September 13th, 2021 
Jackson Murphy 
New Amazon Prime Video animated series Do, Re & Mi is a fun musical comedy about three birds and their love of friendship, adventure and music. This has been a passion project for co-creators Jackie Tohn and Michael Scharf for nearly a decade. To say they’re excited for the show to finally premiere this Friday September 17th is an understatement. (This interview was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: This show was greenlit three years ago. What amazed you the most about this entire process of making this show over the last three years?
Jackie Tohn: Well what’s interesting is: Mike brought me in on this show in 2013 or 2014.
Michael Scharf: Between the two. Yeah.
JT: Right. Mike and I were working on this in a coffee shop on Sunset Blvd. in 2014. Kristen Bell came on board in 2015. Gaumont came on board soon thereafter. We were in development with this incredible production company for years THEN Amazon came on board. And we were in development with them for years and then we finally started voice recordings and scripts began to take shape and Dave Schuler and I were really writing the songs in about 2018/2019. It’s crazy.
JM: That’s unbelievable. So for a good portion of your lives, it’s been devoted to this one show and now it’s finally here. Is it relief? Is it celebration? What’s the emotion you’re feeling the most?
JT: Well I’m only 12 years old, so it’s been half of my life, which is crazy.
JM: (laughs)
MS: I’m over the maestro moon. It’s fantastic. I’m so nervous. I really want the kids and parents to engage in it. We really had this goal of making sure music education could be accessible to kids around the world and we really have the opportunity now. The starting line starts on September 17th and hopefully they all love it.
JM: I think they will. I’ve got a three-year-old cousin who will love this show.
JT: Of the many things we pride ourselves on with this show, we are of course sneak-teaching music education to the kids. The more they enjoy it, the more they’ll be secretly learning. Every episode is a different genre of music, so your three-year-old cousin will be learning hip-hop, classical, opera, country, rock. We’re really trying to expand kids’ minds. It was important to us to make a children’s music show that didn’t make the parent wanna put the tablet in the microwave.
JM: Good. Not be annoying. Be important, educational and fun. You’ve got it.
JT: And real songs that parents are gonna wanna listen to over and over in the car with the kids.
JM: Yes, legitimate songs and legitimate fun. It’s interesting you bring up teaching kids about music. When I was young, and even before I saw the entire movie of The Sound of Music, in my music class in elementary school my teacher would often play the “Do Re Mi” song – to show music in entertainment and movies. Michael, was The Sound of Music an inspiration for you and a movie you’ve latched onto since you were young?
MS: Yeah. I think I watched that movie at least 20 times with my family growing up. My mom wanted me to be a classical pianist, so she put me in kinder music at three years old. Classical piano, trumpets, choir, acapella groups… and I was never good at music. But I really had a good time, enough to want to make this amazing project with Jackie and all the amazing [people] attached. With how engaged my mom was, what I love about this project and what Gaumont and Amazon are doing is making sure not only kids are gonna engage with it but their parents are gonna want to [as well]. They’re gonna have lesson plans that pair with episodes and app games so they can teach and engage with their kids as well.
JM: I’ve always loved owls. My grandmother collected owl figurines. Jackie, what do you find so special about them?
JT: We sort of feel like owls are wise, right? And our bird Do… We wanted to give each of our lead characters super relatable character traits that kids really relate to and experience. Do is really scared and doesn’t know how to fly, so he’s sort of the late bloomer of the group. There’s always a bunch of those kids in class who can’t quite do what other kids can do. That’s what Do signifies in our show. Because he’s an owl, he’s wise and has a big brain. He can’t fly yet but he’s an inventor. He’s always reading books and encyclopedias, so he knows how to get them out of any pickle in a pinch. Mi [our bluebird] is ready for anything. She’ll try anything. But she also has her own insecurities and fears. She has a very can-do attitude but also real and grounded, whereas Re, the hummingbird… my favorite bird… is super fast-moving. She’s moving so, so quickly, she constantly needs to be reminded to slow down, take a breath, listen to your body, have a snack. There’s always that hyper kid running around (that of course was me).
MS: And I love the owl because it was my high school mascot, so that always connected to me.
JM: What you’re saying about kids with different personalities is so right. You have an episode about rain (will it go away?) When I was young, I had a little teddy bear named Mr. Tormenta who helped me get through the storms. Kids are so curious about the weather. Kids are so curious about noises. You get into that in another episode. Michael, how interesting is it for you to study kids and their personalities in incorporating those aspects into the characters and the storylines?
MS: They’re the driving force behind everything that we’re doing. Every kid has their own personality, just like every character that you’re writing on screen. If you can really make a character who’s true to your viewer at home, they’re gonna be able to connect and engage with it more and have a more fun time. And if they have more fun, they’re gonna learn and absorb more. It was about making sure we had a good variety of characters that could connect to all the home viewers who will hopefully fall in love with them.
JM: Jackie, you’re friends with Kristen Bell. I’ve seen photos of you two on Instagram. I just saw her new movie Queenpins, which is hysterically funny.
JT: I cannot wait to see it!
JM: She’s great and Vince Vaughn and Paul Walter Hauser together are so funny. Kristen Bell came on board [to Do, Re & Mi] in 2015. That was a little after Frozen came out. So she wanted to continue on in the animation world a little bit?
JT: You know, I don’t think any of us even thought that far into it. I can’t even give myself credit for having the business acumen to bring on Kristen as a person who could help. She was my friend who has a daughter, and I was asking Lincoln all these questions: “Do you like this art? Do you like this music? Do you respond to this and that?” She loved it. Kristen loved it as well and obviously with kids is very passionate about the mission of the show: when schools face budget cuts, the first things to go are the arts and music education. Kristen, like Mike and I, was passionate about the mission of getting music education into the hands and homes of kids who would otherwise maybe not have access to it. It’s a show we really couldn’t have made without her.
MS: She championed our cause and really helped us focus on making our project more than just a TV show but being cause-based. She brought on Ivan Askwith, one of our co-EPs, who’s a superb streamliner. He knew how to put kids and education up front and from there to triangle out and make an entire, branded product. It was an amazing experience.
JM: The arts have been a major part of my family and so many families around the world. I love the rollercoaster at sunset moment in the show. It’s so sweet. Do you have a moment from making this show that maybe felt like a rollercoaster ride and then you got to that relief point and were like, “This feels nice that we got this taken care of and we pulled this off”?
MS: We had a big meeting with Jazwares, who’s helping create all these amazing music toys for kids to engage with and learn with. At the end of the meeting, we played one of our original songs and the entire room stood up and was dancing and singing along. 25 people in the room. We played the song two or three times in a row and it felt like it never ended. It was a complete movie scene of every executive and every creative dancing and singing. It was pure joy. For the first half of the song, I was off to the side smiling. And then I was like, “Oh wait! I’m here too!” (laughs) This is real magic, not movie magic.
JT: There were so many unbelievable moments. As far as rollercoaster moments… when you’re making a show, there are so many times *not* when it almost doesn’t happen but… before we got greenlit at Amazon. Before we signed on to work with Gaumont as a production company. Mike and I… the whole time has been a rollercoaster. We were sitting in a coffee shop creating ideas and writing scripts and Schuler and I were writing songs. And then we were like, “Is anybody gonna care… AT ALL?!” This is a big dream for just two freaks in Silver Lake going, “I think we can do this.” There’s almost a little bit of crazy in each of us to have even entertained that we could. You have to be a little nuts to really think you can change the world. Mike and I were just that amount of crazy.
MS: But you were a lot more crazy than me.
JT: That is TRUE! Then Kristen came on board and we were like, “Oh my God!” Then we were pitching and we didn’t know if we were gonna get anywhere with pitches. And then we’re getting writers on board. “Are they gonna be the right writers? Oh my God they are! Everybody’s so talented!” Every single step of the way was a journey.
MS: And we celebrated a lot.
JT: The craziest part of the journey was: it was my wackido idea that every episode be a different genre of music. And I’m the one writing the music with Dave Schuler. So at about genre 30 I’m like, “Are there more genres? I think we’re out of genres! And we have 20 more episodes!” So we got real creative and specific. We went singer/songwriter. We went specifically 80’s Pop. Queen-sounding. Classical *and* opera. We did lullaby. We did things that weren’t quite genres but were styles. And we really had to open our big brains for all of it.
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