A Comic Book About a Guy Visiting a Girls Family During Winter Religion
A Groundbreaking Cartoon Family Returns, 'Louder and Prouder'
"The Proud Family unit: Louder and Prouder," on Disney+, revives a beloved animated serial for a new generation.
When "The Proud Family" debuted on the Disney Aqueduct on Sept. 15, 2001, it introduced one of Boob tube's first blithe African American families.
Over 52 episodes and a TV flick, the series offered a lighthearted delineation of a Black suburban family going near their everyday lives. The headstrong centre-schooler Penny Proud (voiced by Kyla Pratt) took the lead, with her strict but loving parents Oscar and Trudy (Tommy Davidson and Paula Jai Parker), feisty grandmother Suga Mama (Jo Marie Payton) and precocious babe twin siblings BeBe and CeCe rounding out the residuum of the clan.
They bickered, supported i another, threw shade and showed dear — all of the things that typical on-screen families do. Just earlier The Prouds, Idiot box audiences rarely got to see a Black cartoon family doing those run-of-the-mill things, too.
Now the groundbreaking brood is back with "The Proud Family unit: Louder and Prouder," a 10-episode revival scheduled to air weekly on Disney+ starting Feb. 23.
During the show'due south original run, from 2001 to 2005, Penny went through the paces of early on adolescence — goofing effectually with her multicultural crew of friends, pouting about chores, dodging school bullies and testing parental boundaries. While many of the show's themes were universal, they were delivered in a way that was uniquely and intentionally rooted in Black culture.
The dialogue was studded with the kinds of colloquialisms and colloquial that can be heard in many Black households. The children'south playground barrack employed of-the-moment slang, often pulled from rap lyrics. There were personal jabs about existence "ashy" and class warfare was waged whenever the working-class branch of the family butted heads with their "bougie" in-laws.
Even the body linguistic communication and nonverbal cues — a wary side-center, an indignant up-and-down glare — were embedded as nods to Black viewers. The humor worked on multiple levels, with silly sight gags that entreatment to grade-schoolers and more than subtle punch lines to keep grown-ups engaged.
"A lot of what nosotros'd do was like, 'Wink, flash. You know what we're maxim, right?'" said Bruce W. Smith, the show's creator. "We were hiding a lot of allusion and, frankly, family unit business under the guise of what our characters were saying and going through. Where the show shines is in all of its cultural references."
Smith is a veteran animator who spent much of the '90s working on feature films like "Space Jam" and Disney's "Tarzan" and "The Emperor's New Groove." Past the end of that decade, he set his sights on serialized tv, aiming to fill a void in the small screen's animated offerings.
"'The Simpsons,' 'Family Guy,' 'King of the Colina,' all these animated sitcoms became the rage," he said. "I was just looking at them similar: OK, we're not in this. We're not involved somehow, and nosotros should be."
At the time, live-activeness sitcoms like "Moesha" and "Sister, Sister" had proven that Black teenage girls could both carry a series and draw a dedicated audition. Smith set out to create a cartoon sitcom in the vein of "Moesha" — 1 that centered a Black girl's life and experiences.
His offset footstep was teaming up with Ralph Farquhar, a creator of "Moesha," as well as its spinoff, "The Parkers," and the brusque-lived Black family unit dramedy "Due south Primal." Together, they oversaw "The Proud Family" and its subsequent 2005 TV moving picture, with Smith as well directing several episodes.
"The fact that there was no one else doing it was sad," Farquhar said, in a joint video interview with Smith. "But for us, information technology was this opportunity. We wanted to tell our stories in a style that we understand. In that nuanced style that just comes from living it."
Smith added: "The great affair about it was there was zilch before us. There was no bar set. For united states, that was exciting because and so we could fix the bar."
In addition to commonplace domestic scenes — kitchen table spats, curfew breaches, babysitting snafus — there was a smattering of more educational story lines. These included a poignant Kwanzaa commemoration and a Blackness History Month tribute to ofttimes-overlooked luminaries similar the pioneering aviator Bessie Coleman and Shirley Chisholm, the offset Black adult female elected to Congress.
"That's what I loved about the original: We talked nigh things that other people shied away from," said Pratt, who took on the function of Penny at age 14. "And nosotros're doing the same thing this time around."
The revival, which is also overseen by Smith and Farquhar, retains much of the original'south flavor, merely it has been updated for the 2020s. Instead of pagers, the kids use smartphones. Dated phrases similar "off the heezy fo' sheezy" are out; "woke" and "Black girl magic" are now in.
The original featured guest appearances by popular early '00s performers like Lil' Romeo, Mos Def and Mariah Carey. "Louder and Prouder" is similarly star-studded, with cameos by the likes of Lil Nas X, Chance the Rapper and Lizzo. The heartwarming theme song, performed by Solange Knowles and Destiny's Kid, besides got a makeover — the 2022 version is sung by the newcomer Joyce Wrice.
Penny and her friends are now solidly into their teens, with all of the torso changes, heightened hormones and social minefields that entails. And a few new players have joined the returning core cast.
The sometime reality TV star EJ Johnson voices Penny'southward gender-fluid friend Michael. (The recurring character Wizard Kelly is a sly innuendo to Johnson's male parent, the N.B.A. legend Magic Johnson.) And a same-sex couple, Barry and Randall Leibowitz-Jenkins (Zachary Quinto and Baton Porter), have moved into the neighborhood with their adopted teenagers: son Francis (Artist Dubose, better known as the rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie) and daughter Maya (Keke Palmer), a fiery activist who serves as Penny's new foil.
Palmer, whose quantum came in the 2006 film "Akeelah and the Bee," credits Farquhar with discovering her a few years earlier, when she was 10. (He cast her in a Disney Channel pilot that didn't get picked up.) He asked her to bring together "Louder and Prouder" because he knew she'd been a longtime fan of the original.
"I saw a family that reminded me of my own — I even had male child-girl twins in my family," Palmer said. "That was a evidence that represented what my Blackness American culture looked similar. I idea they got it right!"
Withal, Disney chose not to renew "The Proud Family" when the original production run ended in 2005. (Disney declined to comment on the stop of the original evidence.) In the interview, Smith and Farquhar said they have never known why the evidence wasn't immune to go along, merely they fabricated clear that they e'er hoped to bring it dorsum in some form.
"From the moment we stopped doing the original version, we had been candidature to bring information technology back," Farquhar said. "We weren't quite sure why nosotros always even stopped."
They weren't lone. "The Proud Family" has been a steady source of millennial nostalgia online, with fans sharing art and cosplay photos inspired past the bear witness on social media, and revisiting beloved episodes in blog posts. Pratt said overzealous fans have often reached out to her in real life, too.
"People were talking to me literally every other mean solar day of my life, trying to get the show dorsum on," she said.
Farquhar and Smith said they noticed a new outpouring from "Proud" fans after Disney+ began streaming the original on Jan. 1, 2020. Disney apparently noticed, too. The visitor approached the men about a revival, and then publicly announced it on Feb. 27, 2020.
Farquhar and Smith accept since signed a multiyear overall deal with Disney to produce animated and live-action series and movies and to develop projects for emerging and various talent. Smith boasted that the "Louder and Prouder" staff, from the directors to layout artists to animators, "looks like the bear witness." (Like about of the entertainment industry, animation has historically offered far fewer opportunities to women and people of color than to white men.)
Smith has wanted to expand Black people'due south presence and influence in animation since he started working in the industry in the early on 1980s, he said, a mission informed by his own experiences as a young drawing fan.
"When I was growing up, I loved shows like 'The Flintstones' and 'The Jetsons,'" he said. Simply together they painted an unwelcoming picture: "I didn't exist in the beginning of time, and I don't think they're looking for me to exist when spaceships start flying off this planet."
"I gotta do something well-nigh that," he continued. "Considering I honey this medium and I want to see myself in this."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/arts/television/proud-family-returns.html
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