Comic Strip to Big Screen: What Dreamworks Radically Changed About Hammy the Squirrel

Take a closer look at Comic Strip to Big Screen: What Dreamworks Radically Changed About Hammy the Squirrel with our latest coverage.

Michael Fry and T Lewis launched the syndicated Over the Hedge strip in June 1995 through United Feature Syndicate. Their original print universe centered around dry irony. Animals watched humans construct suburban subdivisions and treated suburbanites as bizarre, alien specimens governed by consumer compulsion. Within that strip, the squirrel was originally named Sammy.

Sammy was not a lunatic. He had a childlike temperament, often asking earnest philosophical questions that frustrated Verne the turtle and amused RJ the raccoon. He was gentle, easily distracted, and occasionally prone to deep, melancholy thoughts about acorns and existence. When DreamWorks acquired the film rights in 2001, development executives quickly concluded that Sammy's languid, four-panel print pacing would drag a 90-minute computer-animated film to a dead stop.

Screenwriters transformed the squirrel from an innocent thinker into a living firecracker. They adjusted the name from Sammy to Hammy, partly to sharpen the punchiness of the moniker and partly to reflect his hammy, theatrical unpredictability. Rather than wondering why humans buy lawn ornaments, Hammy wanted sugar, wanted nuts, and could not hold a train of thought longer than three seconds.