a tropical island filled with mind-reading manatees, giant fighting fungi and fashion-forward mutants.
StuGo meets at the junction of smart and silly, with the sci-fi island setup allowing for a multitude of possibilities. To learn more about this, I was able to sit with the series creator and executive producer, Ryan Gillis and co-executive-producer Sunil Hall.
Tony Betti: StuGo might honestly be my favorite show from Disney TV Animation (DTVA). Sorry, Big City Greens, Sorry Kiff. I love both of those shows too, but you guys have such a unique voice and such a great idea that’s still good for the target demo without being a traditional family dynamic. It's not like the dad and the kids or the full family. It's a group of kids and a mad scientist who doesn't really care for them, but kind of does?
Ryan Gillis: You got it!
Sunil Hall: It's definitely one of the fun things about the show, is these kids have all come from that family dynamic and they're dumped into a very unfamiliar situation and they're forced to cope even though they're really smart, overachieving, high performing kids. They're not at all for this situation that they're in and they've got to really rewrite their rule book.
TB: Off the jump, I want to know, where does the title, StuGo, come from?
RG: Oh, it comes from a long development process, Tony… as the show evolved, “StuGo,” it means different things to different people throughout the course of the show. But it just became kind of like this repeatable, catchy thing and just became the show name.
TB: I didn't know if it was a spoiler that was up ahead, I didn’t even know where it came from. I’m over here looking at the characters names and it's not each one of their letters in some way or anything like that.
RG: Not a spoiler, no. The answer is not interesting, that’s all.
TB: It's also as random as the show is… I think that one of my favorite details is at some point, a kid will hurt themselves (comedically), or something will happen to them, and then that will be retained for the episode, but then will be reset at the next one.
RG: Yeah.
SH: Yeah, we always reset just to get away with a little more.
RG: Yeah, we were just talking about it, but I was very insistent that the show be episodic, because I didn't like the idea that you couldn’t dive in and watch one and then maybe not understand a joke or not because you didn't see the previous. But Sunil's been great at threading that needle, I think. He rewards people. If you've watched a lot; these characters get more rich, this joke might hit harder if you've seen the other ones, (but) they're standalone.
TB: You guys have previously worked together on Pickle & Peanut. Did you guys start developing this then or was it just a fortunate accident that you guys are back together again?
SH: We really enjoyed working together on that show and then we kind of went our separate ways. I went to work on some other projects and Ryan got into development at Disney and he worked on developing this show and also directing some other pilots. When my show,The Mighty Ones, wrapped at DreamWorks, it was around the time he was getting his green light. The stars just aligned and I was able to come over and join him then.
RG: But yeah, we were looking for a way to work with each other again I think.
TB: StuGo has a unique feel and style, especially when compared to everything else on Disney Channel and in the last 40 years of DTVA. It has its own style of humor. Could you guys talk more about that at all?
RG: It's what we like and we just try to make each other laugh. And it's us trying to keep life suprising the other people in the room. I'm just glad that Disney has been so supportive of it, ‘cause we are swinging for the fences whenever we can.
TB: The Nanny-Tee. I hate that I can’t talk about that with everybody yet.
RG: I definitely came from a more classic adventure serial space, but Sunil reads a lot of like, concept sci-fi and it’s really interesting to try and filter these into 11 minute kids comedies.
SH: Yeah, I think that's great.
TB: I chase after that feeling I had with the 90s shows I grew up on and you guys have come pretty close.
SH: I really enjoy sort of some of the absurdity we get up to, you know, creating that stuff, and it's definitely the kind of stuff I watched as a kid too.
RG: The sci-fi island, it's just a great way to really infuse whatever you want very quickly. Someone just pitched an idea. Like what is that? And then they put an antenna on it. OK, it's sci-fi.
TB: In 20 years time, you're gonna see the kids who grew up watching this, hopefully talking about the show still. Are there any episodes or stories that you want them to kind of reflect on happily, and carry with them for decades?
RG: I'm reticent to pick one favorite baby out of the bunch, but it is as a whole the show, thematically, we're hoping to entertain, we're hoping people fall in love with the characters. You know, it's a bunch of kids in a situation and they're dealing with it and they deal with it well. So I'm hoping if anyone gets anything out of it, realize like, you find yourself hopefully out of your comfort zone, you're gonna be alright.
SH: Hopefully it still holds up in 20 years. We did try to avoid too many pop culture references and too many things that can only work in this time period. So I hope there's a bit of Longevity to the kind of humor we're doing.
RG: Yeah, no cell phones. That was really a thing.
TB: You know what? I didn't catch that.
RG: After I said it, I realized we might have a couple cell phones.
TB: From your guys perspective, how do you think it compares to the rest of the titles out on Disney Channel from DTVA right now?
SH: I think it's good to have a wide spread of stuff, you know?
RG: And we're tippin’ off of Kiff too, and the Big City Greens guys, they gave us advice back when we were getting started. And like Primos is just such a nice slice of life. Like Sunil was saying, good to have a nice spread I think and I'm a fan of all these creators.
TB: One thing that you don't have specifically in StuGo, and it is refreshing but I don't know if this was an intentional decision… as far as I've seen so far, there's no music out in terms of songs. Kiff has songs. Big City Greens has songs. Primos has songs. But you guys don't.
RG: Just again, personal, I’m not musical. I don't know how to do that.
SH: Yeah, I respect people who can do musicals really well. I'm not one of them.
RG: It’s just not how my brain works.
SH: Our writers and our story team, definitely now and then we get a little push to do some musical episodes. Maybe sometime in the future we'll dabble a bit.
RG: We love music. We just can't write it, Tony.
SH: We do have fantastic music in the show and I'm a big fan of [that] work, yeah.
TB: Sunil, you worked on Gravity Falls. Ryan, you worked on The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse… How would you say your experience on those helped contribute to StuGo?
SH: Gravity Falls was great. There was an immense amount of talent on that show and a lot of the directors and board artists and people who worked on the show went on to be showrunners eventually, myself included. Alex was a great storyteller. There was such a focus on just really refining the story and making sure stuff wasn't done until we were totally happy with it. And that kind of focus, perfectionism making it really work, and taking these things seriously and treating it all with respect, I think that that had a big impact on me.
RG: Yeah. And for Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse, I was like “Darrick Bachman and Paul Rudish are these kinds of industry titans, and Mickey Mouse is Mickey Mouse.” So I thought there'd be a lot more strict walls, but the level of trust they gave the board artists and directors was wild. They'd just met me and they really just let you go off and I learned how funny it can be if you take like, “how do they update Mickey Mouse?” They kept him sweet and they kept him conscientious. But they turned that dial up so high. I thought that was really an interesting way to mine comedy 'cause I feel like it can be a knee jerk to “someone's got to be sarcastic or cynical,” but no, this guy's sweet. Just very, very, very, very sweet. So like I learned that there’s a different dial you can pull for jokes from that show.
TB: Now you guys have a pretty stacked cast with StuGo, can you tell me about that?
RG: [Disney Casting] presented a ton of huge casting calls and we just went with it. It was a fun process and we picked the people who – with an ensemble, you got to make sure the voice is better too. There'd be some people like, “oh, they're so funny” but their voice doesn't sound like they're in the same room. So we ended up just with this cast and I’m stoked.
SH: We do allow our actors and we encourage our actors to ad-lib a bit. They all know their characters so well. I think in many ways their characters are kind of just a heightened version of themselves because they're all very similar to who they play in some ways, so we encourage them to kind of ad-lib a bit, say things in their own words and we do find some nice character moments in the booth when we're recording.
TB: I know a lot of DTVA show runners and creators tend to sneak themselves in somewhere, in terms of voice. Have you guys done it?
SH: Ryan's snuck me into it.
RG: Yeah, he's in it, I’m in it.
SH: He was determined to put me in it. I'm in there somewhere.
TB: It sounds like that might have been a reluctant decision.
RG: I love Sunil and I wanna see more of him. I made myself a mutant in there called “Chicho.” It’s fun, I mean, how could you not, with this opportunity in front of you? Don't you want to be a mutant, Tony?
TB: You know what, I do! I love when the shows have townspeople in a way and I feel like the mutants are just the show's townspeople.
SH: Later on in the series we do a completely mutant-focused episode, and that one’s pretty cool.
RG: That was one of the big things early on is that we wanted the kids to be stranded, but we didn't want it to be a deserted island. We always wanted it to be like a teeming, thriving island. These kids are just out there in the middle of it.
SH: And… there's like layers of history and things that have, you know, strange happenings, whatever, that have gone on on this island.
Catch all the fun of the new series when StuGo premieres on Disney Channel on Saturday, Jan. 11 at 8:00 PM. EST. The series is also set to debut in the spring of 2025 on Disney+.