Western Animation / The Great North

It's great up here.^note Left to right: Wolf, Honeybee, Beef, Judy, Ham, and Moon.

Look up there
What do you see?
Nature and stuff
Like a rock
Or a tree
Hup, the Great North
Way up here, you can breathe the air
Catch some fish
Or gaze at a bear
Wow
Hup, the Great North
Here we live, hup, hup
Here we'll stay, hup, whoo
From longest night to longest day
In the Great North

— The theme song

The Great North is an American Animated Sitcom created by Wendy Molyneux, Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin, and Minty Lewis (former writer and storyboard artist on Regular Show), with Loren Bouchard as one of the executive producers, for the Fox Broadcasting Company, which stars Nick Offerman, Jenny Slate, and Will Forte.

The show takes place in Lone Moose, Alaska, where a single dad, Beef Tobin, juggles his life keeping his kids close together, including being involved in his only daughter Judy's artistic dreams, in the local mall.

The series had two sneak previews on January 3 and 17, 2021; the regular premiere was set for February 14 but was delayed by a rain delay of the 2021 Daytona 500. The series instead premiered on February 21, 2021, with the subsequent two episodes being made available for early release on Hulu and Fox's website.

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Hup! The Great North provides examples of:

• Actor Allusion:
  • The show's first boat Couch Gag (see below) is "You Yacht-a Know", a Shout-Out to the song "You Oughta Know" by cast member Alanis Morissette.
  • In "Keep Beef-lievin' Adventure", when Beef sees Moon looking sad, he tells him "that's an awful long face, son. You sure you're not part horse?" His voice actress, Aparna Nancherla, previously voiced a horse girl named Hollyhock in Bojack Horseman.
  • Wolf's T-Shirt in the opening of "Sister Pact Too Adventure" says Farts and Recreation, in which Beef's voice actor Nick Offerman played the character Ron Swanson, Judy's voice actress Jenny Slate played the recurring character Mona-Lisa Saperstein, and Wolf's voice actor Will Forte made a guest appearance as Kelly Larson in the episode "Time Capsule".
• Advertising by Association: The show is advertised as "from the producers of Bob's Burgers", and the artwork and animation style of the two shows are similar.
• Animal Theme Naming: The Tobins' eldest son, Wolf, and his fiancée, Honeybee.
• As Herself: Judy's Imaginary Friend is Alanis Morissette, who lends her own voice.
• The Beard: The town has a dance set in homage to a historical man in town that had died trying to survive the wilderness to marry a woman whom he promised he would gift two cabins as marriage. Turns out, both the man and the women were gay, set to wed each other in a marriage of convenience, and the separate cabin were so both could still have their own romances.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti:
  • In the first season, a white yeti walks behind the Tobins' boat in the opening credits (right after Ham sings "Or gaze at a bear"). In the second season opening, it's a brown Bigfoot carrying a purple keytar.
  • As explored in the Cryptid Episode "Keep Beef-lievin' Adventure", looking for Bigfoot is a big deal for the Tobin family and many Lone Moose citizens. Jerry also gets a job dressing up as Bigfoot for local parties. (Also, Moon insists on calling it Bigfoot because "Sasquatch" sounds too much like "ass crotch".)
• Birthday Episode: The pilot episode takes place on Judy's sixteenth birthday.
• Brick Joke: Many of the Credits Gags often take the form of Brick Jokes such as:
  • Wolf singing a Ska Lullaby for the potholder from a CD he checked out from the library in "Beef Momma's House Adventure".
  • Wolf dressed like a French Maid Moose based on his plan to get the moose off the family van in "You've Got Math Adventure".
  • The intro to Dakota: A Cowboy in College which is what the Tobin's were watching in the first few minutes of "Poetry of the Penals Adventure".
  • A commercial for Moon's imaginary lawyer Olivia Objections in "Slide and Wetjudice Adventure".
• Casting Gag: Alyson, the storekeeper who flirts with Beef, is voiced by Megan Mullally who is married to Beef's voice actor, Nick Offerman, in real life.
• Coordinated Clothes: Subtle, but "Alaska twins" Judy and Ham wear a blue coat with green pants and a green coat with blue pants respectively.
• Couch Gag: During the intro where the Tobins are on their boat, there's another boat in water that always has a different Punny Name every episode.
  • Starting with Season 3, during the part of the intro where the Tobins play a fireside board game in their pajamas, Wolf wears a T-shirt with a fart related pun on the front.
• "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: The main cast sings the theme song of the show in the opening.
• Edible Theme Naming: Beef and Ham. Meat products also show up with Beef’s catchphrase (“Hot dog!”) and Moon’s Establishing Character Moment, which has him mad about some bologna he was drying on the roof.
• Embarrassing Animal Suit: Moon wears a bear snow suit.
• Epic Fail:
  • In "Feast of Not People Adventure"
    • The European settlers who founded their little Alaskan town of Lone Moose were originally trying to get to Florida, which is in a direction as opposite to Alaska as you can get.
    • When Moon says he doesn't think Honeybee could be quiet for 5 seconds, she tries to prove that she can... by loudly counting to five.
  • In "Avocado Barter Adventure", there's no words to describe how way off Beef and Ham were when they tried a make a Shrek-themed anniversary party for Wolf and Honeybee when they have to rely on Ham's memory when he saw the first ten minutes of the film at a slumber party before he fell asleep eight years ago. Not only does he gets Shrek's appearance wrong, but he gets the setting wrong and he also remembers characters that aren't even in the film.
  • In "Beef's Craig Beef Adventure", Ham is convinced by a novelty singing fish to try and free the herring during the Herring Run. Ham tries to save a herring by throwing it overboard. Only for a seagull to catch it. He tries again by putting some into a bucket of water. But since the bucket was filled with fresh water and herring are saltwater fish, they just end up dying.
  • In "From Tusk Til Dawn Adventure", Tusk was not lying when he said Dan, his former sidekick, is terrible with a spear. While taking on the smugglers who hijacks Beef's boat, after Tusk disarms the smuggler's trident and it lands in Dan's hand, he tries to throw it at the smuggler, who's standing right in front of him, and fails. Not only did he completely miss him but he throws it too high and off the boat at a different direction.
    Tusk: I'm telling you, he couldn't stab the broad side of a barn, and we tried. I literally tried to make him stab a barn, and he couldn't do it.
  • In "Stools Rush in Adventure", when Moon stays home by himself for the first time, he gets caught in one of his own traps and spends the rest of the night inside a net and is freed when his family comes home. Beef reassures Moon that Ham's first time alone at home was equally disastrous. They found him trapped in the fold out couch pretending to be a remote control.
  • In "Say It Again, Ham Adventure":
    • When Cousin Danica is holding Wolf and Honeybee at gunpoint, Chief Edna and Elba arrives just in time to stop her. Unfortunately, when they notice Danica holding a gun, they both immediately surrender to her because they left their guns back in their car which make Wolf and Honeybee call them out for their incompetency. But they make it up by successfully distracting her and then disarming her.
    • Wolf and Honeybee decides to investigate the Orca Bay Slicer for their podcast and later think Cousin Danica is the killer. Later, they learn Danica isn't the killer and the real killer already confessed years ago, and Wolf and Honeybee realized they didn't finish reading the article about the killer before they started their investigation because they got too excited about it.
  • In "Cheese All That Adventure", after Wolf decides to let Cheesecake do things on his own without his help at the Alaska Pretzel Company, he's immediately fired the next day for accidentally shredding important documents and somehow shredding the shredder itself.
• Everybody Knew Already:
  • After his wife left him, Beef went into full denial and told his children that their mom got eaten by a bear, but they all know the truth and pretend to believe him so he doesn't have another meltdown. By the end of the first episode, he finally comes to terms with his wife leaving him and moves on.
  • Ham comes out as gay to his family, but Moon points out they already know because he already came out to them a bunch of times and he keeps forgetting.
  • In Season 2 "The Yawn of the Dead Adventure [Halloween]", Mr. Golovkin and Ms. Anderson are revealed to be in a Secret Relationship, but Principal Gibbons and the other school staff are already aware of their "secret" and are wondering why they're hiding it since they're all happy for them. In Season 3 "Arranger-ous Minds Adventure", it's no longer a secret since all the students know about their relationship when one of the students caught them kissing near the VCR store and told everyone about it.
• Evolving Credits: The second season introduces many changes to the title sequence:
  • The backgrounds are much more detailed, particularly the sky and mountains.
  • A Sasquatch holding a keytar walks by in the background, rather than the Yeti seen in the first season.
  • Honeybee, rather than leaning forward with her arms around Wolf, stands next to Beef, showing that she's an official family member now.
  • Ham no longer has his eyes closed in the photo.
  • The ending shot is of the whole family playing a board game together, rather than doing different things in the same room.
  • In the Season 2 holiday episode "Dip The Halls Adventure" opening credits, the porch railing has multicolored Christmas lights wrapped around it, and stockings are hung up over the fireplace.
  • Starting in Season 3, Judy is now standing on the roof with the night sky (and her imaginary Alanis Morrisette) in the background, and Moon is standing in a tree in town with several of the townspeople below him. The music has also changed, adding more instrumentation and background vocals, and the final shot of the Tobins' living room has them in their pajamas.
• Fiery Redhead: Averted. All the male Tobins except for Moon (Beef, Wolf, Ham, and Brian) are red-headed, and all are generally friendly and good-natured.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Ham has his eyes closed in the picture the family takes during the first season opening credits. They're open in the second season.
• The Friends Who Never Hang: Despite being the only females in the family, Judy and Honeybee never spent that much time together without the other Tobins involved, even after Honeybee moved in with them. This even gets brought up in "Sister Pact Too Adventure", where Judy even admits to this and while she sees Honeybee as a sister, she's unsure if Honeybee feels the same way about her so she makes a plan with her to attend a feminist retreat to solidify a sisterly bond between them.
• Frustrating Lie: In "Sister Pact Too Adventure", when Beef's former classmate from high school, Zelda, drops by his house to fulfill their high school marriage pact and he tells her he can't marry her, she gets upset, which causes her bones to stop working, and she lays on the ground and won't leave until she feels better. In order to get Zelda to leave his house, Beef lies and tells her he just got remarried and he'll introduce his wife to her, which frustrates Wolf, Ham, and Moon, who now have to play along in order to get Zelda to leave, and at one point, Ham tells Beef to stop talking to avoid making their situation more complicated. While Wolf is trying to contact Alyssa to help pretend to be Beef's wife, Beef ends up making the situation worse by claiming his wife is currently in his bedroom resting, adding more frustration to the Tobin boys because now they have to rush to get someone in Beef's bedroom before Zelda finds out.
• Funny Background Event: In the opening sequence, as the characters gaze at a bear in the foreground, a yeti/sasquatch walks behind them in the far background.
• Funny Photo Phrase: At the end of "My Fart Will Go On Adventure", right before the Tobins and the Shaws are about to take a photo, Judy says, "Okay, on three! Everyone say, 'Today turned out perfectly and we didn't even have to do the shadow wedding, which is a good move cuz mom didn't even end up throwing up'!" The camera goes off before anyone else can say that, though.
• Hippie Name: Moon.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Each episode so far is "[Phrase X] Adventure".
• Jerkass Has a Point: In "Curl Interrupted Adventure," Judy refuses to put Delmar in because he's super old. She mainly does it out of arrogance because she wants to win and she thinks he's holding them back, but when Beef overrules Judy and has Delmar throw, he gets carried away by the stone and breaks his hip.
• Kissing Cousins: In episode 6, Ham is excited about taking his cousin Becca to the school dance. Although, he only wanted to just in case all the boys would be taken (he's gay).
• Light Girl, Dark Boy: Kathleen and Judy Tobin are blondes while Beef, Wolf, and Ham have reddish-brown hair and Moon has very dark brown hair.
• LOL, 69: Alyson flirts with Beef by pointing out that the total of his purchase ends with sixty-nine cents.
• Multi-Part Episode: The Season Three finale, "For Whom the Smell Tolls Part One & Two" is the shows first two-part episode.
• Mum Looks Like a Sister: Beef and Wolf are father and son, but a viewer could mistake them for brothers at first glance.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: How the town of Lone Moose was found. The early settlers of the town (who were actually headed for Florida) resorted to cannibalism to survive the winter, before realizing there was plenty of edible wildlife around.
• Obsessively Organized: In "Arranger-ous Mind Adventure", Moon is revealed to have OCD when he's caught organizing trash in a neat grid. He's in denial of it until he gets home and realizes all his stuff is organized to an extreme degree. He also helps Mr. Golovkin deal with his OCD by making him move his tools out of the shed so he can make kombucha there instead of in the house.
• Odd Name Out: Judy is the only one to have a normal name in the family where her father's name is Beef, her brothers names are Wolf, Ham, and Moon, and Wolf's fiancée's name is Honeybee. Beef's own brother is named Brian.
• Once an Episode: Starting in Season 3, a white yeti can be spotted in the background during an episode.
• Once More, with Clarity: In "Slide and Wet-Judice Adventure", Wolf initially believes that he is cursed because he loses his trunks every time he goes to a water park, as shown in a series of flashbacks. Later in the episode, Wolf realizes that the incidents were actually results of his poor decision-making, and the flashbacks show exactly what happened: Wolf lost his trunks on the waterslide because he went down headfirst after being told not to, he lost his trunks in the wave pool because he went in despite being warned that the wave intensity was turned up, and he lost his trunks at the hotdog stand because he was wearing a shirt that said "Pants Me, I Dare You".
• Parental Sexuality Squick: A running theme in Season 4, since Beef has finally become confident enough to start dating again.
  • "Risky Beefness Adventure": Moon's subplot with Jerry is set into motion by him opting to eat his breakfast outside when the conversation turns to his father's desire to have sex. Throughout the episode, Judy's only role is to try and fail to hide how mortified she is by the constant topic of Beef's sex life until she snaps and breaks off a piece of the table in frustration. Averted with Ham and especially Wolf, who encourages Beef and throws a party to celebrate him getting laid, with a cake and a banner. If anything, everyone else has to hold back Wolf's enthusiasm about it.
  • "Bear Of Beeftown Adventure": Moon reveals that the reason why Beef has been in such a good mood lately is because he's been getting closer to Carissa, the mom of Moon's frenemy Debbie. The reason Moon knows about this? Debbie told him she accidentally walked in on Carissa and Beef in the bathtub together ("Mom? Moon's dad?! AAAAAAH!"). At the end of the episode, it happens again, this time with Moon accidentally walking in on them. He's just as horrified as Debbie was.
• Phrase Catcher: "Not now, Londra!"
• Quirky Town: More or less everyone who lives in or visits Lone Moose has some odd tendencies and customs.
• Running Gag:
  • Wolf having accumulated thousands of dollars of late fees in the library.
  • Wolf saying good bye to total strangers with "I love you".
• Secret Pet Plot: In "Xmas with the Skanks Adventure", a reindeer from a Santa's Village follows Moon home and he hides it in the shed. He plans to keep it as a pet, but then "Wilhelm", as he's been calling it, starts giving birth.
• Short Teens, Tall Adults: Downplayed. 16-year-old Judy and 17-year-old Ham are about a head and half a head respectively shorter than Beef, and both are at the age where they should be done growing, but it could be justified if their mother is shorter and they take after her (adult Wolf is slightly taller than his dad).
• Signs of Disrepair: A moose gets inside the Tobin's house and gets some of the balloons that spelled out "Happy Sixteenth Birthday" tangled up on his antlers, ending up spelling out "SEXI".
• Students' Secret Society: Judy and Hamm reform the Saved By The Spells, a secret organization composed of Dead Moose's high school students. Despite the grandiose and Punny Name, the group is better known for pulling off pranks around school, and it even turns out Beef had been a member of a previous incarnation during his own high school days.
• Testosterone Poisoning: Beef's description of the Tobin family as a whole in the first episode.
  Beef: From the day we chew ourselves off our mother’s umbilical cord to the day a wild animal eats us, we are fighters, born to wrestle nature itself into submission year after glorious year.
• Varying Competency Alibi: In Season 2 "Skidmark Holmes Adventure", when someone stole Judy's pizza and replaces it with a soiled underwear at her murder mystery party, everyone in the room has to show their underwater to prove they didn't do it. When Russell reveals he's not wearing underwear because he has a "clinically claustrophobia wiener", Henry speaks up and say that Russell is too much of a doof to steal the pizza.

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Ooh, I like the part where we say "Hup".