Management/production company The Collective has teamed with Dane Boedigheimer, creator of the popular YouTube series The Annoying Orange, to produce The Annoying Orange animated TV comedy series. Conrad Vernon, co-director of Monsters and Aliens and Shrek 2, has come on board to executive produce. The Collective is financing six half-hour episodes from the project, which is being written by Tom Sheppard, an Emmy winner for Pinky and the Brain. Casting is already under way, with Malcolm McDowell set to voice one of the characters.

The Annoying Orange video series, which has amassed more than half-billion views on YouTube, features an orange with a human mouth and eyes heckling other characters, mostly other fruits and vegetables. The series has 7 million Facebook fans, it is the eighth-most-subscribed YouTube channel of all time and its app is in the Top 10 on iTunes.

The Collective, which reps Boedigheimer and Sheppard, took a similar route with Lucas Cruikshank’s web series Fred, developing it independently before taking it to Nickelodeon. Here is one Annoying Orange video, which has garnered 58 million views: