Mr. Peabody & Sherman movie coming out this friday, March 7, is based on characters from Peabody’s Improbable History segments which was part of the iconic 1960s animated television series The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ty Burrell ( the voice of Mr. Peabody), Max Charles (the voice of Sherman) and the director Rob Minkoff.
Director Rob Minkoff with Ty Burrell
As a fan of Modern Family and Ty Burrell, I did not think he was the obvious choice for the role of Mr. Peabody. Let’s face it , I love Phil Dunphy on Modern Family but he is not smart the way, Mr. Peabody but Ty Burrell is a perfect fit as the voice of Mr. Peabody.
Burrell had his work cut out for him with this role, describing Mr. Peabody as “essentially perfect, which is a very interesting kind of character since I am so imperfect.” Burrell prepped for the role by watching the classic telelvion shorts upon which the film is based and brought his own spin to it. “So, even though probably most people won’t know the original, I still feel a certain amount of responsibility to pay some respect to Bill Scott (the original voice of Mr. Peabody.) I really tried to keep elements of his cadence and some of the precision that was very precise in the voice.”
I loved that Burrell mentioned his opinion about the overall message about the movie. “I would say that the core of the movie is the universal idea that love and caring and trying hard as in any real relationship is the most important thing that the externals are irrelevant. In this case, it’s a father-son relationship.” I so agree with his asssessment.
Burrell’s on-screen son is played by Max Charles (ABC-TV’s The Neighbors) who for the record is just the cutest kid and really sweet. Charles provides an authentic “kid’s” voice to the Sherman character. According to Director Rob Minkoff, “Max is very funny, has fantastic time and and adorable voice that sounds like he’s chewing on marbles.” Charles mentioned that he thought doing the scenes with big words were fun. “When I go, and I do it really fast, I liked doing that part because I did it with actual words, and then Rob told me to speed it up and speed it up and do it as fast as I can.” And he was very forthright about not knowing the big words in the script. Too cute!
One question that I am sure kids always want to know is how can they can do what Max does. He offered up advice to kids and adults should take note of “Follow their dreams and do what they want to do.”
I bet you think that the idea for this movie just happened but according to Director Rob Minkoff, “it was 12 years ago” when his producing partner named Jason Clark brought up the idea. And they were off contacting Tiffany Ward, Jay Ward’s daughter who were interested in doing the movie and from there they took it to Dreamworks Animation. Wow, that is a long time from and idea to the big screen.
One change I agreed with that was different from the television short is nature of the relationship between the two main characters. Minkoff explained, “Mr. Peabody and Sherman had a fixed relationship. He was his dad. He adopted him. And nothing really happened with them as characters. Craig (Porter, Minkoff’s producing partner), “why don’t we make it a girl and have that influence Sherman and put pressure on his relationship with Mr. Peabody, which allowed us to take a six-minute cartoon short and really flesh it out into something that would work better for a feature.” Totally agree!
As far as the historical characters included in the film, Minkoff gave us some insight into the process. “Every sequence we went to obviously had to have a remarkable historical figure in it and someone that we would probably be familiar with.”
Mr. Peabody & Sherman in theatres March igniting people’s imagination about history.
Mr. Peabody and Sherman Trailer
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Disclosure: NYC Single Mom was invited to a screening to facilitate this review.
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