In some ways, doing development art for the animation studios is one of the saddest jobs on Earth. You give a project your all and get emotionally invested with it, even though only a few pitches ever go as far as animation. The above art is from a show that got pitched to a network, who offered a mini-series of five episodes with the door open for a full 65 if the ratings warranted. However the studio for whom the pitch was done balked over the partial order, and the show never happened.
While I did a little presentation art for Filmation around 1980, I didn't get to do serious amounts of it until going to Marvel a year or so later. My first major (to me, at least) development was Iron Man as giant robot team, based on an idea Stan Lee and I co-created after trips to Japan. There's an image from it below:
We had interest from Bandai USA, but Marvel's toy guy was convinced giant robots were strictly a Japanese fad and wouldn't take off in the States. So this one never even got pitched out of house. Two years later, Transformers and Go-Bots proved that maven wrong.
Here're a few more images by me from shows that didn't happen:
Wish I could share all the stories around these, and maybe I will, another day.
The Masked Mayhem graphic and related text are copyright Will Meugniot 2013. All other images are copyrighted by their respective rights holders.
Some very cool looking stuff there. A shame some if never gets past the initial stages, though.
ReplyDeleteThe odds of a development going all the way to series are slim. Even after in house development at a studio or network, less than 5% get greenlit.
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