The headstrong middle-schooler Penny Proud (voiced by Kyla Pratt) took the lead, with her strict but loving parents Oscar and Trudy (Tommy Davidson and Paula ...
But together they painted an unwelcoming picture: “I didn’t exist in the beginning of time, and I don’t think they’re looking for me to exist when spaceships start flying off this planet.” “The Proud Family” has been a steady source of millennial nostalgia online, with fans sharing art and cosplay photos inspired by the show on social media, and revisiting beloved episodes in blog posts. Smith set out to create a cartoon sitcom in the vein of “Moesha” — one that centered a Black girl’s life and experiences. Farquhar and Smith said they noticed a new outpouring from “Proud” fans after Disney+ began streaming the original on Jan. 1, 2020. Nevertheless, Disney chose not to renew “The Proud Family” when the original production run ended in 2005. Palmer, whose breakthrough came in the 2006 film “Akeelah and the Bee,” credits Farquhar with discovering her a few years earlier, when she was 10. The company approached the men about a revival, and then publicly announced it on Feb. 27, 2020. “And we’re doing the same thing this time around.” There were personal jabs about being “ashy” and class warfare was waged whenever the working-class branch of the family butted heads with their “bougie” in-laws. “We were hiding a lot of innuendo and, frankly, family business under the guise of what our characters were saying and going through. Over 52 episodes and a TV movie, the series offered a lighthearted depiction of a Black suburban family going about their everyday lives. The dialogue was studded with the kinds of colloquialisms and vernacular that can be heard in many Black households.
'The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder' creators Bruce W. Smith and Ralph Farquhar talk about how they approached updating the beloved Disney Channel show ...
SMITH: Oh, the thing is that we had a lot of people calling us, so we have a lot of people that are on standby basically. We knew we wanted to age it up a little bit and we knew that the gloves were off so to speak, in terms of potential topics and the way we could deal with them. And that's on the writing side, but we come with a visual form, and we had to look, and one of the things we did that really influenced everything more than anything this time around was we enlisted a whole different group of people to help us make this show. We had some real major stars on the show that really helped round out the first two and a half seasons of what we did in the beginning. And he came around to me and we were just busting up laughing about how the visuals came together. And for us, that gives us very interesting stories, very fun, different, unique points of view, and truthful points of view with characters that you can relate to in a world that has lots of parallels to the one that we live in today. So these are real-world issues that we bring to the table that now we don't necessarily have to code so much and speak in mass metaphors and such. FARQUHAR: Look, we knew what we wanted to do, we knew the show worked in its original form. SMITH: Yeah, we were all excited about it because we knew that one of the things that Proud Family was always true to was our audience, and being truthful to the stories that we told. And we actually came into the studio to pitch something else that was kind of like The Proud Family, because that's what the Disney brass was telling us, "Hey, give us something like that, but something different." What would you do?' And we were like, "Well … " and we explained the ways that we would change and adjust and shift [the show] and that's kinda how everything got started. And then on the character design side, which we decided just in general to age up the entire cast, or the entire world two years by the way.
Penny, Dijonay Jones (Karen Malina Jones), LaCienega Boulevardez (Alisa Reyes), Zoey Howzer (Soleil Moon Frye), Oscar Proud (Tommy Davidson), and Trudy Proud ( ...
Overall, the reboot authentically embraces the vibes of the original series with some modern updates. In the first episode Penny meets Maya Leibowitz-Jenkins (Keke Palmer), a girl that's clearly more socially savvy than Penny. Determined to impress Maya after she realizes Maya doesn't like her, Penny joins her at the zoo late at night. The animation style is different. That's one change from the original series: while Michael was teased for being more feminine in the original series, the show never made it clear that he was gay. For starters, most of the original voice cast reprised their roles for the reboot. LaCienega makes her first appearance in Episode 1 with a bit of a beauty problem (her face is covered in zits and facial hair). Michael (EJ Johnson) quickly spruces up LaCienega, bringing her back to her original series classic look.
In this new version, protagonist Penny Proud is a 14-year old who appears mostly unchanged from the show's original run. But there is one big change that does ...
But the fact is that Black culture has become so embedded into the white mainstream that The Proud Family, which used to cater to Black culture at every level, might undermine its historical greatness by explaining the things we’ve managed to gatekeep, all in order to serve a wider audience. One of the most telling moments is when the Gross Sisters, the blue-colored antagonists of Penny’s posse, show up for the first time; they are now in the music business, a too-common running joke about Black youth hustling for money with a mixtape and a dream that would have annoyed me if the show wasn’t so dedicated to the conceit. Since The Proud Family first ended in 2005, Black culture has become the zeitgeist of popular culture at large: consistently consumed and adopted by non-Black people who do so with differing degrees of awareness. While the TV industry has diversified in many ways—the fact that Michael is now openly queer is one big example of how—Disney appears to have misunderstood The Proud Family’s innate Blackness to the detriment of its reboot . The Proud Family is the rare TV show, animated or other, that stars a cast of Black teens of all different shades and family makeups in which their race is a crucial part of who they are, but not the entirety of their identity. But there were several recurring gags and references within the show that didn’t need to be explained to the Black audience its creators knew it had and aimed to please directly (akin to another staple of the Black film canon, A Goofy Movie). The Gross Sisters’ ashiness is an implicit joke that became an integral signifier of the show’s intentional and innate Blackness; calling attention to it makes the subtext gratingly explicit. It’s no secret that we’re in the age of Re: the age of the reboot, revival, and remake. This is not to say that this story isn’t relevant to Millennials and Zillennials alike—we’re the ones who invented bad and boujee, after all. But the “us” that loved it doesn’t just include people of a certain age, but people steeped specifically in Black culture; Omarion’s guest spot wasn’t trying to please white Disney Channel viewers, and it’s why The Proud Family remains one of the best-remembered examples of modern Black media. KG’s catchphrase is “sheeeesh,” the phrase “bad and boujee” appears in regular conversation, and there’s a forced “what are thoooose?!” joke that feels not only contrived but also late to the party. Episode 2 is the biggest signal of this contemporary cultural shift, given that its central conflict revolves around internet influencers, the power of social media, and the troubles of cancel culture. We remember the days of TRL and 106 and Park, which were clear inspirations for the in-universe show Hip-Hop Helicopter. We got the joke behind the character 15 Cent, while also recognizing that his voice was that of Omarion. While The Proud Family aimed its humor at us, Louder and Prouder could care less about the OG fans.
'The Proud Family' is back and this time, they are 'louder and prouder' with this 10-episode Disney+ revival.
Disney caught on and asked the men about a revival. As for Penny, she is dealing with social media, getting canceled and her teenage hormones. - Per the show’sdescription, the mom, Trudy, is riding new career highs, while Oscar, the dad, is dreaming wilder dreams.
Creator Bruce W. Smith and executive producer Ralph Farquhar on updating the characters for new audiences on Disney+ and their hopes for the future of Black ...
We made sure we hired people in positions to understand and give you the Black experience the way we know. We get to discover all this new, unseen, unknown, untested talent, so that in the wake of Louder and Prouder, there’s gonna be a bunch of things coming out. What you get with Ralph and myself is knowing from top to bottom — from the writing, from the animation side — that we’re gonna put people in a position that can inform the content as we make it. We were like, “Okay. But why?” She says, “From what I understand, Suga Mama is not gonna be in this version of Proud Family.” I’m like, “Where’d you get that information from?” She got the information from the fan art. We had to go through what we had to go through the first time. That’s a touchy subject in our culture, and we were fortunate enough to get Billy Porter and Zachary Quinto playing same-sex parents that move into the Prouds’ world. The first time around, we didn’t really have any art direction; we were kinda flying by the speed of our hands and happened to land on a style that worked to get us to the finish line. I knew in terms of the stories we wanted to tell. The beauty of it is, the script is a template. If you were a Black kid growing up in the early aughts, The Proud Family was one of the few animated series that made you and your family feel seen. Bruce W. Smith: For me, the technology caught up to the idea of how I visually saw the show the first time around. Ralph Farquhar: We pitched them live-action, we pitched them live-action with animation — we were trying every way to get The Proud Family to come back.