Disney Channel’s newest animated series, Hailey’s On It!, premieres tonight! We had the opportunity to chat with the writers and producers of the show, Devin Bunje and Nick Stanton, whose work will be familiar to longtime Disney Channel viewers. While Hailey’s On It! is the first animated series they created, they’re the masterminds behind Disney XD’s Gamer’s Guide to Pretty Much Everything and Zeke & Luther. Their writing credits also include animated shows such as Phineas & Ferb, The Emperor’s New School, and Brandy & Mr. Whiskers.
Laughing Place:
Where did the concept for Hailey’s On It! come from?
(Disney)
Nick Stanton:
It actually came from just an idea for a scene really, and that scene ended up in the first episode. It was just this idea that this professor comes from the future and arrives in the room of this 14-year-old girl, who's just a regular 14-year-old girl and does this big information dump about all the big things that she's destined for. Our idea was that she never can really get out the information. She only has a few minutes to say all this, and then the conversation keeps getting sidetracked. We just had this idea for a scene, and from that scene, we built a world around it. We thought, well, who is this girl? We came up with this character of Hailey, and then her best friend, Scott Denoga, who's the next-door neighbor. They're best friends who might become more than that. It sort of evolved from there. A lot of that, those same initial conversations, ended up in the first episode.
Laughing Place:
Hailey’s On It! has a classic Disney Television Animation vibe to it while also feeling new. How did you land on that tone for the show?
Devin Bunje:
A comedy with heart is sort of that Disney sweet spot, so we definitely wanted that. What we loved was this bright, positive world that is a world worth fighting for, especially for Hailey. She has these important things to do, but it's worth it because of this amazing place she's staying in. Even when we were developing it, we always loved those classic DuckTales-type Disney TV shows. That was one of the motivations behind it, setting it in this place that is beautiful and colorful and somewhere you just kind of want to spend a half hour watching.
Laughing Place:
You have a great voice cast in this. They're not just names, but they're actually really good, from Auli'i Cravalho and beyond. How did you attract such a phenomenal voice cast?
Devin Bunje:
It was very fortunate, to be honest. During the first audition process, the Disney TVA casting department sent us a bunch of people that auditioned. Immediately, in our minds, Auli'i and Manny [Jacinto] rose to the top for the two different characters. Auli'i is not only an incredibly talented actress, but she can sing, which was something we weren't necessarily going in with immediately, but we certainly liked the idea of someone who's hesitant to put themselves out there also having this ability to just sing amazingly doesn't hurt. Manny is just … I call him sort of a unicorn of comedy. He's just so unique in all his rhythms and the way he sells the jokes and stuff. He's hilarious. He was just the perfect version of Scott that also felt so authentic and sweet, and you just like him immediately upon hearing him, even if you don't know that much about him.
Laughing Place:
Speaking of music, you have a great theme song. You have a whole musical episode about hats that features all sorts of earworms. What role does music play in the show moving forward?
Nick Stanton:
We were fortunate to land some really great composers for the series. The people who have done the music, Matthew Tishler and Andrew Underberg, we shared the exact same sensibilities with. It just made it easy, and it made us want to put music in every episode. I don't think it's in every episode, but it's a big part of the show. Just with that combination, it was sort of a no-brainer. We had these really talented music people and Auli'i. We really had fun with it. You saw the hats episode where we did some parodies of some musicals. We have one coming up, which I think is a great episode. It's at this local music festival called Splatter of the Bands, It's sort of a Gong Show kind of thing, where people get splattered with tomatoes, but it's sort of wall-to-wall music in that episode. It's been really one of the most fun parts of the process for us.
Laughing Place:
While you've worked in animation before, this is the first time you've created and executive produced an animated series. You have what has become a cult classic with Gamer's Guide to Pretty Much Everything. Can you briefly discuss the difference of working in live-action vs. animation?
Devin Bunje:
In our mind, a great story is a great story, so in a lot of ways, they're actually very similar. It's just really about knowing your characters and knowing where you want to go, and making that story work. That said, there are certainly some things you can do in animation you just can't do in live-action. The last two shows we created and executive produced were both multi-cam sitcoms, which are fun, and you can do some stuff there too. In animation, you have a whole different world available to you, just with being able to change locations and go out to extreme places and have people from the future pop out of your closet.
Nick Stanton:
Obviously, the fact that our last two shows were multi-camera sitcoms, we had an audience to give you immediate feedback on whether a joke was working, whether a scene was working. Sometimes it would surprise you. Something you thought maybe wasn't that funny gets a big laugh, and then the opposite sometimes happens too, and you have to rewrite on the fly. We really didn't have that with this project because a lot of it was produced during the pandemic. You don't get that immediate feedback. It gets animated, and months later, the footage comes back, and sometimes it surprises you. Sometimes it works better than you thought, but sometimes it doesn't. Just that immediate tactile feedback was something that we missed a little bit.
Devin Bunje:
Yeah, the punching-up process takes several months here instead of several days.
Laughing Place:
The show is about to premiere. Audiences are about to go through this journey you’ve created for them. What are you most excited about?
Devin Bunje:
I truly just hope it's a show that makes people happy. I feel like it's a world that you'll enjoy watching and being. The characters are so sweet and sincere, and they're funny, and they interact so well. Everybody's been in some version of this where either you have a friend that there's complications with, or you just have people that are close to you, or there's a boy or a girl that you kind of like, but you never say anything. There are just a lot of relatable kinds of characters and situations that we think are handled very, very well. It's just a fun ride, we think.
Nick Stanton:
I'll say I'm excited that it's not a series where we reset every episode. There is a story, and the characters actually evolve. We start off in the first episode, Hailey's really reluctant to get out of her shell at all. We start with this character who's really shy and could be awkward sometimes, but knowing that it's the first step on a journey to doing these great things is interesting. I don't know if you see it a lot in kids TV or kids animation, the fact that characters change. You see it on adult shows all the time. Breaking Bad, someone goes from a mild-mannered teacher to becoming a drug kingpin. This is really another exercise in opposites, Her having trouble coming out of her shell, to becoming super capable, is going to be an interesting journey.
Hailey’s On It! premieres tonight, June 8th, at 8/7c on Disney Channel and will be available to stream on Disney+ tomorrow.