Big City Greens the Movie: Spacecation, a feature-length project based on animated show Big City Greens, debuts Thursday, June 6 on Disney Channel, and a day later on Disney Plus. The show is about the Green family — boy Cricket, girl Tilly, Dad and Gramma, who are not city people but end up in the big city. With four seasons under its belt, the Greens are comfortable in the city, and the fish-out-of-water concept perhaps needed a jumpstart.
So the Houghton brothers, who created the show, sent the Greens to space.
“There’s no place on Earth, literally, where they would be more out of place,” said Shane Houghton.
He noted that the series’ pilot is titled “Space Chicken,” and saw Cricket, who is 10, attempt to launch a chicken into space. “Here we are, years later, actually launching Cricket into space,” Shane said.
Chris Houghton voices Cricket. (“Chris is now a bona fide movie star!” enthused Shane.)
The movie sees a bizarre billionaire, named Gwendolyn Zapp, tap the agriculturally inclined Greens to salvage her mission to grow crops in space. The Houghtons had Elon Musk in mind when dreaming up Zapp.
“There’s so many crazy rich people right now, it’s hard to keep track of them all,” Chris said. “They’re cannon fodder for a crazy cartoon villain.”
He added that the various real-life billionaires with their sights set on space “are all three degrees away from Bond villains.”
The Houghton brothers wanted the movie to be bigger and bolder than the show, and also something that those who’ve not seen the series could still enjoy. “We didn’t want anybody to have to do homework to watch a movie,” said Shane.
He described the goal for the film as being “bigger, better, more epic highs…the highs have to be higher and the lows have to be lower. This has to be a full cinematic experience.”
Chris added, “what’s a story that we can’t tell in the series, and this seemed to check that box.”
Producing the show and movie at the same time was “excruciating and exhausting,” Shane said, but that kind of challenge left the Houghton brothers “both excited and exhausted.”
Astronaut Scott Kelly (now a U.S. senator), who has made four ventures to space, including one to the International Space Station that lasted a full year, is a guest voice in the movie. Working with him made Chris nervous. “It’s one thing to talk to a movie star or celebrity, that’s very exciting,” he said. “But the amount of people who have been to space, and Scott Kelly spent a year in space. There are very few humans who have done that, and I think that’s a remarkable thing.”
Shane mentioned how space trips backed by Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and other titans began popping up after they started writing the movie.
“Hopefully this movie is still relevant in years to come,” he said, “when we’re all vacationing in space.”
