La storia di Buffy the Animated Series

http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2008/08/26/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-animated-series-to-be-resurrected/

‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ Animated Series To Be Resurrected?
Published by Jennifer Vineyard on Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 11:10 am.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” has been many things —
so much so that creator Joss Whedon jokes, “I got to make a comic book out
of the TV show out of the movie out of the T-shirt out of the opera of the
song of the bumper sticker of the shoe line that I love.” One of the things
he left out in the absurdly long list is an animated series — which was
actually in the pipeline once upon a time, and looks to find new life once
again.

Back in 2002, Whedon and Jeph Loeb came up with the idea of doing an
animated version of Buffy that would take place somewhere in season one.
“We liked to call it episode seven-and-a-half,” Loeb joked. “It was a much
simpler time. Angel had been introduced, but he was not yet Angelus. We
could retrofit Dawn as a ten-year-old, so you can really play the older
sister gag. Their mom is alive.” And because it was animated, “no one has
to grow up.”

“Buffy the Animated Series” was meant for a more general audience than just
regular Buffy fans — you didn’t need to follow the show religiously to get
what was going on. “It was a very simple entry point,” Loeb said. “There is
a girl in high school who has been chosen to fight evil, and there’s a
great deal of it in her town. Here are her friends, and here is her
watcher.”

With special effects costs no longer a concern, they were able to do in the
animated series what they couldn’t on the regular TV show (and what they do
now in the comics). “We could have thousands of vampires,” Loeb said. “They
could fight an army of the undead. In the pilot, the vampires raised a
dragon, a 120-foot wingspan dragon, and Buffy ends up riding it across
Sunnydale, and as it’s shooting fire, she looks down and says, ‘Hey, I can
see my house from here!’”
'Buffy the Animated Series' art
With many original cast members such as Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendan,
and Anthony Stewart Head aboard to do voiceovers, and Eric Wight aboard to
do the animation, you might have thought this would be an easy sell. “We
had an opportunity to do something about how animation changes and affects
how things look,” Loeb said. “For me, ‘Batman the Animated Series’ drew a
line where everything that came after would be compared to this particular
show. ‘Buffy’ would have been the next generation of that.”

But despite taking it to “every outlet in television” — including MTV —
Loeb said, they had little luck. “We’d take to one network, and they’d say,
‘How can we make this more mature?’ Well, do you want more violence? To
have the language like it is in the show? To have the actors do the voices
so it sounds like the show? We had all that. We would say, ‘This is what we
have: big piles of money and gold, and it’s sitting in the street and you
can come out and take it.’ They would ask, ‘But you do have copper pans?’
No, we have money, and gold! But they would want copper pans.”

Eventually, Fox Family signed on to air the show on Fox Kids — but when
that collapsed in a Disney buyout, the show went nowhere. And yet, for some
inexplicable reason, a three-minute version of the pilot just leaked to
YouTube earlier this month. An online petition just started to get it on
the air. Somehow, there’s fresh hope that this project may find a home
after all — just as Buffy has found new success as a comic book series.

“The best Buffy stories are ones of resurrection,” Joeb said. “Everything
still exists — the designs, the scripts. It’s such a ‘no-duh’ project, so
why the hell not? All you need is to draw it. Eight years ago, there was no
fascination with ‘Family Guy’ or ‘Robot Chicken,’ but there’s an audience
now that could drive to it. You can’t stand in the way of pop culture.”

Do you want an animated Buffy? What network should it be on? And what would
it take to get it on the air?
-- 
Jolan Tru
Filippo "Hytok" Simone
http://perestroika.iobloggo.com/