Brothers Chris and Shane Houghton, creators of the hit award-winning Disney Channel animated series, Big City Greens, have put out over three seasons of the show (now in its fourth season) and much of their recent time (along with their creative team and crew) has been spent putting the final touches on their new film Big City Greens The Movie: Spacecation.
Big City Greens the Movie: Spacecation follows the Green family as they embark on an adventurous outer space-bound vacation. When thrill-seeker Cricket tricks his family into taking a “road trip” in space, chaos in the cosmos quickly ensues. Despite growing frustrations between Cricket and his dad, Bill, the two must learn to appreciate each other’s unique perspectives in order to prevent Big City from being destroyed by an interstellar disaster.
Chris and Shane Houghton
For several years now (far longer than it feels), Big City Greens has been part of my beat here at LaughingPlace.com, and in that time, not only has the assignment turned me into a serious fan of the series, it has also afforded me the chance to sit with the siblings on more than one occasion. As their new film is on fast approach (debuting on Disney Channel on Thursday, June 6th at 8:00 PM and Disney+ the next day) I was able to sit with them once again.
Tony
The first time [we talked] the storyboard [for the movie] I think just went up on reels.
Shane
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tony
And that was right ahead of season three, if I remember right. At that point you told me the sibling shirt had been tattered.
Chris and Shane Houghton as Caricatures of Themselves (Topher and Blaine) in Season 2's "Animation Abomination"
Chris
Yes, that's right.
Tony
Now that you're done with the full movie …How's the sibling shirt?
Shane
The sibling shirt has been upgraded to a sibling space suit. It is now cryogenically sealed to contain us and all of the air that we need to share. We are closer than ever now that we have completed running a TV show and a movie. I guess we have not finished running the TV show, that's still going.
Tony
You were making me nervous for a second with that.
Shane
But the movie! The movie is done, yeah.
Tony
It is done, we're all excited. A lot of emotion in there that I kind of wasn't expecting. I was just expecting a fun romp, but then it got a little a little heavier… the gravitas was a little surprising, which was great.
Shane
What we wanted to do in the movie is take everything that we've done in the series, but like Amp it up. Higher highs, lower lows…In the series, we've told lots of emotional episodes. We pitched [the movie] as National Lampoon's Vacation meets Armageddon.
Tony
That's appropriate. [There’s even] an Armageddon bit in there that was very – I don't want to ruin it, but I caught it. I thought “they must really like the director's commentary of Armageddon on the bonus features,” or it's a general thought, I guess…
Shane
Yeah. Like that. I don't think that's a spoiler to say, Armageddon is about – “We've got a problem. We need to send somebody up to fix this problem in space. But we need to drill to do it. So we're going to get drillers and we're going to teach them, teach them to be astronauts.” But it seems like it would be a lot easier to teach the astronauts how to be drillers. But you know what the movie forgoes that little bit of logic and blasts those drillers off into space. And we did the same thing. We had a farming emergency in space. And you’re gonna send who you gotta send.”
Tony
I noticed the humor seemed a little more amped up, too. I'd never in a million years thought we'd see Gramma’s butt.
Chris
Yeah.
Shane
I feel like there's not a lot of butts, but sometimes, sometimes Gramma's just gotta show in the moon, her moon, you know?
Chris
Yeah, there’s not enough old butts I say. So we're doing our part.
Tony
There you go. Representation right? The other thing I noticed that was amped up was the character animation. There was a lot more detail than the normal rubber hose [style] we would normally get out of Big City Greens.
Chris
Yeah, that was by design. Like Shane was saying, you know, on and on in every aspect of filmmaking we tried to ramp it up. There's an expectation for a movie that comes out that's based off of a series that we felt obligated to to do our best to meet that expectation. Story’s bigger, they go to space, the emotional depths are deeper. Hopefully the comedy is funnier. And certainly the animation – we needed it to really shine. We did a trip to Korea. We met with our Korean partners and sat down and talked about how we could make this look even bigger and better and yeah, we hope that comes across.
Shane
A lot of that is also – to just give credit where credit is due – to the studio believing in Big City Greens and giving us the opportunity to make the movie. There was some early talk of like “oh, it's just going to be like a couple of half hour episodes. You put enough of those together and you get a movie right?”
Tony
Can I be honest with you? That was what I was fearing the minute [the movie] was announced.
Shane
Yeah, exactly.
Shane
And to the credit of Meredith Roberts, the head of the studio, kept telling us she was like “guys, don't make this a long episode. Make it a movie. Like really, you gotta amp it up.” There were higher expectations, so we really went into making the movie with that, took that to heart and really wanted to – like Chris is saying – amp up every possible aspect we could with the amount of time and budget that we had. The time was a big thing because it's like you’re noticing, “hey, it's funnier and it looks better,” A lot of that. We had more time to really watch this movie over and over and over and really polish and refine and really tweak jokes and add new jokes and really just make it as dense as possible. But also while flushing out the drawings, there's more storyboards for this movie than I think any episode we've done just per the runtime or anything. It's so posed out that there's some sequences that were basically animated. Or at least key animated poses out here and then sent overseas. So our overseas partners had a lot more material to go off of, which just led to even better, more posed out fluid animation. It looks great. Everybody did a killer job.
Tony
I think there was a scene where Bill's hair was flapping beautifully, and I was just thinking you would never have gotten that on the series.
Shane
Right. On the series, you just don't have the time. You know we're working out so many episodes. You just kind of keep it going. As much as we'd love to make every episode of the series as beautiful as possible, sometimes it's just not realistically possible.
Tony
Going back to the emotional stuff we talked about, it's perfect timing that it comes out just a little ahead of Father's Day. We always knew Cricket and Bill were at ends with each other, but there was the love there. It kind of gets – again – “amped up” in there to a point where it reminded me of another movie based on a Disney character who also had his own TV series – A Goofy Movie. I don’t think you set out to make another version of A Goofy Movie, but it definitely had that vibe.
Chris
I mean, we all love A Goofy Movie, who doesn't? I think the main difference was that in A Goofy Movie it was Goofy wanting to go on a road trip to reconnect with his son, and I think A Goofy Movie is the best version of that. I think we've all seen that story. [With Spacecation] we wanted to play around with a different dynamic between father and son, which was big ideas versus small ideas or taking some risks. Do you take the risks and go into the unknown or do you stay where it's safe and predictable? So both of them want to go on vacation. It's really just a matter of who gets to choose what vacation looks like. So we wanted to give them a conflict that really allowed both of their perspectives on life to come out. So it's about this vacation, this “spacecation,” but it's really about this fundamental difference in how these two characters view the world.
Tony
You've got a lot of musical aspects to it, and we've seen so many guest stars in the series – this time you pulled some appropriate musical guest stars – I wouldn’t call them guest stars – Stars of the movie because they're in the movie. Let's talk about who you got to appear in the movie.
Shane
First of all, the Greens. Everybody sings in this movie and the Green family have all the big main numbers. I gotta say, Chris [Houghton], Bob [Joles], Marieve [Herington], and Artemis [Pebdani] really knocked it out of the park. None of them are like traditionally classically trained singers, but they all can sing so incredibly well. And then to sing well also while in character, doing a voice that is an added challenge. All of those guys just did a phenomenal job and the movie opens with a really fun big kind of Broadway musical number and I think it's very apparent that the talent of this core cast really shines. And then we can just build it out and go from there. But Chris, you wanna talk about maybe the other folks in the movie?
Chris
Yeah. I mean Renee Elise Goldsberry. Incredible. Incredible talent. We were so happy she said yes to sign on to this. You know, we love her in Hamilton. We love her in Girls 5 Eva. I mean, she's hilarious. She's very talented.
Shane
So funny.
Chris
She's great. She's just absolutely fantastic and she's got a standout song that is just killer, and she just nailed it. But she was a delight to work with, too. She brought such a determination to this character and she took the role so seriously, which was so appreciated because that is who the character is. This character, this new character Commander Colleen Voyd, is basically the commander of the spaceship that the Greens are on. And her whole philosophy is “follow the rules, follow the rules,” and she's the perfect foil for cricket. I don't want to give too much away, I'll just stick with saying Renee was such a pleasure to work with. And such a talent. And we're so thrilled she's in the movie.
Shane
Cheri Oteri as Gwendolyn Zapp. So Cheri’s been on the series, she plays a big part in the movie. And we thought, “Oh my gosh, it would be so funny to have her sing a villain song.” So we came up with this kind of jazzy villain song for her, which is so strange and goofy. And then the director, Anna [O’Brian] thought it would be really fun to give her some kind of Bob Fosse type of choreography, so it just makes for this really insane musical number that is so much fun and it just really came together. It's so goofy. Cheri was incredible. So funny, and just really knocked it out the park with Gwendolyn Zapp. Every time.
Chris
And speaking to the music of the movie – we have a soundtrack coming out! All of the songs in the movie, plus some fantastic score from our composer Joachim Horsley. It'll be available on Spotify and all the streaming services. Yeah, the music in this movie is incredible.
Shane
Yeah, former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly did not sing in the movie…we were very nervous to work with him – he probably would have if we asked him, but we were too nervous to ask him.
My thanks again to Chris and Shane for sitting down with me again, and we all look forward to watching Big City Greens The Movie: Spacecation when it arrives on Disney Channel on Thursday, June 6th at 8:00 PM ET, followed by a debut on Disney+ the next day, Friday June 7th.
For more from the Houghtons, and the rest of the cast and creatives behind Big City Greens the Movie: Spacecation, be sure to check out our purple carpet interviews!