Prep & Landing: The Snowball Protocol is the third half-hour special in the beloved, Emmy-winning animated franchise. It premieres Thursday Nov. 27 at 7pm on Disney Channel, Friday Nov. 28 on Disney+, and Sunday Nov. 30 at 9pm on ABC. Executive Producers Kevin Deters and Stevie Wermers-Skelton discuss the lasting impact of P&L, including this new adventure. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: Kevin, when you made that first special in 2009, the audience reaction and the 12 million people that tuned in on night one… How did you feel all that and take all of that in?

Kevin Deters: Oh, I felt pretty good. Yeah. (laughs) No, it was great. Thank you. Stevie and I worked really hard on that, and it was a really great opportunity that we had at the studio, to do something that Disney Feature [Animation], Walt Disney Animation Studios now, had never done, which is to create a holiday special. And it was a high bar we set for ourselves. We really wanted to strive for something that could sort of humbly sit on the shelf with some of those classics that we loved as kids ourselves, like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!”… and of course “A Charlie Brown Christmas”, as the gold standards. We thought, “Okay, well that’s a good goal to set for ourselves.” And we really love developing that world and those characters. It was a great team we worked with at the studio. It was sort of between the big movies and nobody really knew what it was gonna be. We made sure we had a lot of fun making it. Continue to be proud of the efforts and we’re thankful that it’s lived on and that we get to make a new one. It’s pretty great.

JM: Stevie, do you watch the other ones every year when they come on ABC?

Stevie Wermers-Skelton: Sadly no (laughs) because I could watch them whenever I want. Because we made them, I’ve seen them many, many, many times in many different iterations. I probably should, but I don’t even have cable anymore…

JM: But they’re on Disney+ now, which is good.

SWS: They’re on Disney+, Yes!

JM: It has been 14 years since “Naughty vs. Nice”. So Kevin, why was now the time to bring back Wayne and Lanny and Magee… bring back this gang 14 years later?

KD: Yeah, it’s been a while. But at the same time, those characters I don’t think have ever really left Stevie and my hearts and minds. When we created the original ones, we did a lot of writing, a lot of world building as you do, and fleshed out a lot of characters that we knew existed in the world that we just didn’t have time to fit into those original specials. And we were asked by the studio to start cooking up some new ideas. And I think that the advent of Disney+ and the hunger for really great holiday programming certainly helped spur that ask. And it was really fun to kind of dig out all of the old writings we’d done and drawings and old ideas that had fallen by the wayside and sift through it all and come up with this new one.

JM: You guys really expand the universe when it comes to “Prep & Landing” and the timeline, because when you jump into this, Stevie, it is a little bit of Christmas Eve, but you go really beyond that and this “Snowball Protocol” concept. Tell me about wanting to jump into other days on the calendar with this gang.

SWS: Well, you know, back in the day, back in like 2008, 2009, when the first one came out, we’ve often thought, and like Kevin alluded to, that we wanna build to really build this world. And you know, one of the questions you ask yourself was like, “Well, there’s Christmas, but then what about the rest of the year? What do these guys do in January, when it’s downtime?” So that’s why we thought maybe they go on a tropical vacation. That’s something that’s completely opposite of where they’re living 24-7 the rest of the year. So we had the idea for them going to a tropical island back then.

JM: Wow.

SWS: Just to kind of flesh it out and also… we’ve been on a couple of Disney member cruises in the past where we’ve premiered “Naughty vs. Nice”, and also for “Olaf’s Frozen Adventure” that we also co-directed. So we had this idea in our head, this would be an awesome thing for the elves to do right after Christmas — to be able to go to some tropical island and to see them in a completely different element was something we always thought would be great.

JM: It is fun and the humor is there. And Kevin, because you have this cast again, of Dave Foley, Kevin Richardson and Sarah Chalke returning, how did it feel to have them back in the booth and also helping you guys to expand out this world?

KD: It was a lot of fun. We’ve gotten to know them pretty well over the years and stayed in sort of loose contact here and there. And it was a real pleasure to bring ’em back. They really epitomize those characters and they know them as well as we do. And it was like putting on a very comfortable pair of old sweatpants or something. Everybody slipped right back into it and we had a blast, but still found ways to explore new sides of the characters too, especially with Magee and this new one.

JM: Yes. There’s some great moments with McGee. There’s so many things I wanna say, but I don’t wanna spoil everything for the fans. Stevie, the fact that this is called “The Snowball Protocol” and Wayne has to sort of face ‘Well, do we tell [Santa]? Do we not?’ allowed you to come up with interesting concepts. How did you wanna approach The Snowball Protocol itself, including a very cute seal in the mix?

SMS: As you said, The Snowball Protocol is ehsy Wayne basically tells Lanny after the things go awry. ‘We’re not gonna say anything about this. We’re gonna initiate this snowball protocol, meaning we will not talk about this forever.’ But then he gets in the hot seat with Santa and then he inadvertently admits to doing some things in the past that are not really what he was talking about earlier, but this is how we get to see the anthology and other things that he’s thought he’s done wrong in the past.

JM: It’s such a good concept, and there’s so much great dialogue and the timing of it. Kevin, what I love about the Nog the seal is how adorable Nog is. But also, there is a moment in “Olaf’s Frozen Adventure”, which is terrific as well… when Olaf holds the two kittens. And it reminded me of just how adorable and hilarious that moment is.

KD: Oh, thank you. Yeah, that project was a really nice journey for Stevie and myself. We had a really wonderful group of collaborators on that who we still maintain close contact with. In fact, Kate Anderson and Elyssa Samsel, who were our songwriters on “Olaf”, also wrote a song for us here… that Magee sings. So it was really fun to get to work with them again. And Nog is a pretty cute character. That’s another character we sort of had in the back of our minds for a while. We just didn’t really have a place for him, so, it was pretty great when we were like, “Oh, here’s a great chance to put him in there.”

JM: Stevie, because you have 22 to 24 minutes, something like that, for these specials, and because you have so many ideas, how difficult is it to edit things out? And also you have this song that I’m sure had to be a certain length because you needed it to place it in a certain [point]. How difficult is that whole process?

SWS: It’s very difficult. It’s probably one of the biggest challenges of making anything like this. I take my hat off to people that make sitcoms and all other things like that all the time. They have to get these things down to the frame, down to the split second. Fortunately we didn’t have to quite do as much, because we knew it was gonna release on Disney+, so it wouldn’t probably have any ads. So it’s very difficult. And we did lose a few little babies that I particularly liked, one of them being about the explanation of where Tiny was in the island section. I won’t tell you. But yeah, we had an explanation of why he was not there. So we had to cut that. You have to lose some of your darlings and it hurts, but you have to go like, “Okay, this is for the betterment of the story. We gotta keep moving and we gotta get it made.”

JM: Kevin, if you’ve been with this franchise since 2009, you will watch this special and go, “The humor is there, the emotion is there. And this arc of Wayne and Lanny about them being coworkers versus friends… you will feel that emotion.” How did it feel for you in a sense of ending this as a trilogy in a sense, but you could do more beyond [this], with that emotional arc that you’ve had with these two characters?

KD: Thanks for the kind words. We always want to have something to say. We really wanted Wayne to sort of be reminded of the value that his partner Lanny brings in his life. It’s more than just sort of working together one evening out of the year kind of a thing. We felt that certainly would resonate at really any time of the year, but ideally definitely at the holiday season. You just want to have a nice emotional foundation your audience can relate to and they can see themselves in the characters.

JM: Without question. That’s what impressed me so much… one of the factors… of the first one: “Wow, here is this emotion of what this holiday means to kids, what this holiday means to these elves, to these characters, to everybody.” And so, Stevie, do you wanna do more? You’ve got all these ideas. Are you ready to do more? The whole calendar year?

SWS: Of course! Yeah. That’s why I encourage everybody to watch it so we can do more. (laughs)