In its first Halloween special “Blood Moon,” Big City Greens used scares alongside a few traditional elements to pit Cricket, Tillie, Bill and Gramma against zombie versions of farm animals. Season 2’s Halloween special raises the stakes with the sci-fi/horror-inspired “Squashed,” which features the Green family’s latest attempt to have a simple Halloween upended by a mutated batch of dangerous and vegetable creatures.
During an interview with CBR, Big City Greens creators and executive producers Shane and Chris Houghton shared their love for horror, reflected on the shared history of frightening fiction with Disney Animation and why “Squashed” was always going to focus on Tilly.
CBR: Disney Animation and horror have always been intertwined, going all the way back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and those early Silly Symphonies, continuing on into the modern era of animation. What’s it like finding the balance between that distinct Disney animation sensibility while still being frightening?
Shane Houghton: I’m a huge horror fan. One of my first jobs in Los Angeles was interning at a horror movie production company, where I would just read horror scripts and try and find a good one. I’m such a big fan of horror movies, and Chris, as well.
We’ve found that Big City Greens plays really well when we balance it with some really like scary ideas. Some of the episodes have been mined from childhood traumas, with fears that we’ve had when we were kids. I think about the episode, “Hi Henry,” where Cricket is traumatized when Tilly finds a ventriloquist dummy. That was totally from me and Chris. Chris was really into ventriloquist dummies. They terrified me. We shared a room. He’d prop them up on the top of the dresser. He would angle them all, so they were looking at my bed. It was horrifying.
And so that’s all good. That’s nightmare fuel. Now that we’re adults, that is cartoon fuel, and we take them out and we put them into the show… Steven Spielberg once said that a scare and a laugh are really close together in terms of what the human is feeling. He was talking about Jaws when [Brody is] shoveling chum. It’s like, there’s a joke, and then a scare. So there’s something that just, I don’t know, it pairs well.
Big City Greens has always been a show about two parts funny, one part heart. I think that’s very much the Disney way. There’s a lot of like endearing characters and endearing moments. So to kind of counter some of that with some scariness is a lot of fun, but we don’t depart from that entirely.
Chris Houghton: I think there’s something to scary stuff in animation and in kids’ media, I think it works. I think in cartoons, pain is often funny. It’s the anvil falling on the character’s head. But I think also fear can be really funny too. Even think about some of those early Disney shorts and some of the Silly Symphonies and stuff, they were creepy. They had a creepy edge to them, but they were still really funny. There’s something fun about trying to get scared. It’s been a fun balance to kind of play with.
What does it mean to you, as creators, to say that you’re a part of that legacy of Disney Animation, specifically getting to throw a little bit of horror into the mix?
Shane Houghton: It is truly an honor to be able to give the children of today the nightmares of tomorrow. Thinking about that Disney legacy… [horror] is kind of baked in. Maybe from the creator side of things, I also think just personally, it’s really fun to write scary episodes, and to kind of do things that we wouldn’t normally do in an everyday episode.
Our Halloween specials are very pushed, but in a really fun way that still hopefully feels like the show and feels like the series, but we’re able to do things… like, we basically have aliens in this episode. We’ve really tried to keep the show grounded in reality. I think we justify our aliens in a somewhat grounded way. But it’s fun. I think being a Halloween episode gives us the leeway to kind of explore and have fun with some of that stuff.
Chris Houghton: Yeah, we always said no monsters and magic, and this episode has no monsters. They’re mutated vegetables and not magic, but accelerated science.
The series does feature Danny Trejo as Vasquez, who gets to fully embrace the horror movie aesthetic by the end of the episode.
Chris Houghton: I think since we cast Danny Trejo in Big City Greens, we’ve wanted to give him an excuse to pick up a machete, and just go to town on some bad guys. That’s exactly what happens in this episode, which is so delightful to see.
Shane Houghton: It’s a dream for us to have Danny in the world of Big City Greens. It’s just a delight.
Were there any specific horror tropes or imagery you specifically seeded into the episode?
Shane Houghton: We definitely thought a lot about “Blood Moon,” our first Halloween special, and what we accomplished with that episode. We were trying to find what can we do that we haven’t done before. So “Blood Moon” was zombie farm animals. So we had a lot of zombie tropes and hands coming through the dirt, and animals clawing at the walls and trying to bust down doors and stuff. So we were kind of figuring out like, what’s a different genre of horror that we could kind of play around with? And “Squashed” is much more a sci-fi horror… Rachel McNevin, one of the writers on the episode, is a huge Aliens fan.
Chris Houghton: I think like the thing is always rolling around in everyone’s heads when they really tackle horror. Like this, so kind of alien sci-fi horror. Then we’re also, we were just last week, I was in a meeting where we’re all just geeking out over Sam Raimi. I think that’s another horror influence. It’s probably very deep within the animation. He’s just has such an animated style of filmmaking. So I think it was just a lot of those things. Like Shane was saying, we don’t necessarily get to play in this sandbox of horror that often. So it was like, yeah, let’s do a bunch of stuff. Let’s just take inspiration from any and everywhere.
One of the sweet elements of the episode is how much of it is focused on Tilly and her relationship with Bill. How did you find the heart of the episode?
Chris Houghton: Our last Halloween special, “Blood Moon,” really focused in on Cricket’s relationship with Halloween and specifically to his dad. It was this nice deep dive, and we kind of touched on how Halloween has changed for the Green family now being a big city.
So in doing another special, we knew we didn’t want to retrace our steps, but there was this element with Tilly that we stumbled on that’s just so sweet, where Tilly really wants to dress up like her dad, because ultimately she wants to be like her dad. That was the core of the episode that we were able to build everything else around because there’s such a sweet element to that. Tilly does look up to her dad, and there’s something about, wow, what a neat choice she made instead of dressing up like a ghoul, she just dressed like her hero.
Shane Houghton: It’s a different dynamic. It’s a different relationship that the kids have with their father. It’s really interesting to see these two Halloween specials kind of side-by-side, and seeing how Cricket’s relationship with his Dad works, and how Tilly’s relationship with her Dad works, and what kind of like Halloween misadventures they go on because of it.
Big City Greens 22-minute Halloween-themed special, “Squashed!,” premieres Saturday, October 9 (8:30 a.m. EDT) on Disney Channel and DisneyNOW.
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