Nickelodeon’s hit animated series The Loud House is getting a spinoff. The Casagrandes debuts this Monday, Oct. 14th at 1:30pm. Supervising Director Miguel Puga, who worked on “LH” as a storyboard artist, talks jumping onto the new show – which has been a long time coming.

Miguel Puga: From my very first episode of Season 1… we never got to meet Ronnie Anne but we heard about her. She was the school bully (being a bully to Lincoln). And when the writers approached me, they asked, “Who do you think this character should look like?” They showed me a little red-head girl drawing. And I was like, “No. We should make her Latina.” And eventually we got into, “What if she’s Bobby’s sister?” And soon it was a spider web. So they finally asked me during Season 3 of The Loud House to join this show, but I’ve been part of this whole thing since the very beginning.

Jackson Murphy: That’s really cool. What makes Ronnie Anne such a strong choice to be this show’s focal point?

MP: She’s such a cool character. And one thing we thing we always look at with characters, especially in any TV episodes, is that the audience member has to watch it, and kids especially have to see the character and say, “Hey – I wanna hang out with this person.” So right off the bat, as soon as we were developing Ronnie Anne, we knew she was going to be a standout character just because she looked cool, she was always skateboarding, and she has that awesome go-to attitude. Nothing can keep her down – she always finds a way, just like Lincoln.

[Ronnie Anne] has her best friend Sid and all her new friends in the city, and all the new adventures she gets into. There’s a school that we’ll explore, and there are fun-loving, colorful characters that we’ll see. I have a few of my new favorites that I can’t talk about right now, but you’ll see them eventually.

JM: And I’ve asked this to some The Loud House people over the past few years – but when it comes to this show, too, how do you tackle SO MANY characters?

MP: Well it helps to have the characters (especially as a board artist) laid out. You have to figure out the layout: Who’s the shortest? Who’s in the middle? Who’s the tallest? – and see where you can fit them all in. And then you replace the legs as walking, so they can move like a giant mass. But it helps to have a flat-style show, but at the same time we do go dynamic. And I can’t wait for [people] to watch some of the big episodes of Season 1 of “The Casagrandes” where there’s a lot of characters involved. And we’re still trying to figure out how to fit everybody in there.

JM: Has there been a lot of pressure to make Casagrandes good – to live-up to the expectations and live-up to what “The Loud House” has done?

MP: Coming from The Loud House, with the writers and the artists that helped establish “The Casagrandes” (which is everyone on “The Loud House”), one thing we made sure this show always had was a lot of heart and a lot of humor. And I think we still have that to this day on both shows.

JM: So what are some of the big differences that Loud House fans can expect in “Casagrandes”?

MP: The bursts of color of the new city, the music, the storylines – it’s a nice bridge into a Latino household that we haven’t really seen in an animated series before. So it will be nice to invite everyone into this loud and festive, colorful new cartoon.

JM: And there’s a lot of color in the first episode, “Going Overboard”, which you directed. That’s a big responsibility.

MP: It was a fun episode to work on. And as a board artist, whenever I got working on an episode, I always worked with the writers closely to make sure I could add jokes (because that’s what I always did on The Loud House). And the ending was slightly different from this episode, so I wanted to bring together Frida’s artwork and some skateboarding… the Carlos X painting at the end. We pitched it to the network, and they loved it.

JM: Have you always been a skateboarding fan?

MP: I was more of a poser – I would dress like one, but I didn’t have the balance. But I tried.

JM: This is a minor spoiler if you haven’t seen the episode yet, but trampoline calculators are awesome!

MP: I made that up on a whim, just trying to come-up with a new ending. I was like, “Alright. How can I get paint splattered on the wall? Boom. Trampoline calculator buttons.”

JM: That would’ve been so great to have in school. And speaking of that, I heard that when you were in school, you used to draw on your homework all the time.

MP: That’s correct. I always hated Math, and when it came to taking notes… I have ADD… the one thing I always focused on was that I could draw and fill this paper up and hopefully I’ll get extra credit if my teacher sees it. I never did. But once I did in Geometry, I drew a “Transformers”-type character. I always drew. It kept me out of trouble… and it got me in trouble.

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Jackson Murphy

Jackson Murphy is a movie critic and entertainment columnist. He is the creator of the website Lights-Camera-Jackson.com, and has made numerous appearances on television and radio.

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