Welcome to fine tuning with Drew Taylor, your one-stop shop when it comes to animation news and commentary.

Drew and I are recording this week's show on Sunday, October 23rd, 2022, so Drew is beginning to look a lot like Halloween. What's going on?

Well, you know to look alike, Jim. It's it's absolutely out of control. Yeah, I think later today we are supposed to go on a walk with some friends who have kids because the yeah, all the decorations are fully in force.

You know, if you have a neighborhood that counts a bunch of former Imagineers and Rick Baker amongst the amongst the denizens that you're going to get some good good Halloween decorations, so.

Yeah, okay, no Bob Hope anymore sadly, but yeah, I know no more full-size candy bars. Okay, well, I want a full report on next week's show.

Okay, I'll give it to you. All right, lots of animation news this week folks, but before we get to the news, of course, we have to acknowledge that the news portion of today's show is brought to you by storybook destinations, trusted travel partner of the Jim Hill Media podcast network for a worry-free travel experience.

Please book online at storybook destinations dot com to follow up on last week's show. We talked about the late a Dame Angel of Landsbury and a couple of folks wanted to point out that she hadn't just done the voice of Mrs. Potts for the animated feature beauty in the beast and then the Bell saves Christmas or whatever it is.

Or one magical Christmas, excuse me, they also wanted to point out that Angela had also done the voice of Mrs. Potts for the Kingdom Hearts game, do you ever play that?

I didn't, I mean, I am more of a casual gamer, Jim. Okay, anything too complicated does not really flow my boat, but I know people love them and yeah, I know that they're very, very popular.

Did you see the animatic that showed up online earlier this week? I guess Seth Curzley, who was the director of the Dilbert animated series, the also Adam Sandler's eight crazy nights animated feature, as well as the Looney Tune show, made the decision to put out this project that he'd worked on back in 2003, which was the animatic sort of a proof of concept for a Kingdom Hearts animated series.

Yeah, I did see that on Twitter, but you want to give some background on what this was exactly?

This was an action role playing game that Square Enix developed in collaboration with Disney, a very first Kingdom Hearts game hit store shelves back in March of 2002.

It was designed for the PlayStation 2 and huge success and launched a giant franchise.

In fact, as of October of last year, 35 million copies of various forms of this game have been shipped worldwide.

So it's really not a surprise given that sort of success that Disney requests that they make a run at doing a Kingdom Hearts animated series in early 2003.

It was kind of a ticking clock because they knew that a second game Kingdom Hearts chain of memories was coming out in fall of 2004 and this was being developed for the Game Boy.

So what Disney was hoping was that they could have the animated series up and ready for the fall of 2004.

So with the thought that it could cash in on the success of chain of memories and also help promote the Game Boy advanced version of the game.

And sets an animation professional, so he took an interesting approach to the Kingdom Hearts animatic.

He didn't build it around an origin story for the show. He'd rather dove right into the pile and picked episode seven of the proposed series, which was set in the world of a Latin.

And Curzley had kind of an interesting thought process here. He'd like, look, Disney television animation had at that point already produced three seasons of Disney's Latin, the animated series.

They'd also produced the two direct to video sequels. Return of Jafar and Aladdin the King of thieves. So the thinking was that it wouldn't be all that hard for Disney television animation.

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