Disney TV Animation Begins Production on ‘Pickle & Peanut’

It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between YouTube cartoons dreamt up by teens in their bedrooms and big-budget TV studio productions created by professionally-trained artists.

Today, Disney Television Animation announced the beginning of production on Pickle & Peanut, a “buddy comedy series about two unlikely friends—an emotional pickle and a freewheeling peanut…two underdogs who dream up plans to be anything but ordinary.” Of course, you wouldn’t know any of that from the promotional artwork Disney released since the expression-less identical poses of the pickle and peanut betray no sign of personality or character except their questionable sense of sunglass fashion.

The hybrid 2D animation/live-action Pickle & Peanut will debut in fall 2015 on Disney XD. Concept was created by Noah Z. Jones (Fish Hooks) and developed by Joel Trussell (Electric City), who has ably directed similar mixed-media projects like Carrot and Stick and Mr. Wobble’s Nightmare (below). Jon Heder plays the pickle and Johnny Pemberton is the nut, and Mark Rivers (Jimmy Kimmel Live!) is the story editor.

As his defense for greenlighting the series, Disney TV Animation’s Eric Coleman, senior v-p of original series, said, “We see very few pitches that are as funny and original as Pickle & Peanut. We instantly fell in love with these characters, and Noah and Joel have built a world with a visual style and sensibility unlike anything on TV.”