This is Mike Nawrocki, Leslie Ferrell, and Cydney Trent discussing Sweetpea Beauty.
Transcript[]
Mike: Hello everybody this is Mike Nawrocki, I am the director and one of the writers on Sweetpea Beauty.
Leslie: And this is Leslie Ferrell, I'm producer, executive producer on the show, or what I like to refer to as Queen Bee.
Mike: (giggling) Queen Bee... (in a falsetto voice) Queen of them all!
Leslie: Which it certainly fits with the show!
Mike: That's right being our first-
Leslie: We have a queen! Yes, yes.
Mike: All girls princess show.
Leslie: This was such an exciting show to put together certainly as a group of women that were involved in the concepting. Because we used to sit around, it was fun sitting around with you, Mike, and just kind of throwing out, hey, we need a gown and a crown. And lot's of sparkly.
Mike: And lot's of sparkly. And it's funny because with a show mostly over the years being developed and written by guys, coming up with a princess story isn't the most natural thing. I remember Duke and the Great Pie War, which was actually Princess and the Pie War, was kind of our first attempt of it. But then, I remember we ran in- what was it? The next princess attempt was sort of a Rapunzel story, then sort of a detective Cinderella story, but it didn't have quite all of the- what women were looking for from a true princess story. It was giving that direction for me to say "What if we did a couple of real true princess stories?"
Leslie: Oh you did a great job... I mean you just took on what- You know, we just started with what's just that dream of every little girl! Every little girl at some level wants to be perceived as beautiful.
Mike: Well and just that whole topic of image and how we see ourselves and how we think other people see ourselves, and how that affects how we feel about ourselves, and contrasting that with what the Bible says about how God sees us and how he looks at the heart, rather than on the outside. I think it was just a great thing to concentrate on, the topic of inner beauty.
Leslie: Well I know you have a girl. Having raised a girl, I just I really- the pressure for my daughter to look a certain way and dress a certain way and to evidently find acceptance or a sense of belonging, it's just so upside down from really what God's wishes are, and to build your self esteem while something that false is just so destructive and I really am so thankful that my daughter sees that god values her, period, and her real beauty is from within. That's what we really want. What we want little girls and young women to get from this show.
Mike: And that Annie here, obviously, Annie is the voice of Ally, my daughter, so it's kind of neat having her in the show in that sense and this is Lauren, one of Annie's good friends, so that was really fun.
Leslie: That was probably really fun for them to participate together on!
Mike: Oh yeah yeah, it's good if you do it together, it's great. And their both kind of in that age where it's sort of the thoughts that they're starting to have and of course, Cydney Trent is Petunia, who's actually gonna come and visit us.
Leslie: She's gonna be a guest later on, isn't she?
Mike: Yup, she'll be in our commentary a little later on. This is the story of Snoodlerella. A bunch of folks may remember the story of A Snoodle's Tale, which we did a number of years ago, which was a very Seussian story about a little Snoodle who went up to the mountain to talk to his creator and find out he was special. It was very, it was a wonderful story about self worth and where we should get our self worth, and we just thought it would be really fun to do a girl version of that. The original Snoodle's Tale was a little boy Snoodle who did that, and we thought, "What would it look like to have that journey happen with a girl Snoodle?". And the name Snoodlerella just had a catchy feel to it.
Leslie: Oh, it was perfect! What better way to do it then to put it as an overlay to the classic fairytale Cinderella. It was just perfect, you really just did it so smart and clever.
Mike: Well, thanks, and being able to pull that familiar- everybody knows the story of Cinderella, and that one's just- if you look at that story as a Christian, what does that say about beauty? That she was plain and she was made beautiful, and then she got the prince by being beautiful. We wanted to look at that from a slightly different direction, as she goes to the ball that the king is throwing, what does the king have to say about her appearance? We just really wanted to parallel that with what God says about us and how he loves us.
Leslie: Right, I love that. Not to give away the ending here, but I love how in the tale here, Snoodlerella doesn't leave with the prince, but she leaves with the knowledge that God loves her just for the way she is. And in that, that God's gonna bring people in our lives that can love us and care for us, and really be his vessel to us, with his care and love us and give us a community where we belong and it's just wondeful. I love the whole look of the sets here, just that what you mentioned earlier, that Seussical. You can see it in the interiors, you saw it just earlier in the town. Where'd you come up with the idea for the little fairy wings? I love that.
Mike: Well the original Snoodle's Tale, they had wings, but they also had backpacks. We thought it'd be fun to make them look almost more, when you get a princess costume? The fabric on the princess costume, that kind of silky look. My little girl has gotten a few princess costumes over the years and I just wanted to incorporate that look into the wings themselves. One of the things I wanted to mention here was about the voices that we had to cast. Typically with our VeggieTales voices, we have our cast of characters, but a Snoodle is a whole different world. So casting the female voices, because there are so many female characters, we needed to reach out and make sure we got just the right voices for these characters. With Snoodlerella and then with the step-Snoodle sisters... the step-Snoodle sisters is Keri Pisapia, so she did both of those characters, and then Rebecca Walker did the voice for Snoodlerella. What was funny was that she was reading for that and she started off with a typical princess voice, because she's done some voiceover work before as a princess, and we just weren't really hitting on what really was appropriate for this character, and I said, "What would it sound like if you just got really nerdy on us and just started talking like you were going to a Lord Of The Rings convention or something?"
Leslie: A Star Wars convention. Sorry, Star Wars fans.
Mike: Well you know, just like a super fan! She just had a really great delivery for that. I'm really happy with the voice here, she did a great job.
Leslie: And these ducks! This is the second time they've appeared in our shows.
Mike: Yeah that's right. With Pistachio, we had the Berry Godmother in Pistachio. In that whole fairytale land in Pistachio, where the Berry Godmother and the ducks came along and we wanted to bring that back in. Oh, the Blue Fairy is what she was called actually in Pistachio. And of course, since the woodland creatures make up Cinderella, we had to bring in woodland creatures here too.
Leslie: Wait, where can I get one of those spa-in-a-boxes?
Mike: That's a pretty good thing, isn't it?
Leslie: That's amazing! Open it up and there it is! I love that. I want to make sure we make a VeggieTales version.
Mike: One of the challenges, technical challenges in the show was the mirrors. This whole show is populated with mirrors because it's an essential theme and obviously, how we see ourselves, and that's how we view ourselves, through mirrors. So with the countertop, with Snoodlerella, and in Sweetpea, we used this mirror theme. But from a technical point of view, it's difficult because you really have to shoot... one shot becomes two shots, because you have to shoot through the camera of the world itself and then you have to have another camera that's basically set in the mirror pointed out to give you your reflections. So it's almost double the work when you have a mirror in the shot. That was definitely a technical challenge. Of course, we wanted to give Bob a cameo, that's SnoodleBob. And if you notice, he's sort of looking at his hands in wonder, like a little baby when they're looking at his hands like, "Oh, what are these?" We did that with Bob too.
Leslie: That is great. The rhyme really carries the story and not only does the words have meaning, but I think that cadence adds that fairytale and charm.
Mike: I'm such a huge Dr. Seuss fan and the original Snoodle's that Phil wrote, Phil Vischer, was in that Seussian cadence and I've always been a huge Dr. Seuss fan, and I've read so many Dr. Seuss books to my kids, not only because they loved them, but I loved reading them. Just reading with that cadence, and practicing that, and trying to do it without messing up was always a challenge. It was a really fun challenge to try to write a whole story like that and kind of just keep up that cadence and follow the whole line of the story and the path of the character.
Leslie: Now seriously Mike, you knew all these dance steps right, because you and your wife have been taking lessons.
Mike: Well yeah, my wife is such a great dancer. Soon after we met we would go out salsa dancing and she taught me how to salsa. She's a great dancer and I'm still self conscious about dancing just because I'm 6'5", so whenever you see 6'5" guy out there dancing out there and the dance floor, it sort of sticks out like a sore thumb. But yeah, it was fun to incorporate all of these dances and rhymes.
Leslie: Isn't this cute? This is really cute to put the fun dances there. We should do a "How To Do All The Steps" for the bonus features, "How To Do The Rumba", "How To Do Ballroom Dancing".
Mike: Yeah. That's Tim Hodge, voice of Dignified Snoodle. Tim also did the voice of the king, who is coming up here in a minute. Tim was the creator in the original Snoodle's Tale too, so we wanted to bring back that same feeling of that character here. So Tim came to do that voice. He just did a really good job there.
Leslie: Look, and you just follow this story and here she is. She is beautiful on the outside, and yet I love how you had her make the point, "Even when I'm beautiful on the outside, I still don't feel beautiful on the inside or nurtured." Really, that outward beauty, yet so many people chase it. It doesn't fulfill.
Mike: There are so many people who have what the world would consider that outward beauty that are still very insecure about who they are and what their place in the world is, and I think that can only be found through what God tells us about ourselves.
Leslie: Right, it's just how he longs for us to have that assurance, it's part of the fullness of belonging to him. You really see this here, I love this shot, which turns around and she sees the king. Look at that, here she goes ahead and says it. Again, she's beautiful and she's like, "But I'm an awfully poor choice".
Mike: And this was actually, that little bit of dialogue was a direct lift from the original Snoodle's Tale, and sort of an ode to that, and really that same reflection that Snoodle Doo or Snoodle Roo? I forget what his name, the little Snoodle in the original Snoodle's Tale. Just carrying that backpack of all those little images that people had put in about how they saw him and then they came basically saying that, "No, it's about the painting that I've drawn of you and what I think of you".
Leslie: You know, A Snoodle's Tale has been one of the most, through our customer service, Snoodle's Tale is, we've really had the most comments on that show, and they've been pretty revealing, which we've just appreciated it. Moms in particular that have written about tough spots that some of their kids are going through, particularly as they make transitions during elementary school and how much that show really administered to their children, and supported what their parents were trying to do to support them. We've had schools use the show as a teaching tool, and of course, churches, church preschools, and I really think the same will be true of this show. It really comes alongside and teaches that very much needed tale. God really looks at the heart. There's the crown! I wish I had a crown.
Mike: A little princess crown. Don't you have a little tiara while we're on work, Leslie? A word about the set here, the classic fairytale castle is Neuschwanstein, which is in Bavaria, in Germany, and that ballroom is actually designed after one of the ballrooms in Neuschwanstein. I had the chance to go there, actually with my wife and the producer of The Pirates Movie, Paula Marcus went. We recorded the score for Pirates in Prague and got to go down to Munich for a few days after we were finished.
Leslie: Let's talk about the moment at the end, I really like how you wrapped up the teaching moment.
Mike: Oh of the uh... just that after having danced with the king, she could go back to her world. Even though she still might be getting the same outward messaging from her sisters and her step-Snoodle, she had danced with the king and she knew what he thought about her, and that made what they said about her not mean as much to her anymore. This song, Ian Eskelin, a tremendous singer/songwriter who actually Brian Mitchell here at BigIdea introduced me to. Ian pitched this song idea and just a fun bouncy song called Pants, he had written it with a friend of his, Doug McKelvey, and we just had a fun time putting this together, We originally wrote it as an auction song, so he's trying to auction off pants. We took it in and developed it and said, "Aw, it would be really fun to have it as a veggie shopping network." So it suited itself really well to TV, so Larry's just trying to pitch pants. Instead of the price going up on a single pair of pants, we're counting down the pants that were selling like they do on the home shopping network.
Leslie: And Jimmy and Jerry are perfect aren't they? Putting them on stilts is funny!
Mike: Just the ridiculousness... Oh Brian Roberts did those animated 2D pants, He did a great job on those. But yeah, just the ridiculousness of vegetables in pants, of course, they're on stilts now.
(Break)
Mike: Well, everybody we have a very special guest joining us now, it's Cydney Trent who is the voice of Petunia Rhubarb! Hey Cydney, how you doing?
Cydney: Hey Mike, hey Leslie. Thanks for letting me sit in a bit.
Mike: Oh sure! So Cydney, what was it like to have Petunia play a princess again?
Cydney: I was so excited to take Petunia back to her original roots. Her very first release in the VeggieTales series was Duke and The Great Pie War, and that's where we first created Petunia, and a big part of her was her innocence, her raw innocence, and her giggle! It was so fun to get to go back to the basics and pull out that giggle and that light, fun, airy, honest Petunia.
Mike: Well and what was really cool was that it was such a contast to Madame Blueberry, who was really struggling with her beauty.
Cydney: I loved that Petunia felt so square on her feet and so strong about what she believed in. I think a lot of that has to do with that happy-go-lucky side of her, which is interesting, because in life, the children in our world are the happy-go-lucky, they're the younger ones... and as adults we tend to lose some of that. It's nice that she is an adult but she still has that happy-go-lucky feeling that a child may. Particularly when she's running in the forest, and she's talking with the animals, it's just happy and it's just good.
Mike: Do you think Petunia connects with young girls?
Cydney: I do and particularly in the world today. With the struggles that young girls face about their physical appearance. Since Petunia is a role model, it makes me very, very proud to speak for the cause, and let little girls everywhere and boys as well, actually, that it's about what's on the inside, not about what's on the outside, and you don't have to be anything specific, you don't have to conform to the way others are. You are special in your own self, so yes, it meant a lot. I do feel that this will be an exceptional role for her to reach out and touch.
Mike: Cool! So does playing a princess fulfill that childhood dream for you?
Cydney: It does... although I do have to giggle at that question because when you're a child, or a little girl I should say, and you dream of being a princess, you don't usually picture yourself to be a vegetable! So it's been kind of fun and quirky for me. So, I don't know, I giggle when I think about that. I'm a rhubarb princess and it's awesome and it definitely brings me some of my childhood dreams. Especially the way that it speaks to the kids.
Mike: Cool. Well alright, I know you have to go, so thanks for stopping by. It was a pleasure having you as part of the show.
Cydney: Oh, well thank you so much Mike. It was a pleasure for me too. I can't even tell you how proud I am of what we do and the way we speak. I am actually the mother of a young daughter myself, and to know that I can bring this to her and the rest of the world is really special. I really believe in what we're doing. And thank you very much.
Mike: Well thank you Cydney, and I hope to see you in another VeggieTales really soon.
Cydney: That sounds great! Bye!
Mike: Bye!
Leslie: Bye Cydney! Mike, should we give just a little sneak peek into the production behind Sweetpea? There were some challenges. This was a pretty complicated show technically, which some of our fans may not understand all that goes into it.
Mike: Yeah, you know, I mentioned the mirror. There's three mirrors: on the countertop, Snoodlerella, and now Sweetpea. In Sweetpea, the mirror is animated, and as we'll see in a minute, he has limbs, he grows his arms, he grows his legs and he walks around.
Leslie: That's because every once in a while in a VeggieTales show, we have to throw in some arms some where.
Mike: That's right, yeah, yeah. We couldn't do that at the beginning of VeggieTales when we started 17 years ago, but we can now. One of the things, we were working with the new animation studio, which is always a challenge, because you need to get everybody up to date on how to animate your characters and how to emote the specific personality of your characters and I really think they did a great job in animation, really capturing who our characters are. Larry looks like Larry, Petunia looks like Petunia, so that was wonderful. We had a number of sets, a number of special effects, and pulling all that stuff together in any production is just a huge challenge. We went right up to the line in this production, getting shots and effects. While we're watching this show, some of the shots we're watching are not final so we're hoping we'll see some final shots pretty soon.
Leslie: Haven't we dubbed this show "Don't Stop Believing"? DSB. That's what we tell each other as we come to the final delivery.
Mike: There are two acronyms, DSB and CBB, "Could Be Better".
Leslie: Well I know it's gonna be beautiful. The textures of the castle, just the castle walls, they look so- we just saw the shots, they look so beautiful.
Mike: They're looking really, really great. We just wanted to capture a fairytale feel. One of the other things that was really fun in the show was just all of the, and Sweetpea in particular, we wanted to make it feel like a princess musical. Mark Steele, who wrote Sweetpea and the songs for this, along with Kurt helping him out with arrangement and melody, the songs came together really well and show a lot of really fun music.
Leslie: And I love all of the little forest critters. The hedgehog; the worms that form a heart.
Mike: It's kind of creepy, but that's okay, it's part of the message. It's fun with the animals, and a story about the animals we had in the VeggieTales backlots, characters that we had used in the past including the porcupines from Jonah, and so we pulled back that model. As we went through production, it turned into a really difficult character to animate. We had plans for a skunk to make a cameo, but the skunk was a new model, and it worked just so much better in the show that we swapped the roles of the skunk and the porcupine. The porcupine initially was named Gaspard, but then we swapped that to the skunk who shows up more. It's just fun, you can't have a princess story without woodland animals.
(Break)
Mike: Oh, and Mark also the writer of Sweetpea was the voice of the mirror. He had a lot of fun doing that. And Madame Blueberry, Megan Murphy, did such a great job. I think Madame Blueberry is at her best when she's whining.
Leslie: I do too. And the things we can do with her as a character. I mean, think of what she looked like in Madame Blue, but look at her here now with her big crown, her pursed lips, and her whiny attitude. She's terrific.
Mike: She's such a great character. Joe Spadaford, who did the concept on her "queenly" attire, did a great job too. The mirror was a real technical challenge because if we were to have him reflective the whole time, we would've never got the show done. One of the things we had to do was sort of give him a generic reflection, a reflective texture, and reveal that he's reflecting her every once in a while. Stylistically, I think it turned out okay. I think part of it would have been distracting if we would have seen the room in his stomach the whole time.
Leslie: I think so too. You kind of have to make him his own person. Here, another, look at that catch. Queen Blue with pearls. Pearl earrings, pearl necklace...
Mike: Part of the fun now too is just this mirror is this evil character, being able to give her a false reflection. This mirror is showing the queen what she wants to see and what she thinks she should look like, being younger and what she thinks is more beautiful. When on the outside, she's revealing the true nature of her heart. I think one of the fun things about this show too, what Mark did a really good job with, was combining a ton of princess stories. You think about Cinderella, you think about Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Snow White, all of these classic princess stories kind of jumbled together in one story, which is just a lot of fun. She's banished, she meets the seven snowpeas, she gets stuck in a tower...
Leslie: My favorite characters.
Mike: The seven snow peas. Those guys a great, brilliant. "I can fit an acorn in my belly button". It's a vegetable with a salad on his head.
Leslie: I grew up with a Danish granddad, who in his childhood, he was just told the Hans Christian Andersen fairytales his whole life. If you ever visit Copenhagen, part of visiting Copenhagen is seeing The Little Mermaid statue. His stories are something the Danes are very proud of. So, I was raised on those stories. Princess and the Pea, and The Little Mermaid, and I have so many fond memories of my grandpa telling me all of these stories, and we used to beg for him to tell us these stories over and over and over. Really, in most fairytales, not only is there that magical quality, but there's always a lesson. Some darker than others...
Mike: I was gonna say they all end in freaking the kids out!
Leslie: Yeah, Hansel and Gretel really takes a bad turn. Anyway, just all to say, that we still love fairytales and I do think that even kids today! We used to read fairytales to our kids as well, as a genre.
Mike: Well absolutely and they're all wondeful morality plays and all the classic ones tend to be a little bit darker when you go back to the original, but they always have something to say about good and evil, and the consequences of our actions, and so I think they're really valuable. I mean, that was one of the things that really drew me to Pinocchio, the original story, which is pretty dark in places, but at the heart of that it's just a wonderful morality play based on biblical worldview, which certainly Hans Christian Andersen and Carlo Collodi had. It was really neat to now, in a modern era, take that worldview and incorporate it into a fairytale.
Leslie: I'm wondering if our fans have picked up hearing the minstrels.
Mike: Ah, the minstrels. They're such a fun- they're such a great storytelling style especially with that renaissance medieval flavour just to have these travelling minstrels narrating as we go along; but Mr. Lunt and Jimmy both voiced by Phil, Phil Vischer, are both just a whole lotta fun throughotut this whole thing. Later, they actually score the action scene by singing, which is just a really funny gag, Sort of an inside funny musical gag. I think musicians will really appreciate it, but I think it works really well in the regular context of the story.
Leslie: They kind of have that combination where they're just annoying enough. To also be entertaining.
Mike: (singing) Personal space!
Leslie: You can just feel how closely annoying they are.
Mike: Oh there's Gaspard and he's a cute little skunk! He doesn't smell too good, but he's cute!
Leslie: Here we go, okay, these are my favorite. See, here we go, everybody can guess, what's this?
Mike: Okay so here we even have, we even dipped into the Goldilocks lore, so we got Goldilocks and Snow White in the same hut,
Leslie: We mixed 'em all up, we took liberties.
Mike: Oh and here comes a Princess and the Pea allusion here. She can't sleep because there's a pea under her mattress. Oh and this set is actually a reuse of Gelato's workshop from Pistachio, which was in turn, a reuse of BooBooVille Workshop for the inventor, Larry who played the inventor in BooBooVille.
Leslie: Oh, from the show Abe and the Amazing Promise.
Mike: Abe and the Amazing Promise, yes. So we got some great mileage out of this set. Oop- there's Umbrilliant!
Leslie: There's the acorn. That's a pretty nifty trick. Is that something you or Mark could do? Is that how it got written into the script?
Mike: Yeah, we tested some different things. We tested out some wrenches and acorns turned out to be the perfect size. It's just so random at the beginning here, but it does play a part in our resloution of the action scene.
Leslie: If only they weren't so adorable.
Mike: So, it's great! Jean Claude and Phillipe have always been the exact same model, so you can't differentiate them apart visually, and then to add 5 more of them- actually, 4 more of them, because Umbrilliant is the only different one. It was hard to keep track of them in animation, so the animators came back, "Which one is talking? I don't know which one is supposed to be talking." They kind of sound alike too, but you have to know them well to know which one is which.
Leslie: You know, we run contests with our fans, and one of the things we'll say is "Give us a ranking, of your favorite VeggieTales characters", and the French Peas come in 4th.
Mike: The 4th? Oh! Alright! As a pair? They aren't separated?
Leslie: Yeah, they're just French Peas, they aren't separated. It's Larry, Bob, Junior, French Peas, and with Petunia, actually very close behind the French Peas.
Mike: That's awesome. That's my order, I like that order.
Leslie: Oh she's lovely.
Mike: It was fun just coming up with her different phases. She starts to make more and more ugly decisions. I was talking to Joe about it at the beginning of the show, and said, "Hey, she just needs to just get hideous. What can you come up with?", and he came back with this drawing, that he told me he just kind of did as a joke, he said, "Aw, you know, they'll never go for this", and I said, "That's perfect!!" She just looks so funny.
Leslie: Okay Mike, so you've just got to answer the question, if we're talking about how it's beauty on the inside that counts, what are we saying here when she just gets uglier, and uglier, and uglier? That shouldn't really matter!
Mike: Yeah, we could parse this philosophy and really get into some deep waters here. It is that whole idea of her inward decisions having a consequence, we wanted to reflect that into a kind of comical hideousness coming out of her.
Leslie: And of course what he really teach here, at the end, is that juxtaposition of Queen Blueberry and Petunia is that what makes Petunia so beautiful is what's inside her heart.
Mike: Yeah, it's not that she's cute on the outside, it's just the decisions that she makes and the kindness she shows to the queen, that's what's beautiful about her.
Leslie: And that's what really gets recognized and really adored.
Mike: Jerry Gourd! Some people might think he sounds a little bit like Larry, and those people would be right.
Leslie: So see, at this point, she doesn't see her true self.
Mike: That's right, every time she sees herself in the mirror, she sees a falsely beautiful version of herself. She doesn't get that yet, she doesn't find out until later.
Leslie: How many times do you look in the mirror and see a false self?
Mike: Just with the right type of lighting I can do wonders.
Leslie: That mirror really is a bad guy.
Mike: He's so treacherous. I like this little camera move here as we move out. Just that minstrel hanging out, watching the whole thing.
Leslie: Here come the minstrels doing the little backstory here, helping us stay on track.
Mike: Originally, there was another scene after this where the minstrels went out to get Prince Larry and for timing we just had to cut it out, but I don't think at the end of it that I miss it. So they say, "Hey, let's go get the prince". And then they come back with the prince to the rescue afterwards. It works out pretty well.
Leslie: That looks like a King George. Is that a King George?
Mike: Oh absolutely! This whole queen's quarters and the balcony is a reuse of the King George and the Ducky castle. The textures on the inside are different so it's a little changed up, but we used that same set. Originally, the script had called for them being in a dining room, but we wanted to economize the set so we said, "Hey, let's just set up a table in her quarters." She's got advisors and subjects, so they can load up a table during the old time. So this is a Princess Bride ode. Inconceivable!
Leslie: There's the Lazy Susan, doing the switch. Although they didn't have a Lazy Susan in Princess Bride.
Mike: No he kind of just hid the viles behind, and did the switch and then they had the battle of wits to figure out what was the poisoned vile.
Leslie: I wonder if Sweetpea has the antidote built up. Isn't that what happened in Princess Bride? He had built up an immunity.
Mike: Yeah he had built up an immunity so it didn't matter which- what an interesting... If you play the Lazy Susan in slow-mo, you see she picks up a different one, which one of her advisors ends up drinking later because he's thirsty and he falls asleep. We don't answer the question of how he wakes up, because that's in a different episode.
Leslie: This is what I like here. She's really starting to speak what she believes and is true about her, and you see the mirror get nervous.
Mike: Yeah, he gets nervous and the queen really starts to take it in. She starts to hear her. We wanted to, while we were developing it, to really figure out, at what point does the queen really start to turn and when does her character arch, and it starts here, we start to see it, and later it comes when the mirror has Sweetpea on the turret. As she's really turning, she starts to go back to her normal self. She starts to lose her rabbit teeth, and her bushy eyebrows, and facial hair, not that ther's anything wrong with that.
Leslie: My eyebrows are too bushy. Oh, the true nature of the mirror is also being revealed.
Mike: It's a very Sherlock Holmes moment right here. One of the challenges for this mirror too was to make him the bad guy and sinister, but not make him scary. Not too menacing. He's got that menacing voice, and that menacing look, but he's also sort of ridiculous, Just watching him walk like that makes me laugh, just that "ding ding ding ding ding". So he's this big, tall, menacing mirror, but he's also ridiculous. The prince to the rescue! You know, it's funny with Larry as a hero, and it's the same in Larryboy, where he's the hero but he never really does anything. He's a bumbling hero. He tries hard, but at the end of the day- he does help Petunia, he catches Petunia at the end here, and they bounce down on the peas. But he's not quite the hero that he hopes to be. Okay, here goes the singing action scene. The action scene was actually a real big challenge for production, because typically with animation, what you'll do is record all the voices first, and then from there you'll go into animation, and once it's animated, it'll go into score. So you're scoring, and this case, Kurt Heinecke who does our scoring, is scoring to finished animation so he can pick up all of his cues and everything. The challenge with this scene is we couldn't have them singing the score until after the animation was already done, so it was sort of a chicken and an egg thing, so we edited the version first of the action scene, and we had them animate that- no I'm sorry, we layed it out in storyboards and Kurt wrote the score for it to storyboards. We brought that back to Phil. Phil sang it as Kurt had written it and then that went into animation. It was much more complicated than it normally is, but I think ti turned out really fun. It's really fun to see these guys react.
Leslie: I think we do action scenes well, I'm just recalling our most recent release, St. Nick. I love the scene where they're going through the snow and of course, what became the iconic image for us, was when they were in the sleigh and it crosses over and you see the moon in the back, kind of that Santa Claus- See, we get so many comments on that. They're in and out of the village, there's chasing scenes...
Mike: Just this whole climbing to the top of the castle, this is very much a Beauty and the Beast ode, right here. It's great if you can have, just from a story structure standpoint, you have your action climax, your emotional climax, and I think our most successful shows, those two are overlapped. When the main character has her epiphany right in or around the action scene, you have these really exciting moments building up to the realization of the character.
Leslie: Look at Sweetpea, she had immunity. She awoke! Forget the apple cider.
Mike: Oh! There he is. He's gonna have to be kissed by a frog.
Leslie: That was the real culprit. Now she's back to her real self!
Mike: Yeah, she starts to go back, she goes back to her real self.
Leslie: Did you add the beauty mark?
Mike: Well she's always had that, she's always had that beauty mark. Which also Mr. Lunt has too, as well. He's beautiful on the inside and the outside. I like these little bath toy noises the peas have when they bounce. Remember in the original versioin of the script, Larry and Sweetpea were going to get married?
Leslie: Oh yes.
Mike: And we had a discussion about that, how do we end this? Most princess stories end with the prince and the princess getting married. It ties up in a bow! But really, if you look at this story, it's called Sweetpea Beauty but the real hero in this story is the queen. The queen is the one who learns the lesson, she's the one who starts at the beginning wanting to be crowned queen again, and to really wrap up the story, it really needs to wrap up with her being recrowned queen again, so we forewent the wedding and ending at the coronation.
Leslie: (unintelligable) There's spots of just reality here, the queen is the hero and she's in part the hero because she learns from her mistakes. She was teachable. I think sometimes as parents, not meaning to, we can tell our kids, all about what they should aim for but how much do we ever teach them about how to handle mistakes or missteps, which we all have. How God can redeem them, and we remain teachable.
Mike: I was thinking about the mirror, what happened to the mirror. Most of the time, we redeem our villains, except for when our villains are our vices, so if you look at the Rumor Weed or The Fib From Outer Space, those villains don't represent actual redeemable people, but more vices. We broke our mirror, he ended up in shards, and obviously, we didn't want to make them too scary either. So we did it in a way that I thought was pretty fun. Our little coronation ceremony. I think Petunia would have a hard time being queen because that crown would just crush her. When she does eventually marry the prince and become queen, she's gonna need to get something more dainty. Maybe she can borrow Snoodlerella's crown.
Leslie: Let's see Sweetpea Beauty, she wasn't greedy for power.
Mike: That's right. She wasn't active behind the scenes to grab the throne. For folks who didn't see Pistachio, our last show, it's when we had the countertop makeover, so going forward with our countertops, we have our new Qwerty and our new blue wall, that was a big deal, with the last makeover they just painted the walls blue. That was it. It's funny our new Qwerty with video mail.
Leslie: We didn't get any comments on the blue wall or Qwerty, so if any of you out there want to let us know you noticed...
Mike: Oh I heard a few... not on the blue wall, I don't know if anybody noticed the blue wall, that was subtle.
Leslie: We didn't hear about the blue wall, not in customer service. Now we did hear about the change in the theme song, how we tightened up the pace.
Mike: Oh yeah, the theme song was like a minute and a half and now it's just a minute and... it's a little quicker and heavier.
Leslie: We had some folks that noticed. They didn't have a negative reaction, they just noticed the change.
Mike: I think if it had been too different, we would have heard about that but-
Leslie: But this just kind of tightened it up and-
Mike: I think that was nice... and reanimated it too and brought the whole cast in to sing.
Leslie: We pulled out the spa in the box and applied it to theme song.
Mike: Brought this back from Minnesota Cuke and the Search for Noah's Ark. Noah's Umbrella, sorry.
Leslie: Oh that's cute. And that's Ally in that live action.
Mike: Oh it's fun, it's really fun. And I think it helps kids to relate. We did the first one last time and we got good reactions about that, and I know kids love to watch other kids, so to see an actual other kid is learning that lesson is great.
Leslie: It's in one of my top 40 things I want to do, I want to be in Qwerty.
Mike: Okay we'll have Leslie in Qwerty. Let's talk a moment about this song, about Nichole Nordeman over the credits. This is such a beautiful song. I know initially Leslie, you reached out to Nichole, I think her manager to...?
Leslie: I think Nichole would say if she were here that if not her life message, certainly one of her top life messages about how our beauty, it's inside what counts. When we showed her the concept of the story, and really we started with the message we wanted to resource parents with, and resource our fans, both girls and boys, so that they could be really ministered to, she went nuts.
Mike: I know she had obviously spoken on the topic, and sung on the topic, and so that's what made us say, "Hey, I wonder if she would do a song for us", and it was neat hacing her watch the storyboards at the time, the show wasn't done but she came back with this song and when we first heard it it was just the real rough version with just her and piano. She was saying, "I hope you like this, I'm not sure, you know"
Leslie: We were all stunned. In the office, we listened to it, and we were just dancing up and down. She really got the message, it's such a beautiful song. People have to enjoy, it's one of the bonus features and we shot a whole music video of Nicole singing the song. I love how they introduced the mirror as a prop in the music video, and she just comes alive when she sings it in person and you see that. Oh it's just lovely. And by the way, I just have to comment, you've really embraced the woman inside of you. These credits with the pink and the swirlies.
Mike: Yeah, we went all out with pink swirlies and the whole thing.
Leslie: Yeah, you've just really got it!
Mike: When Brian Roberts, Ron Eddy did the title design, and Brian Roberts helped to do the animation fot it, it was really funny in an initial pass where he did a gag reel, directed by Mike Nawrocki, and parentheses appeared, not a girl. Just so it was clear. It was fun. Yeah, Ron and Brian did a wonderful job on these credits, just watching all these names go by, with people who worked really hard on this, we really appreciate all of their efforts. And the folks in Hawaii, aloha Hawaii folks. Alright, we got the BigIdea logo, Bob and Larry turning it around. Well, thank you everybody for joining us today, it's been a pleasure talking about Sweetpea Beauty!
Leslie: Thank you, bye!