Inspired by bedtime stories Ryan and Katy Chase would tell to their kids at night, this husband-wife team created a new children’s show called A Wonderful Day with Mabel Maclay that incorporated the usual cast of characters from the night, mixed with whimsical elements, an amazing score and practical gadgets.
This homeschooling couple with three kids also taught improv classes for a decade in Los Angeles so it made perfect sense for them to be Mabel and Find-It Fred in the series. We sat down with them to learn more about bringing this show to streaming, the new Bentkey app and more.
Interviewed for Family Entourage
Family Entourage: Thank you so much for taking the time. I’m super excited to talk about A Wonderful Day with Mabel Maclay. You are a husband, wife team, but also the creators of the show. Start with, how’d you come up with the name?
Katy Chase: Oh, that’s a really good question. A Wonderful Day with Mabel Maclay has a little bit of a nod to Mr. Rogers and it really embraces the idea that life is wonderful and it’s worth wondering about, and so we really wanted to lead with that right off the bat.
FE: I love how each episode tackles a theme or a personality trait or something that can help us grow. Talk a little bit about this approach and then how that led into creating the show.
KC: We wanted to give each episode a virtue, a character virtue that we were going to dive into, and a lot of them were inspired by our previous work. We had a small business where we taught children improv classes in Los Angeles for 10 years. And so through the study of improv, we were always leading kids toward growing their social emotional skills. And so we did talk about things like listening and eye contact and confidence and courage when you’re scared. And so this show really feels like an extension of that work, and we knew we wanted to keep exploring those themes when making the show.
FE: So Katie, you’re Mable. I love this. And Ryan, you’re Find-It Fred.
Ryan Chase: I am a neighbor, yes, who shares interests with Mable in fun, practical what-cha-ma-things as she calls them on the show. And yeah, I pop in as a neighbor and we share the excitement of things that especially Find-It Fred. He’s kind of like the dad hitting those Saturday morning garage sales and garage full of trinkets that hopefully we’ll get to see in Season 2 and 3. But yeah, it’s pretty interesting, especially our kids being like, you guys are what? Your neighbors, your mom and dad,
KC: We joke that there’ll be a whole spinoff of our love story. We’re going to get married and have children one day, but it’s like, no, that’s not really what this show is.
FE: In real life you have three. So how did they help inform the show? Either directly or just from your parenting lens?
KC: For sure. I mean, we’ve worked with kids for our entire careers, but I always say that we weren’t really great teachers until we became parents. And so I love that I’m getting to play this role now through the lens of being a mom because I have a different point of view and I have a different tone with children and a gentleness about me that maybe I didn’t have when I was younger, but they helped so much. We built a model, a miniature model of our show on our kitchen table as a first step to developing. I mean, we homeschool our three kids, so we’re always trying to find some sort of original curriculum. So there was about a year where this was their curriculum was we were creating and playing around with these ideas and naming animal creatures, and it was a lot of fun.
RC: Oh yeah. The kids were doing the puppeting and we were helping guide them through in the magical, our Bannerberry, our Make-believe. And so we have a lot of experience with them doing all the stuff, and we thought that’s the direction it would go. And then it ended up morphing into this other thing that we now we’d love. But yeah, the kids, our kids were big, big parts of the development. In fact, a lot, some of the inspiration is I would make up bedtime stories for the kids with characters, and I started coming up with these characters and then the stories would be a little consistent and then we’d change a little. And so those ended up being in the show, some of those characters. And so it’s been fun little Easter eggs, especially for our kids like, Hey, is that who we were talking about? Yep.
KC: That’s it. There are a lot of Easter eggs for just our kids alone.
FE: Well, and I love that there’s a consistent and large cast of characters and that it’s done through so many different mediums. I love that there’s puppets, I love that we go into animation, you have a book at one point — there’s just so much visual but not overstimulating. And then we are getting these familiar faces. Talk to me about all those different elements that you’ve incorporated into every episode.
KC: That was very strategic because from the beginning our inspiration was to make something that felt the way Mr. Rogers used to feel. And our kids love Mr. Rogers, but they also are a bit extreme and that they haven’t been exposed to a ton of screen time. So they have the attention span to handle it, whereas the modern attention span and what kids expect when they sit down to watch shows is a little different. So we had to be really creative about how do we keep this pace gentle and slow and grounded, but also have a lot of fun along the way and adding all those whimsical elements and making sure that the scoring really took us through from scene to scene and keeping things exciting with all these gadgets in Mabel’s House.
RC: And we were very intentional that we wanted to have as many practical effects as possible to emphasize the kind of the vintage or old school aesthetic, the memories we have grown up watching shows before you could do everything with a computer. So everything that can be practical is practical. The machines and the Wonder Wheel, those are real things that were actually made.
KC: And the Stop Motion town is all made of paper and wood and little props that are felt and yarn. And so we wanted it to have that feeling of fun, but also a bit nostalgic and really sweet.
FE: I definitely think that you accomplished that because my kids are eight and five and I sat down with my kindergarten daughter and I said, we’re going to watch this new show. And we started watching it and she was like, I really like this. And we both enjoyed it. And her favorite aspects of it were those tangible pieces when it came to the question of the day and you see the marble or ball drop and then the wheel spin. I mean, she literally looked at me and said, this is impressive. It was so cute. Just her little vocabulary as she’s processing what she’s seen because it is so different than a lot of the content that’s out there in a really positive and unique way. So I appreciated all that kind of tangibility. It crossed the plane into our living room for sure.
KC: That’s so sweet. That’s wonderful. Well, there’s so many incredible things that you can do with technology now and kids’ content, but there’s also so many incredible things that existed before that technology did that are wonderful. And so our hope was that today’s kids would get that and love it so much. So I love to hear that.
FE: And for me, it was the music, it was the score that every move that you have has music attached to it in a really fun and playful way and also helps with the social emotional. Should I be happy in this scene? Are we gearing up to be sad. So talk to me a little bit about the importance of the music.
KC: Well, its key role I think was to help us accomplish the slow pace that we wanted to have. And we wanted kids to be able to have a moment to breathe and process what just happened. So we didn’t want Mabel to walk from room to room in our house, and it’s an enormous set. It really is a big house, and so there’s a lot of dead air as she moves about her house. But we wanted it there and we didn’t want her to kind of turn to camera and be like, come on, kids. We’re marching this way. We wanted a sort of gentle way for a kid to quietly process what just happened and take a beat. And so the scoring, these composers that we worked with were so talented and just filling that space and I think a way that allows a kid to sit with what just happened before the next thing happens. We’re really proud of the music in the show.
RC: Scoring is one of the things. We probably talked about one of the earliest aspects, and we had had ideas and I thought maybe there’s a world where it’s all a certain genre and maybe there’s a world. And then we landed, especially with these wonderful composers, a wonderful mix of these sounds and some country jazz type sounds, Western swing. And they just really captured it and we’re so thrilled. And as she was saying, with a show that’s slightly paced down and not the quick cuts, there are those moments and they’re purposeful and there’s a method to it. And so yeah, the music was to keep you wither as you’re thinking about what just happened and where are we going? And instead of just a quick cut, so man, we’re just so thrilled. We love these musicians so much, man.
FE: And I’ve only gone to see a couple episodes. We haven’t delved into the whole thing yet, which I’m excited to do, but I understand you’re even going to have some guest appearances from maybe some familiar faces. How did that come about?
KC: Yes, we just asked. We dreamed big and asked, and Mabel ends up on a enormous famous football field talking to the head coach. She learns to ice skate from Scott Hamilton.
RC: Wild! Olympic Gold medalist Scott Hamilton. That’s wild. That really happened.
KC: Yes, that really happened. That was real life. She learns to play the banjo with an incredible 14 time Grammy winning musician. I mean, we dreamed big and people said yes, and there are so many fun adventures that are to come in season one. Probably one of my favorites is actually a more simple one. We took M able to AC chocolatier and she learned to make chocolate with all these big factory machines and stuff, and that was such a sweet one. I don’t know. I don’t think I could pick a favorite, but she certainly had a lot of adventures.
RC: And the folks that said yes to be our guests and be on the show, I mean the kindness, they really poured the kindness out. And overall, these are strangers, we’re strangers to them, and man, they just came and blessed our socks off and it just felt like that throughout the whole making of the show, including the crew on every level. It was just kind of a kindness overload. Yeah, I mean, just the fact that she learned ice skating from Scott Hamilton on there and he doesn’t know us, and he was awesome. And rom block playing the banjo, that guy is awesome. I love that guy. I love that. I can call that guy a friend now. And there’s just endless stories like that. So to come take a chance on us and be guests and let Maple learn things and expose those subjects to the children we’re trying to entertain and teach just awesome. We’re just had our socks blessed off.
FE: I’m so excited for audiences to get the opportunity to see it and interact with it. And this is all going to be available on the Bentkey app. Talk to me a little bit about BentKey.
KC: Yes, it’s a brand new app and we think it’s the greatest thing ever as parents because now our kids just turned it on and we’re like, we know all these shows and all of them are being really carefully vetted and looked at, so they all feel like what we love, which is imaginative, wholesome, happy, shows that our teaching values we all agree on. It’s a really joyful place to grab kids’ content and we felt so aligned with Bent Key in that vision of just creating shows that feel good.
