American franchise Ice Age has been entertaining the audience for the past 20 years. There have been films, TV specials, video games and much more outings based on the beloved group of pre-historic mammals surviving the Paleolithic ice age. Naturally, when the sixth instalment, "The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild", a spin-off film was released on streaming platform Disney+ Hotstar, it set tongues wagging. As Simon Pegg returned for the titular character of the animated film, the makers of the film sat down to discuss how previous films inspired them to spin this new adventurous ride.
During The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild press meet, executive producer Lori Forte shared, "Everybody responded so amazingly to the Lost World, it was something we came up with a long time ago when we were researching the first film and we had someone from the Museum of Natural History come and talk to us and said, 'When you're making this film, make sure you don't put dinosaurs in with mammoths because they never lived it in the same... They were millions of years apart'. And we did some sequence in the first movie called the Ice Museum where students walking through, we see a T-Rex in ice and we figured, 'Well, that's a great way of putting the dinosaurs and the mammoths together.'"
"We came up with a mythology that created a whole world underneath the ground where dinosaurs, maybe they didn't all go extinct during the asteroid hit, maybe some went underground and actually survived. When we came up with that, we knew that was a world that people were going to want to see. And obviously, with Buck living there far too long, he'd see he has no real relationships. His relationships are with animate objects, because he's so close to nature, like rocks and tree stumps and a pumpkin as a daughter. So I think there was just so much there to be able to explore," he added.
There have been many characters in the franchise that were loved by the audience, so why the makers choose to focus the story on Buck?
Answering the same, Lori said, he's been living in the Ice Age for the last 20 years and he came up with Buck during Dawn of the Dinosaurs, which was the third Ice Age film. "It's such a lovable, eccentric, wacky and joyful and adventurous character and Simon Pegg brought all of that to life for us. I think it just really had been a while since we saw him, we brought him back in Ice Age 5 because Simon kept saying, "When are you going to bring me back?" We came up with a story in the Collision Course to bring him back. When we're looking to come back and tell a new story in the Ice Age world, it felt so natural to go back to the Lost World and come to Buck because it's a character that everybody loves."
Adding more to that, John C. Donkin said, "I think that this movie allows us to start to peel back the layers of all that is Buck and actually the introduction of the Zee character gives us a glimpse into some backstory in Buck. There's some history between the two of them and we start to reveal that through the course of the movie. It expands the universe in that way, too, in the sense that we get to dig a little deeper into these characters. They're not just wacky because they're wacky or whatever. They have some history and it brings them who they are today. I think Zee was a great addition to Buck in the way to see that there isn't this other faceted hint that we're starting to reveal."
The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild is currently streaming on Disney+ Hotstar
