Sam Has Eyebrows

Blue Sky Studios began as a small Westchester-based CGI house in 1987 producing commercial work and short subjects before being acquired by 20th Century Fox in 1997. Chris Wedge's Ice Age, released on 15 March 2002, was the studio's feature debut and grossed approximately 383 million USD worldwide on a 59 million USD production budget. The Smilodon character Diego was voiced by Denis Leary, then primarily known for his stand-up comedy work and his role on FX's upcoming series Rescue Me. Leary returned for every subsequent feature in the franchise: Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009), Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012), Ice Age: Collision Course (2016), and the Disney+ exclusive Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild (2022), a streaming continuation produced by Bardel Entertainment after Disney shut down Blue Sky in April 2021 following the Fox acquisition. The original 2002 film's lava-cavern set piece, in which Diego rescues Manny's herd by leaping across collapsing igneous rock, was singled out at SIGGRAPH 2002 for technical excellence in particle simulation and fluid dynamics; the sequence was overseen by Blue Sky technical director Carl Ludwig. The character arc, in which Diego begins as a pack scout under Soto's command before defecting, has been widely identified as borrowing the conventional structure of the western-villain-becomes-ally trope from films including The Magnificent Seven (1960). Smilodon fatalis, the actual sabre-toothed cat species the design references, went extinct approximately 10,000 years ago and is not a domestic-cat ancestor despite the visual convention. The franchise grossed roughly 3.2 billion USD across all six features by 2022, making it one of the most commercially successful non-Disney animated franchises in the early CGI era. Leary has stated in interviews that Diego is the longest-running character of his career, longer than any of his live-action television leads.