Doctor Who Concept Art Teases An Animated Series We’ll Never See
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Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a good solid run, surviving seven seasons on TV and launching spin-off material that continues to this day across darn near every media you can think of. But there’s one painful little footnote, a slice of “coulda been” potential that still stings to this day: an animated Buffy series that died an ignominious death, in spite of looking awesome. Well, scoot over and make space at the bar, Buffy fans, because Whovians are about to join you to cry into their beer over the unrealized reality of a Doctor Who animated series.
Word of the abandoned series comes by way of comics artist Dan Norton’s deviantART account, where he also posted the artwork accompanying this story. Up top is Norton’s “pitch poster,” which makes it clear that the series would served up new adventures for all the Doctors we know and love. That and the fact that his artwork looks great makes this all doubly frustrating. Most of Doctor Who’s run was decidedly low budget, and an animated series would have been an awesome way to explore the series’ long legacy and give the earlier Doctors the benefits of better production values. This could have easily inspired newer fans of the show to delve backwards and check out the Doctors that came before Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth. And for longtime fans, it would have meant new voyages with your favorite classic incarnations of the Time Lord. Dammit, BBC, this was win-win!
Here’s what Norton had to say about the series:
Yeah man, we were so close… Had a few revisions creatively that were requested and so we retooled. It was going to be epic man. End of the day, BBC didn’t want anything to distract from production of the tv show.
Well, what was close to happening didn’t. Since the BBC eventually passed on, you will be rewarded with! This is the pitch poster I had only 7 hours to do. Starting to with first Doctor, the series would have touched on all the versions and filled in some gaps.
So yeah. That would have been amazing. But we’ll never see it, because the BBC are a bunch of poopyheads who hate our joy. You’ll regret this, you British bastards! I’m ordering a Voodoo for Dummies book as. we. speak.
You can see Dan’s take on the various Doctors in the images below, but this next one includes some explanation from the artist. For one thing, it reveals that the show would have given the Doctor some younger traveling companions, which makes sense for a show that would likely have pulled in lots of younger eyeballs. Here’s Dan:
In this one, I was establishing scale of a Cyberman and I did some rough body types of the child companions that would have traveled with the Dr. The boy would have been circa 1920′s and the girl was of modern times. I was really trying to break traditional proportions and style by going really skinny on the legs and pushing the faces a bit more euro from an anime base.
