August 20th, 2020 
Jackson Murphy 
A new Cartoon Network Studios-produced animated series is now streaming on HBO Max. The Fungies! comes from creator Stephen P. Neary, who was a story artist on Rio, The Peanuts Movie and The Angry Birds Movie. Neary discusses all aspects of his Fungies! world, including creation, characters, casting and clay. (This interview was conducted as an email Q&A.)
Jackson Murphy: Where did the idea for this show stem from?
Stephen P. Neary: I was up late on Wikipedia and I learned about these ancient fungi called Prototaxites. They grew on Earth about 400 million years ago, and I was fascinated by this geological idea called deep time. It got me thinking about how I see time in my own life, and the furthest back I can remember is being a kid. Those memories seem so formative to my personality and character. So in tone, the show is sort of like, what if the entire earth was a kid becoming aware of themselves for the first time? And I wanted these new and developing personality traits to be embodied by different characters in the show.
From there, I started thinking about the sort of cartoons I enjoyed as a kid. There were so many creature shows—Fraggle Rock, Popples, Smurfs, Noozles. And there were really sincere shows, like David the Gnome, The Adventures of Pete and Pete, Sesame Street. But it seemed like all of these shows had certain undercurrents of creativity too, like they were unapologetically themselves. That was the sort of show I wanted to make with The Fungies! It’s almost like we’re rebooting a show from the ’90s that never existed in the first place. The Fungies! is a show where anything can happen, but it’s all grounded in a very specific tone.
JM: The characters (and there are a lot of them) are so unique in design. Was that one of the biggest challenges – differentiating them?
SN: The fungies, as creatures, are pretty weird looking. So I think the biggest challenge was how to make these completely new creatures with their own sets of rules that kids could still identify with. Can a character with one eye still be expressive? How gross should they be? How simple can we make them so kids can easily draw them? We looked at old Smurfs a lot—they’re all so uniform, but there’s always one or two things to set them apart from other Smurfs, with an almost comic simplicity. As a kid you’re like, “Oh, that Smurf has glasses!” Our supervising director Nick Edwards came on during development and really set the tone for the visual language of the characters. I love how their simple, graphic shapes sit on top of the pencil backgrounds as supervised by our art director, Valerio Fabbretti.
JM: You also voice Pascal. How was it coming-up with his voice and inflections?
SN: Pascal is very soft-spoken. It’s actually this voice that all my siblings use from time to time, when we want to disagree with someone in our family but don’t want to sound too harsh—I don’t think we even realized we were all making this voice for years, which probably says a lot about my polite, midwestern family. The character has evolved a lot from there, but it definitely comes from a side of my personality that’s extremely passive and not as confident as I’d like to be sometimes.
JM: ‘Let it Snowball’ is the first episode. Do you remember your first experience and fascination with snow?
SN: I grew up in Indiana, which always felt like a place of extreme temperatures. The summers are scorching and humid, and the cicadas are so loud you’ve got to shout over them to be heard. But the winters were the best, when blizzards would shut down the schools a couple days a year. It was so exciting going to bed, knowing that there may or may not be a snow day tomorrow. My three siblings and I would wake up early, our eyes glued to the local news for school cancelation notices. And playing in the snow is probably the coolest thing you can do as a kid–carving caves in snowdrifts, sledding over ramps you’ve built, or building a family of snow people.
JM: Over the season, how do you explore Seth, his siblings and friends trying to figure out why they and the universe exist?
SN: Seth loves exploration and science—it drives him completely. But sometimes in his quest for answers he goes too far, or he pushes other fungies outside their comfort zones. So, while Seth really loves science and wants to share it with the world, the biggest lessons he learns are more about how he fits in within that world—how to be a more caring and empathetic sibling, student, and friend. But it’s always Seth’s thirst for knowledge about the world around him that drives him to learn more about the world within his own head.
JM: Anna Nanna is a fun reporter with some sharp dialogue (especially in ‘The Fanciest Fungie’ episode). TV news has made for some great comedy movies and shows over the years. Have you always been interested in it?
SN: I was this sort of manic student as a kid with a ton of energy and curiosity. I loved extra-curricular activities that had anything to do with media. Things like the school paper, school news, speech team. It was fun to be a part of that world, kids pretending to be adults. I find the pageantry of news fascinating, and love investigative journalism movies like Spotlight. And I love watching news bloopers on YouTube. I think more than ever we’re evaluating how news fits in our lives, and it feels almost quaint to look at Anna Nanna as this simpler-times embodiment of local news.
JM: Jennifer Coolidge brings such a warm yet confident voice presence as Seth’s Mom, Nancy. Was she a dream casting choice of yours?
SN: Nancy is definitely one of my favorite characters on the show. She’s actually based on my own mother, Nancy. I had planned on voicing her originally—I do a lot of impressions of my mom for family and friends. She’s such an amazing personality. But when we heard Jennifer Coolidge’s audition, it became obvious that she could bring so much more to this character. Working with Jennifer is a dream–her voice is like music and every take is unique in its own hilarious way. The crew quotes her constantly. I grew up watching a lot of Christopher Guest movies and Jennifer has such brilliant timing. And even her serious roles, like in Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant, really exemplify her amazing range as an actor.
JM: And I’m sure it must’ve been really nice having June Squibb voice Granny Grancie.
SN: June Squibb is amazing! I love her. There’s such warmth to everything she says, even when she’s scolding fungie kids. Our casting and voice director, Kristi Reed, does an incredible job finding actors and getting these grounded, almost conversational reads from all these amazing actors. We do a lot of ad-libs in records as well—it’s incredible to work with these veteran comedy character actors like Sam Richardson, Edi Patterson, Chris Diamantopoulos, and many others. The records for me are one of the most interesting parts of the process. It’s one of the few times anything spontaneous can happen, and it’s always fun to build off of new things actors bring to their reads.
JM: I really like the clay-made episode title cards. How was it putting them together?
SN: Thank you! I photograph most of the title cards myself, and Nick Edwards usually does the text. It’s a fun exercise for me. Sometimes running a show can be a bit overwhelming with all the different things to do, so assigning myself these title cards is a fun way to stretch my brain a bit. There’s usually a strict time limit to how long I can spend making one, and it’s satisfying to work on something that’s a little more self-contained in scope than the rest of the episode. As a kid I loved when cartoons used live-action shots, and it was something I wanted to incorporate into the show somehow.
JM: Now that you have your own Cartoon Network Studios-produced show, what advice/words of wisdom would you tell your 17/18-year-old self who was an intern on one of CN’s all-time biggest hits, Teen Titans?
SN: Ha! Oh boy what wouldn’t I tell myself? But would I even listen?? I’d probably tell myself to learn to be patient. Learn how to draw better, and learn how to love drawing. I always had a lot of ideas, but it took a while for me to understand that, for a show that’s meant to be seen, those ideas are only good if they connect with an audience. For me, drawing was the biggest thing limiting me from getting my ideas across to other people. Seeing those amazing board artists on Teen Titans was definitely a wake-up call for me!
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