[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Thanks for sticking with us on The takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Back in the 2000s, TV audiences who wanted a dose of fun family high jinks and creative animation could turn on the Disney Channel and watch The Proud Family. Centered around daughter Penny Proud and her parents Oscar and Trudy, The Proud Family was an early pioneer into Black family animation. This week, The Proud Family is back, streaming new episodes on Disney Plus with an updated theme song to boot.

[music]

Instead of leaving the Proud's back in the arts, the show producers have brought the show into our current moment, while aging up the characters by just a few years.

Trudy: What are you upset about, Penny?

Penny: My friends. They're all at the mall giving makeup boy $20 for an autograph.

Trudy: Oh, yes. That boy who gives makeup tips.

Oscar: A boy that does makeup. What is your generation coming to, Penny?

Penny: I don't know, daddy. They're like zombies. They do what any random noob tells them to do.

Trudy: Relax, Penny. We did the same thing when I was a kid. Everybody used to dress up like Prince. The girls and the boys.

Penny: Who's Prince?

Oscar: Who's Prince?

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: To learn more about how they'd reshaped the show for 2022, I spoke with Bruce W. Smith and Ralph Farquhar, the co-executive producers of The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder. Bruce started things off by explaining why they wanted to bring the show back, and also politely correcting me when I referred to it as a reboot.

Bruce W. Smith: This is a revival. It's a rekindling of sorts. Ralph and I, when we first did the show back in 2000, when we finished doing the show back in 2005-ish, we knew we had a lot of unfinished business. We really established the world really well and all the characters. We had so many characters in the world that we wanted so many chances to tell so many different stories. This is that part. The real true difference is we've aged the characters up a couple of years. We're in a world of social media and lots of racial tension, and all those things play completely into our hands when recreating the show.

Melissa Harris-Perry: How old is Penny Proud now?

Ralph Farquhar: Penny is 14 years old now. Originally, and there's much debate about this, so this is going to be a definitive statement. We played them as tweens, which was between 12 and 13. Now we've taken it two years later, and Penny and her crew are 14. LaCienega, we have [unintelligible 00:02:58]. That's where we are today age-wise.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Penny is a real and full-on teenager now. Now, having raised one of those through the tween years and into the teen years, and now real young adult years, I can say there's a big difference between 14 and 12. If she's going to be 14 in this moment of a second wave of Black Lives Matter, what's some of what we should be looking for in Penny Proud and her crew?

Bruce W. Smith: Well, lots of issues we handled the first time around, we really had to suggest metaphorically drop and such. We're on Disney Plus this time around, and some of the skipping around shackles have been unleashed, so to speak. We get to really dive into issues that really matter to teens right now. We talk about kids getting counseled on social media. One of the things we didn't get a chance to really touch on is that we dealt with racism in a few episodes the first time around in the first run, but we've never really dealt with racism within the crew.

We deal with that as well. We also deal with a lot of gender politics as well. For example, our character Michael, we suggested he was gay in the first run of the show. Michael, this character now is out and fabulous. We have a whole lot of fun with his characterization, who he is right now.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There is even more pride in The Proud Family this time.

Ralph Farquhar: Absolutely. Look, we have the addition of some new characters. Keke Palmer's playing Maya, who's sort of a woke sister, if you will, and her brother KG, which stands for King Grade, which is his Wu-Tang name, they're adopted siblings, if you will, and their parents are same-sex parents. We have Billy Porter and Zachary Quinto voicing their parents. That's one of the biggest things we explore moving forward, the gender politics of the day. The big change from 2001 when we first premiered and now is exactly that. We're tackling that head-on.

That played into us revoicing the Michael character. We brought on EJ Johnson to bring that authenticity to that voice. A totally redesigned character, which I know everybody's going to absolutely love. Proud Family: Louder and Prouder is definitely a capital P on the prouder side.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is presumably part of the joy of what you can do with animation, that would be impossible to do at least with the exact same cast, if 20 years had actually passed. You can age them by a year or two across two decades.

Bruce W. Smith: Yes. The beauty of animation is exactly that. You can continue to tell the story, and our characters can still stay just as fresh, the same age, in the same era as we need them to be. That allows us to tell a plethora of stories with these characters and really flesh out this world to where these characters-- in most cases, in anime shows, characters really have a one dimension to them. I think what's great about the writing in the show is that we really continue to fully realize these characters and make them as identifiable to your brothers, your sisters, your mama, everybody that you grew up with, that really hadn't had a voice in this medium.

The animation, the truth of the matter is, you trace the history of us Black folk in animation, and it hasn't necessarily been kind. That was really the inspiration for me of creating this show, because I knew there was a space for this at the time where you had a lot of animated sitcoms blooming. You had The Simpsons, you had Family Guy, King of the Hill, and the question remaining was, where are the Black people at? I knew that the answer truly lies within our culture. Our culture is rich. I thought that this was the one medium that we hadn't really permeated that landscape and really took the truest deep dive to give the fullest version of us.

Ralph Farquhar: The great thing, Melissa, about animation, which a lot of people may not realize or understand, is that, not only has the cast not aged, but Bruce and I have only age two years also.

[laughter]

Anyway, I couldn't resist that. One of the great things about reviving the show, if you will, is we get to do it with people who were actually fans of the show. We like to refer to our Proud Family: Louder and Prouder as the ultimate fan art because now, our writers, our artists, our directors were fans of the show, watched the original show. That's how we can come back 20 years since we first premiered, revive the show and be as fresh and as urgent as we need to be, because we've got some very qualified, very talented young people making the show right now.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Bruce W. Smith and Ralph Farquhar are co-executive producers of The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder. Pass those anti-CRT bills if you want state legislatures. The kids can just go home and turn on The Proud Family. Bruce and Ralph, thanks so much.

Ralph Farquhar: Thank you.

Bruce W. Smith: Thank you, Melissa.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.