Six Fun Facts About Big Hero 6: The Series

Thank you to Disney and Pixar Studios for hosting me during the #PixarCocoEvent which included this special #BigHero6 event.

I have a confession. When Big Hero 6 was released I didn’t see it in the theater. It didn’t have a princess. I didn’t think it would be my kind of thing. Then I was sent a copy of the Blu-Ray and I saw it for the first time. I fell in love. I cried like a baby. I wanted to see more Honey Lemon! Now the Big Hero 6 team is back in an all new series for Disney XD. We had a chance to talk about the new show with with Big Hero 6: The Series star Ryan Potter (voice of “Hiro”) and Executive Producers Mark McCorkle, Bob Schooley & Nick Filippi.

The actors get a chance to ad lib in the booth.

Bob Schooley: We always encourage the actors, and especially when you’re adapting a movie, the actors know the characters better than we do coming in, so we let them take the lead on that to a big degree.

Stan Lee will be back!

Mark McCorkle: Somebody we’re very excited that we brought back, Stan Lee, who plays Fred’s dad in that little after credit sequence. The back story is that he was a superhero in the past and he gets to be the voice of wisdom from Fred, and then a particular episode for Hiro. And it’s just great to work with Stan Lee like that. Intimidating, but an honor.

The series will have a different animation style from the film.

Nick Filippi: It is traditional hand-drawn animation, where the feature was computer generated 3D animation. We chose to go with hand-drawn animation partially because we wanted to create a new world and look for the show. We wanted everybody to immediately recognize these characters, to embrace these characters that they fell in love with in the movie, but we wanted to have a fresh start on the show, so we choose hand-drawn animation similar to what Disney was doing in the 60’s.

They’ve embraced the mashup world of San Fransokyo.

Bob Schooley: We fell in love with the idea of this mash-up culture of San Francisco and Tokyo, just because it was such a cool idea. And that sort of informed the animation. We were like let’s make it look like sort of traditional American animation. The stuff in it like noodle burger, which are hamburgers on a Ramen bun roll. So there’s a lot of that. And Muirahara Woods, this is a smash up. It’s like Muir Woods and Tokyo’s Aokigahara Forest. So it definitely became sort of this fun thing to create that combo world.

We’ll get to a closer look at the entire Big Hero 6 team.

Mark McCorkle: We did a spotlight on Fred and a spotlight on Go Go and Honey Lemon. We felt like we knew that Hiro and Baymax were the heart of this show, of this whole franchise. So we knew that would be the big thrust for the series, but as fans we got to see so little of those other characters in the movie. It was fun to say, okay, let’s do more with them.

We can look forward to some great villains, including some real girl power.

Bob Schooley: We have Katy Mixon from American Housewife and she’s hilarious. We have really about half and half, male to female roles.
Mark McCorkle: Yeah, she’s part of a something that every superhero show needs to have. She’s part of a mother-daughter 80’s themed dance crime team.
Bob Schooley: Called high voltage.

You can catch the one hour television movie Big Hero 6: Baymax Returns on Monday, November 20th at 8pm EDT on Disney XD, then come back weekly to catch the series!