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A Spirited Friendship The veteran team behind Disney Channel’s The Ghost and Molly McGee discuss the making of their lively new show.
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t’s been almost 30 years since Emmy-winning writing partners Bill Motz and Bob Roth sold their first script to Disney, which was for an episode of the popular show Darkwing Duck. Now, after working on numerous acclaimed animated shows together including Aladdin, Hercules, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, Kim Possible, Phineas and Ferb and Penguins of Madagascar, they are back with a charming new show for Disney+ called The Ghost and Molly McGee. The series centers on Molly, a cheerful young girl (voiced by actress/writer Ashly Burch) who is stuck with a grumpy ghost named Scratch (Dana Synder) after she and her family move to a new home. The duo ends up forming a friendship despite their differences as they navigate life’s little adventures. During a recent interview, Motz and Roth reveal that their own different personalities inspired the premise of the show. “We came up with this simple story about a young girl and a ghost years ago, but it wasn’t until we started developing the show that we realized they were actually us,” says Roth. “Bill is an extrovert and an optimist, and I’m more of an introvert and a pessimist. Bill is happy-go-lucky, and I’m kind of
grumpy. That’s when we realized: Wait a second, we’re just making a show about us!”
Keeping the Ghost Alive The duo recalls coming up with the pitch for the show 14 years ago, but they had a hard time selling it at the time. “It got killed in 30 seconds,” says Motz. “Then, we pitched it to Nickelodeon, and that was dashed on the rocks, too. But we kept coming back to it. We were finishing our LEGO Star Wars project with Disney when the studio graciously gave us an overall deal. So we played with several different ideas, and Bob said, ‘Hey, I liked that Molly McGee idea,’ so we gave it a shot again! Then, when we got Dana as Scratch and Ashly as Molly, we were cooking with gas.” Motz says they decided earlier on to base the heritage of Molly on whoever they cast for the part. “So when we picked Ashly, whom we just adored, we built the character’s ethnicity on her,” he notes. "We didn’t want to assume it was OK, so we got together for lunch and asked her how she felt about it, and she was very excited about it.” Roth adds, “When we interview people, we always ask them to tell us about themselves — not to just tell us about their jobs, but where
they grew up, their siblings, their pets, where they come from, etc. That’s how you get to know about them. So, that’s why Molly got to be half Thai and half white, just like Ashly. Our crew also brings so much of themselves to the show and that makes it all richer and more interesting.” The diversity of the team making the show was very important to the show-runners. As Roth tells us, “We built our crew around that idea. We work very closely with them, and they’re all very talented and hardworking. Disney was also very helpful in terms of helping us discover talent that we weren’t aware of before. We had a huge stack of submissions from people who had never been staffed before. They had such fresh perspectives and told us first-hand about Thai culture and traditions. We also bring in consultants in all the different areas that the show’s storyline encompasses, whether it’s LGBTQ issues or climate science, etc.” Motz and Roth are very pleased about what they call the “magical alchemy” of their show. “We discovered certain things just through happy kismet,” says Roth. “For example, we learned about the Thai culture’s practices towards the supernatural. They have the tradition of these
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september|october 21
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