Nickelodeon on May 2 will debut The Loud House, a cartoon series about what it takes to survive in a huge family as seen through the eyes of 11-year-old Lincoln, the sole boy amid 10 sisters. Chris Savino, creator and exec producer, chats with CynKids about the show, what resonates with kids today, and his 25 years in the animation (his first gig was with Nick’s The Ren & Stimpy Show).
From rabbits to humans
The original pitch was about a boy rabbit with 25 sisters and the Nickelodeon development team was looking for a big family pitch and suggested we make the characters human. Of course we couldn’t have 25 sisters, so we narrowed it down to 10, five each side of Lincoln. At that point it started to connect to my family I’m nine out of 10 siblings, we have five boys and five girls and the content of the story pitches are a little more personal. I also pulled in my sisters’ names, and Lincoln happened to be the street I grew up on. But nothing of me is in the character of Lincoln. I liked drawing and that wasn’t something I could do in the chaos of a big family, so I would often excuse myself out of the big gatherings and go out and draw. Lincoln is a man with a plan; he is the opposite of me.
Where does The Loud House fit into today’s cartoon landscape?
When we were getting to the pilot stage, Breadwinners was coming out on Nickelodeon, and it’s such a zany carton. I started to worry that’s where cartoons are going, and what I was doing was so not cartoony. But it’s a matter of trusting my instincts. This is a real feeling show. Of course it’s a cartoon and there are cartoony elements, but I wanted it to feel grounded, and that someone watching it could maybe relate to experiences they had. In most cases the writers and storyboard team were comfortable pitching their childhood stories as ideas. I’m hoping the time is right for a cartoon that isn’t fantasy-based, that there’s room for one that has real, relatable grounded story line where you see a bunch of kids, from 17 down to a year and a half, creating problems within the household and working them out.
Kids think parents are “cool”
One surprising thing that came out of testing the pilot was that we had mention of the parents, but they were nowhere to be found. They were out for the night. And one of the things the kids brought up was they wanted to make sure the parents were there. They understood the kids were forced into situations where they wanted to solve their own problems, but they didn’t want the kids having complete rule of the roost. So it was great to hear they wanted to know the parents were at least around. Kids today aren’t the kids of a certain era where parents were dumb and kids ruled. Kids now seem think their parents are pretty cool.
How has the animation business changed in 25 years?
As you get older you start to think about your viability – can I still keep up with young talent coming in with fresh new ideas. Especially with technology, it really does make you feel old school. But what hasn’t changed is there’s no replacement for someone that understands how to make cartoons – it’s a business and a lot of money is exchanged to make these cartoons – that it’s not a singular voice sitting at home and not having to deal with notes, or “interference.” It is collaborative and you have to be willing to give and take. Every single production, no matter whether it’s funny animals, self-referential, whatever it’s about – we are all really busting our butts to make the best cartoon we can and that’s never changed.
Sizing up the competition
Kids will watch a 30-second YouTube clip of stick figures that gets 1 million hits and we could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a cartoon and it gets two hits. The question is, What do we have to do to get a piece of their content viewership? There’s definitely more pressure these days, and we are still a commercial ad-based network and we still have to follow those rules. There’s been a shift away from watching the kind of standard cartoons I grew up with but I don’t feel like it’s the length of the content that makes the difference. I think a kid will watch an 11-minute, 30-second, 22-minute piece of content. It’s more about how many they can get. We’re doing 10 episodes of The Loud House in a row. We don’t have to make content shorter to appease what we think is this short attention span for kids. It’s more that kids want what they want, now.
