Ice Age is an American media franchise created by Michael J. Wilson, centering on a group of mammals surviving the Pleistocene ice age. It consists of computer-animated films, short films, TV specials and a series of video games. The first five films were produced by Blue Sky Studios, 20th Century Animation, and distributed by its then parent company 20th Century Studios, which is a subsidiary of Disney. The series features the voices of Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, and Chris Wedge across all films, with Queen Latifah, Seann William Scott, Josh Peck, Simon Pegg, Wanda Sykes, Keke Palmer, and Jennifer Lopez joining the main cast in subsequent films. The films center mainly on the adventures of "the Herd," which since the first film consists of at least woolly mammoth Manny (Romano), ground sloth Sid (Leguizamo), and Smilodon Diego (Leary). The franchise also features mostly independent plotlines involving a dialogue-free saber-toothed squirrel named Scrat (Wedge), who ends up in misadventures from trying to retrieve and bury his acorns, the latter act creates a chain of events that sets up the various adventures of the protagonists.