Kevin Smith believes that now, two decades after ABC unceremoniously axed it, it’s time to bring back Clerks: The Animated Series.
Today, Consequence Of Sound shared a novella-length oral history of the cult cartoon that touches on everything from its origins to its animation to its future, which Smith feels could be bright.
The way he sees it, COVID-19 has hindered Hollywood’s ability to make live-action entertainment, leaving studios desperate for new content and looking towards animation houses. He’s into rebooting Clerks, as are several of his collaborators, and says it’s already “been time tested and vetted.” According to Smith, “All we have to do is turn the lights back on. It’s not like, now we’ve got to create all new designs. We have the basic designs. We have all that artwork and stuff.” Greenlight it, he says, and “10 episodes of the show could come out next year.”
He’s looking specifically at Hulu, as Clerks: The Animated Series is, like the streamer, owned by Disney. “You guys aren’t doing anything with [the episodes],” he says. “We have all these designs and a bunch of people we’d like to be involved. The voice cast could come back, a bunch of the writers could come back and stuff. But all the heavy lifting has been done.”
Co-creator David Mandel (Seinfeld, Veep) is game, and even shared a few of the ideas he’s still kicking around.
“[T]here’s still a sort of master list of some of the ideas that we always wanted to do. One of them was the Single White Female idea with the KIT car, where Randal or Dante was gonna buy the KIT car. And then it starts dressing like him and taking over his life a little bit. Like, so we have a list of ideas.
There was a Die Hard in a theater showing Die Hard. A bunch of different things. At one point, there was a movie idea that we had played with. They were going to make a movie that was basically like Clerks called Store People. And it was going to go and get very Hollywood and they were going to go to Hollywood to deal with their movie. We have lots of other little bits and pieces of ideas and things. Whether it ever happens, I can’t speak to that. But I’ll simply say I’m game.”
As we wait to see if Hulu takes him up on it, why not dig into the oral history itself? In addition to Smith and Mandel, CoS spoke to actors Brian O’Halloran and Jason Mewes, writers Steve Lookner, Brian Kelley, and Paul Dini, and behind-the-scenes talent like Alan Bodner, Stephen Silver, and Jim Venable, among others. Billy Campbell, the then-head of Miramax Television, also joins Smith and Mandel in recounting how Harvey Weinstein and the surprise success of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? were key players in the show’s eventual failure.
If that’s not enough to entice you, know that there’s an entire section dedicated to that bugnuts anime sequence that gave us, among many other choice quotes, the immortal “Who is driving? Bear is driving. How can that be?”
Other highlights include the show’s connection to Kim Possible and the moment Mandel and Smith realized Alan Rickman was simply “too good an actor” to play billionaire Leonardo Leonardo. Read it in full here.
Send Great Job, Internet tips to [email protected]