What About an Animated Dark Shadows?

[The Ghost of Sarah Collins]

I personally would love to see a Dark Shadows movie made in the same style that the
"Nightmare Before Christmas" was made, I'm not sure what that process was called, although I know it would be fantastic! 

[Maybellique]

I think it's called "stop-action". ~DJ

[The Ghost of Sarah Collins]

Thank You Maybellique, I can imagine the story of Dark Shadows made in stop action... possibly put to music also.    of course the voices should be those of the original cast... if possible. 

[GooberCollins]

Doesn't Adult Swim mainly consist of comedic animations? Or am I missing something there?

Adult Swim is a mixed bag. You have the more comedic shows like Family Guy, Futurama, and Robot Chicken, and they also air anime series with more adult themes, like Bleach, Trinity Blood, and Death Note. Out of all of those, I only really like Futurama, Robot Chicken, and Death Note (which honestly reminds me a little bit of Dark Shadows, despite having a totally different premise, due to the good writing and acting with occasional slip-ups; I don't think DS ever had a line as bad as "I'll take a potato chip... AND EAT IT!!!" though). Honestly, quite a lot of the stuff on that programming block is tasteless garbage.

I think Dark Shadows does have tremendous potential as an animated series, as a gateway between fans of the original and their kids and grandkids. Give the show intelligent, mature writing that both adults and older children can appreciate, but keep it at a level where kids around 9 or 10 can get into it and have a spooky good time without emotional scarring. Joss Whedon tried to do that with a Buffy animated series, but Fox Kids decided that it would be better to have a wide selection of bad dubs of already mediocre anime shows as their Saturday morning block instead. God knows it would have saved me at that age; at 9 I thought that Ed, Edd, n' Eddy and Yu-Gi-Oh were the pinnacles of intelligent writing.

[Pansity]

I've often thought that it would have been cool if they had done an animated DS on Saturday mornings in the '70s, as they did with STAR TREK.

I was just thinking about the animated Trek as I read this thread. They got some very good stories, so they brought a lot of the grown up fans to the Saturday morning "kiddie geared" cartoons. (Yeah right, like a lot of us weren't there watching classic toons ANYWAY.  )

All kidding aside, they got to do some interesting science fiction from writers like Larry Niven, and didn't have a makeup budget to make them crazy. Not to mention the vast difference in animation quality from then to now....

I think it could work, for all the reasons the audio dramas work.  Now to get the powers that be INTERESTED....

Jeannie

[borgosi]

It could be set in a parallel, animated world.

[Taeylor Collins]

I would support as I support most anything DS, however, I don't know about a cartoon version of DS.   I just saw a leaked version of the Buffy cartoon and I was glad it wasn't picked up.   YAY!  My 400th post!

[GooberCollins]

Eek. I just watched the leaked presentation and it was terrible. You are 100% right, Taeylor. When I mentioned the Buffy presentation, I didn't know that it had been leaked, and I was simply going on what I had read about the pilot, which grossly exaggerated its quality. In the event that a Dark Shadows animated series is made, it will hopefully be better than that... thing.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Back in the '90s there was talk of an animated DS series based on the original series with many of the original actors providing voices. I'm thinking the Fest or maybe it was ShadowGram that conducted a survey of fans to gauge interest and the idea never went anywhere because basically there was so little interest expressed for it. Who's to say the reaction would be the same today?    But, of course, someone with the actual ability to get such a project off the ground has to get behind it before any sort of survey might be conducted again or an official proposal could be presented. But with DCP pretty much nonexistent for most intents and purposes, that would be much harder to do now than it was back in the '90s. Though not impossible...

[Taeylor Collins]

So does Johnny own the exclusive rights to a movie only?  I suspect Dan's girls own the rights to the original?? Can anyone shed some light on this??

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Depp only holds the rights to do a film. But just who can negotiate other sorts of rights deals is a bit of a mystery because all sorts of theories had been put forth in fandom after DC's passing with none being totally substantiated as far as I'm aware. For what it's worth, Variety reported that Depp & Co. sealed his rights deal with "the estate of Dan Curtis" - but just who represents the estate is what the matter of debate was about...

[jimbo]

So hypothetically speaking if CBS wanted to do a new DS television series they would probably have to contact David Kennedy since he seems to be representing the estate of Dan Curtis and his family. I base this on the fact that he is listed as one of the producers of the DS movie (although JP is probably doing most of his work). In reality CBS would probably need to contact JP first.  So my understanding is that the estate is free to negotiate with any entity who wants to do a new DS project although in reality that won't happen with a big budgeted DS movie in the works.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

I hesitate to get into this on the forum because so much is not "officially" known, but I think it's pretty safe to say that David Kennedy is most probably not the person of power to contact. He supposedly severed ties with DCP by the time he'd stared his own production company. He is, however, one of the producers of the Depp/DS film because he'd headed DCP for so long and is trusted to look after their interests. But all of this is getting way OT, so it's really best to leave everything at that...

[Doug]

I did'nt know they were talking about a DS animated series back in the 90's. The only thing I remember about DS of the 90's was the NBC remake and the Innovation comicbook series.

If they did decided to do a animated series, the only two cable channels that I can think of showing it is either Sci-Fi or Chiller.

[GooberCollins]

Yes, because they'd either have to dumb it down for the audience that a channel like Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon caters to, or attempt to sell it to a regular network. There's unfortunately not much middle ground with American animation these days; it's either very juvenile or very adult.

Though I wouldn't be thrilled with it because I'm not really into manga or anime (Japanese comics/cartoons), there's a possibility that a Japanese manga writer could find DS and want to adapt it to comic or cartoon form.