How“ Everybody Still Hates Chris” makes the transition to animation

The Comedy Central show serves as both a sequel series and a reboot.

It’s been nearly two decades since Chris Rock and Ali LeRoi turned Rock's Brooklyn-based upbringing during the late 80s into the beloved absurdist sitcom, Everybody Hates Chris. Since its debut on the now-defunct UPN in 2005, Chris (Tyler James Williams) and his family — cheapskate dad Julius (Terry Crews), no-nonsense mom Rochelle (Tichina Arnold), devilish baby sister Tonya (Imani Hakim), and ladies man younger brother Drew (Tequan Richmond) — has garnered a loyal following through syndication and streaming. Now, Chris and his family are back in animated form — and so are some familiar voices.

"I never thought I would be back playing Julius, and this is the best dream because the show got canceled, and we didn't want it to," Terry Crews, who reprises his role as Julius for Comedy Central's Everybody Still Hates Chris, tells Entertainment Weekly. "We had more stories to tell. It felt like we were yanked. We were the darlings of the network, and then we jumped into Gossip Girl, and there was a different kind of network."

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When UPN was shuttered in 2006, many of its original programming, including Everybody Hates Chris, Veronica Mars, and Girlfriends were moved to its successor The CW, where it concluded in 2009. Arnold, who also reprises her role as Rochelle, shares a similar sentiment. "We thought we had at least three more seasons at least,” Arnold explains. “It just wasn't resolved for us."

Thankfully, Everybody Still Hates Chris doubles both as a sequel series and a reboot, taking off right after the original series' finale episode, "Everybody Hates the G.E.D."

When the series premieres, Chris (Tim Johnson Jr.) has failed his G.E.D. and is with his family — Drew (Terrence Little Gardenhigh), Tonya (Ozioma Akagha) , Julius (Crews) and Rochelle (Arnold) — at a diner. After revealing that he failed his G.E.D to them, Rochelle knocks him into animation. Literally. Upon contact, Chris, his family, and all of Brooklyn, becomes 2D.

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Showrunner Sanjay Shah (Central Park) shared the concept with fellow executive producer Chris Rock — reprising his narrator role —when proposing how to revive the series in animated form. "That was part of my first couple of sentences to Chris when I met him," says Shah. "This is my take: He gets slapped into animation."

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Under the new format, the animation team replicated 1980s Brooklyn in all its beauty and absurdity, making it a tertiary character. Shah comments, “We spent months pulling photographs from the era that we're covering and interviewing people. I mean, gags were born out of a conversation with someone who grew up in Bed-Stuy at that time, something that he walked by every day. And so we tried to bring as much realism into this world as we could, even though it's animated.”

For Arnold and Crews, seeing their counterparts and likenesses in cartoon form filled them with excitement. "I love animation," says Crews. He expresses how, before acting, he was almost going to be an animator as he had a hidden talent in illustration. “And then to see myself actually animated. I don't know what to say. When this comes out, I think I'm going to shed a couple of tears.”

Arnold, for her part, felt similarly. "To me, that's when it all became real," Arnold exclaimed, "I was like, 'Oh my God, look, I'm a cartoon character!'”

Crews and Arnold took separate methods to get back into their respective characters’ rhythms. For Crews, it took a rewatch of a couple of episodes of the original series to get back into Julius’ shoes and his cheapskate rants.

“It took a minute,” says Arnold. But the help of her showrunner and his passion for the original series, she was able to ease back into Rochelle’s power. “It's like getting back on a bike again,” Arnold expressed. “Then [I was] able to have that same laughter that I had back then when I was physically doing the show and to be behind the mic and still have the same laughter and same feeling.”

Shah also teases a few “surprise voices," Easter eggs for diehard fans, and episode plots that take advantage of the 80s setting, “I think we have an interesting take on the music that feels like a cousin to what was done in the original, and I can't wait to start talking about that more specifically when the time is right," he says.

With Chris and his family entering the pantheon of animated families, the crew hopes that Everybody Still Hates Chris is in it for the long haul. “I hope that I do the show as long as The Simpsons,” Arnold says affectionately.

Everybody Still Hates Chris is set to premiere Wednesday, Sept. 25, on Comedy Central.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.