Kevin Smith Wants To Revive CLERKS: THE ANIMATED SERIES
I’ll be honest, I completely forgot that there was a Clerks: The Animated Series in the early 2000s! Well, Kevin Smith has been going back to his roots recently with Clerks 3 and his Mallrats sequel, and the filmmaker recently revealed that he’s also been looking at trying to revive the Clerks animated series!
The original series only lasted for six episodes on ABC before it was canceled, but Smith still sees the potential in it. Consequence of Sound is releasing an oral history of Clerks: The Animated Series in honor of the show’s 20th anniversary, and during the development of that, they learned Smith wanted to bring the show back, but one of the big issues that he’s come across is who owned the right to the property. That’s the thing that has always held him back. Smith explained:
“Figuring out who owns the fucking thing has honestly been the biggest struggle of the last decade. Because we didn’t know who owned it. It was a Miramax television product, and Miramax television doesn’t exist, and Miramax certainly doesn’t exist the way it did back then. It was a Disney thing, but it’s never shown up anywhere on any fucking Disney outlet. You’re certainly not going to see it on Disney Plus or something like that. So, for years, we were trying to figure out who owns that version of the Clerks cartoon.”
Well, it turns out that Disney still owns the rights to the show and Smith’s longtime producing partner Scott Mosier, who recently directed the Illumination Entertainment adaptation of The Grinch, thinks that there might be the possibility to get the reboot set up at Hulu:
“Scott’s point was like, ‘Right now, they’re trying to figure out how to put a bunch of people on the T.V. set or the movie set post-quarantine. How to work together and still socially distance. But the one thing you could do right now, and you’re doing today, I guarantee you, is that everybody could still make animation. Maybe we walk into Hulu and say, ‘Look, this is the story. Here we did these six episodes. Disney owns them. You guys aren’t doing anything with them. 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. It’s been time tested and vetted. So all we have to do is turn the lights back on. You could always do any Clerks cartoon you want, but if you want to do that Clerks cartoon, the one we all love, the one that would make the most sense to do, this is the very thin bridge we cross upon which may be how it gets built.”
That seems like a smart move, especially right now. If they already haven’t tried to jump on that, they should! There’s an audience out there that would love to see Smith bring back Clerks: The Animated Series. I don’t see why Hulu wouldn’t be interested in reviving the property. There’s a built-in fan base and it’s not an expensive series to produce.
It will be interesting to see if anything comes from this. Would you be interested in seeing Clerks: The Animated Series make a comeback? Did you enjoy the episodes of the series that did air back in 2000?