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Daughter of Invention Norton Virgien and Niamh Sharkey take us behind the scenes of their charming new Disney Junior show, Eureka! By Karen Idelson
A
nother brilliant young explorer is expected to brighten the preschool television scene when Disney Junior’s Eureka! premieres in June. Created and executive produced by Emmy-winning toon veteran Norton Virgien and author/creator Niamh Sharkey, the show centers on an adventurous young girl who solves problems and shakes things up in a prehistoric environment using the kind of unconventional thinking and determined mindset that can take her anywhere. Supported by her parents, a cherished pet mammoth named Murphy, good friends and her teacher, Eureka is an inventor who designs what she needs — including the wheel — and boldly inspires others to come with her on her journeys. They even invented a word for what she does that is heard in the series’ main title theme song, performed by Lexi Underwood (Disney+’s Sneakerella) …
‘Thinkering’ All the Time! “There were a couple moments where we had our own Eureka! moments coming up with the names of things like the wheels that the
‘We want the viewers to look at Eureka and see that she’s not disappointed when she fails. It doesn’t stop her. She just dives in and doesn’t look back.’ — Creator & exec producer Niamh Sharkey
kids use riding around,” says Virgien, whose many credits include Doc McStuffins, Vampirina and Rugrats. “We’re very proud of naming them rock and rollers. Erica [Rothschild] came up with this name for this magical process that seems to happen when you experiment with thinking, called ‘thinkering.’ And Eureka is always doing this. She’s tinkering and thinking, and this is where Erica got that one.” Rothschild serves as co-executive producer/ story editor for the series, and Donna Brown Guillaume and Rusty Cundieff are consulting producers. The show is produced by Brown Bag Films, the same studio behind Doc McStuffins, in association with Disney Junior. Approximately 50 animators at Brown Bag Films worked on the show and an additional 100 animators in India also contributed to the pro-
duction. The writers’ room is based in the U.S. The show started production just before the world shut down during the pandemic. Initially they were meeting in person, but soon the crew had to go remote. “We did the show all through lockdown,” says Sharkey, who also created and collaborated with Virgien and Brown Bag on the acclaimed series Henry Hugglemonster. “We started at the end of February 2020 and we went to the states and we had a Eureka! writers’ room for a couple of weeks, and then the world just shut down. So, we became very friendly with Zoom. But what made that interesting was, because we’re on different sides of the ocean, we were very involved in the writers’ room throughout the process, which I think was a nice thing — especially with Erica, just having her every step of the way.”
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june|july 22
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