Here's a little before-and-after involving Jay Stephens' character Tutenstein, which is now an animated series airing on the Discovery Channel. Stephens' very style is animation-friendly: it's clever and charming all on its own, and simple (as opposed to simplistic) enough to be (I would imagine) easy to animate. So what do the cartoon creators do? Completely revamp the very design and appearance of the character, making him something more in line with what they think the Yu-Gi-Oh! generation would groove on, apparently, as well as sticking him with a lovely young partner a la Delia and Beetlejuice and an annoying talking cat a la Sabrina. So what's the point I'm trying to make? I don't know. It's just that I watched Discovery's Tutenstein recently and was very disappointed with what I saw, that's all. And while there's a lot of quality animated TV on out there right now, perhaps more that there's ever been in the history of televison, I suppose that it's inevitable that there must still be some wretched examples of corporate overthink, copycat-ism and meddling out there too. Sigh.
