It seems impossible, but the Ice Age franchise has been around for nearly two decades at this point. It probably stands to reason, then, why the newest film — the sixth, in fact! — in the franchise would go ahead and focus on the series’ most beloved character, the weasel Buck Wild (voiced by Simon Pegg). And, as this newly released small teaser shows, that’s exactly what the next Ice Age project is going to do.
Ice Age: The Adventures of Buck Wild clearly begins when the “very, very stupid” (their words, not mine) possums Crash (voiced by Seann William Scott) and Eddie (voiced by Josh Peck) inadvertently manage to return to the Lost World, a.k.a. the H.G. Wells-style subterranean realm underneath the Earth’s frosty surface where all the dinosaurs escaped to before the K-T event wiped out most species on Earth. The jungle is also the home of the adventurer Buck Wild, the weasel who accidentally landed in the Dino-World when he was young, leading to… all of this:
The announcement of a new entry in the series is something of a surprise, considering that Disney dissolved the series’ creators, Blue Sky Studios, earlier this year, cancelling the team’s upcoming movies, including an animated adaptation of the Noelle Stevenson comic Nimona. 450 employees were let go in the process, and while some planned projects were scrapped, not all of Blue Sky’s projects met the same fate of Nimona. It was known at the time that a TV series set in the world of Ice Age was in the works, and it would appear that Adventures of Buck Wild would indeed be that show.
What Disney has planned for the franchise beyond this remains to be seen, but Ice Age: The Adventures of Buck Wild comes to Disney+ on January 28.