Little Michael sits down to eat his juicy peanut butter and jelly sandwich at his elementary school’s cafeteria. He looks up and notices for the first time that all his friends have brought strange but enticing lunches from home.

"What’s that?" he asks his friend Sanjay, who just moved from Mumbai.

"Delicious samosa — mashed potatoes with peas and other stuff," Sanjay replies. Suddenly, Michael’s PB & J doesn’t look so appetizing.

He goes home that day, and complains to his mother that being Canadian-American isn’t as exciting as being Indian or Cuban or Korean. Sympathetic, his mother decides to hold a potluck — a night filled with mouth watering dishes from around the world.

But Michael’s father, Tim, refuses to sample any of it.

"Try some pickled squab," suggests Jae.

"I like corn on the cob," Tim replies. "I like American food like hot dogs, fries and pizza."

"You do realize that those aren’t from America," Sanjay’s father points out.

Meet the hilarious cast from Mixed Nutz, a new

multi-cultural cartoon series produced by local Vancouver animation company, Big Bad Boo Studios.

Based in their trendy Yaletown studio, Shabnam Rezaei and her husband Aly Jetha lead a team of 20 young but highly skilled toon-boom animators. They busily work on a cartoon of a different flavour — one that highlights the different cultures that exist within a region.

The cast of characters include: Babak, the self-conscious kid from Iran; the Cuban superstitious bookworm Damaris; Sanjay, the romantic comedian who just moved from Mumbai; Jae, the Korean natural-born athlete who desperately tries to please his father; and, Sousanne the bossy and competitive nemesis to Babak.

"We want to be entertaining but we also want to give kids hints of culture without forcing it down their throats," said Jetha. "Our hope is to teach kids to be curious about different cultures."

To help them create authentic characters, Jetha and Rezaei have hired cultural advisors. They have one from every culture represented to help them create rich explanations of why people act in a way that might be understood differently across cultural boundaries.

"The trick is to entertain and educate the audience without using slap-stick humour," said Jetha. "We don’t want cheap laughs. We want something richer than that."

To that end, Jetha and Rezaei recruited Emmy Award winner and composer Randy Rogel, who has written music for shows like The Legend of Tarzan and Batman, three-time Emmy Award winner Alfred Gimeno, who worked on shows like Madagascar and The Smurfs, and animation director Glen Kennedy, who learned his skills on The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Flintstones, and The Yogi Bear Show.

Jetha and Rezaei’s backgrounds are as eclectic as their Mixed Nutz characters. Jetha was born in Ndola, Zambia and moved to Vancouver when he was two. His ancestors are Indian Ismailis from Gujarat.

Rezaei, who speaks five languages, was born in Iran, but moved to Austria with her brother to avoid the Iran-Iraq war. At the age of 18, she moved to the U.S. to attend the University of Pennsylvania before moving to New York City.

The two met in Boston at a model UN conference. They hit if off instantly and had dinner. But the next day Jetha returned to his home in Seattle and they never spoke again - not until 10 years later, when they ran into each other at a bar in New York City and realized they had met before. One year later they were married.

Both feel Vancouver is the perfect place to develop Mixed Nutz, which currently has eight finished shows and 26 in production.

"Not only does Vancouver have a strong animation industry, but here, multiculturalism is alive and well," said Jetha. "When ethnic communities come to this country, Canada changes. This is very different from the U.S. where the burden is on immigrants to assimilate."

Jetha and Rezaei plan to dub Mixed Nutz into six languages and sell the completed shows to television stations across the world for children of all backgrounds to watch and learn from.

"If you teach kids about different cultures, they will grow up more tolerant," said Jetha. "In the end, many children face a lack of opportunities so we want to tell them that they can be anything they want.

"It might sound clichéd but it’s certainly not clichéd to recognize the fact that inequalities can be found around the world."