More from Comic-Con At Home 2021

I’ve already written about women directors, show runners, and writers and what’s coming from Amazon Prime, IMDB, and Legion M at this year’s virtual SDCC at home at rogerebert.com. And you can “attend” every year’s SDCC highlight, the Masquerade costume competition on Tumblr. One more event I wanted to write about was a press conference featuring four very different projects. Here are the highlights.

Macy Schmidt (Orchestrator/ Music Director) Ratatouille: The Tik-Tok Musical

One of the most improbable and all-out remarkable origin stories of any artistic work in history is the pandemic-era development of a musical based on the non-musical Pixar film Ratatouille, the story of a rat who wants to be a chef. It somehow went from an impulsive post of just a few seconds from a teacher named Emily Jacobsen to a full-on virtual Broadway show (with the gracious permission of Disney). It raised an astonishing $2 million for The Actors Fund. At the press event, music director Macy Schmidt said, the participants would not have had the time to put something like this together if they had not all been out of work due to the virus and had access to the collaberative tools of Tik-Tok. “The creators had the ability to be creative in a way we didn’t in the before-times.” But she expects that they will continue to use those tools.