“If you’re not meeting your audience where they are, there’s a problem with your show,” The Ghost and Molly McGee co-creator Bob Motz tells me ahead of the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Disney Channel show’s second season. “I, for one, am excited to explore ܫthese topics that once upon a time weren’t things you could talk about.”

First debuting in October 2021 as shows like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Owl House and Amphibia were dominating discussion on the network, The Ghost and Molly McGee is a cutesy-animated comedy about a young girl called Molly who befriends a grumpy ghost called Scratch as the two become besties split across different planes of existence. Back then I sat down with Ashly Burch and talked aboutಌ bringing this titular charact💎er to life, but for the second season, it was time for a natter with the creator🉐s. Bill Motz and Bob Roth are seasoned veter😼ans of animation, and are keen to inject their latest project with a contemporary dose of imagination all ages can enjoy.

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The second season is an opportunity to greatly expand on characters and relationships the first spent several hours introducing, knowing your audience is already in♏vested in this world and wants to see more from it.

In the medium🔜 and age demographic it occupies though, Motz and Roth say there’s a balance they hope to strike. “When we sit down at the beginning of a season in our writer’s room, we put cards all over the wall and try to decide what sort of stories we want to tell,” Roth explains. “Then we talk about, ‘Okay, what are the silly little things we want to do?’ and having it all up on a wall means you can recognize moments to dip int𒉰o the overall story of the season, and to make sure we’re hitting them at a regular cadence. So by the end it doesn’t feel like we’re cramming it all in because we forgot, or [doing] it up front and not mentioning it for 20 episodes.”

Roth describes the writing process as having a rhythm as the crew jump between ❀a dozen minutes of q🔴uickfire fun and more nuanced, story-based episodes that push forward the core narrative in ways that matter. “Sometimes online I see fans calling these filler episodes, and I could not disagree more,” Roth adds. “These are the episodes where you really get to learn about the characters, because they’re not dealing with the big overall things. These are their everyday moments.”

Speaking of the mundane, the second series The Ghost and Molly McGee will feature an entire episode where our heroine must deal with the embarrassment of her first period. It’s a boring yet important topic for shows like this to tackle, even more so when audiences might have few sources or voices to turn to in their lives to be educated on such things. “It’s necessary to talk about, and has only recently become [possible],” Roth tells me regarding the episode. “For the majority of Bill and I’s career that was a verboten topic, it wasn’t🅠 even something you’d consider because there wasn’t the leeway to have that kind of honest discussion with your audience. I think that’s changed, and I think it’s a change for the better.”

It’s refreshing to see two seasoned voices in the field, who have worked on shows ranging from Kim Possible to Darkwing Duck, r🍎ecognise the necessity of this modern change. “Part of what we get the privilege of doing in making content, especially for this age demographic, is you get to talk about relatable occurrences in the🌱ir lives, and half our audience menstruates,” Bill Motz adds with a laugh, as if these topics ever being off the table was absurd. “It’s a struggle to go through and there are all sorts of issues about that transition from childhood to adulthood that is awkward and frightening for you, your friends, and your family.”

Roth says that their writer’s room can talk about any subject under the sun “so long as we can find a way to make it funny” and this approach is often how po🐲ignant or controversial topics can be raised with younger audiences in ways that they can not only understand, but benefit from. June, a new character introduced in the season premiere as part of The Chen family - who also🎀 happen to be expert ghost hunters - is autistic, a facet of her personality touched on in her very first line of dialogue. It’s not subtle, but it’s never intended to be here.

“We want to make sure we approach it with some se🦄nsitivity,” Roth assures me. “That means talking to people - we talked to autistic consultants who helped us design the character from the bottom up and build🌼 June into who she is. Then we cast authentically too. Sue Ann Pien, who plays June, [is autistic], and one of the first things we said was, ‘If you see something in the script that doesn’t feel like it’d be you, say something.”

Authenticity and honesty are increasingly important factors for all creators nowadays, even more so when online fandoms obsessed with minor details and scrupulous oversights will be more than eager to point things out. “You have to remember that Twitter isn’t the real world,” Roth tells me. “There’s danger of presuming that what you see from the fans online is what the rest of the world is feeling, and sometimes that is the case, and sometimes it’s because they're drawn to this stuff and have their own unique perspective. It can be a challenge to disentangle what is a reaction isolated to the community and a more universal response.”

Motz also offers a hard truth that not everyone considers: “Animation takes so long, as you well know, that we were deep into season two before season one had even premiered. So you g🍬et that fan feedback and there’s a part of you that goes, ‘Just hold on. We’re doing it!”’

The Ghost and Molly McGee Returns To Disney Channel On April 1

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