Nickelodeon may have canceled its stop-motion animated The Tiny Chef Show last year, but Chef hasn’t hung up his tiny knives. To a raucous crowd at New York Comic Con, his creators announced on Friday that they were cooking up something new with the funny felt gourmand, unveiling teaser footage for a stop-motion film that “doesn’t exist yet,” in the words of co-creator Rachel Larsen. She and production designer Jason Kolowski and the voice of Chef himself, Matt Hutchinson, then showed footage of Chef kicking around a dusty western town — with clips of him decked out in a cowboy outfit, stuck in jail, and researching the place where the team shot all of these clips, Pioneertown, California.
Chef was elected the mayor of Pioneertown about six months ago, and his tenure as mayor inspired the new show, Larsen said. It’s still early in its development, but the loose idea is that Chef seeks to put the small municipality, which was once regularly used to shoot Hollywood westerns, back on the map. It’s still being scripted, but Larsen described it as a “pilot special for his next cooking show, so we can get him into long-form content.”
Despite not being on Nickelodeon or a major streaming service, the Tiny Chef brand has lived on through in partnership deals with the likes of Ikea and Priceline and support from its fan club and subscribers. Since the cancellation, the team has tried to “embrace the freedom it gave us,” Larsen said. “It was a little ironic: We got canceled, then attended the Emmys three months later and won,” said Larsen, who acknowledged that making Chef’s content wasn’t as easy now that they have no corporate backing. “Going independent, everything’s in our hands.”