Buffy Animated

Jeph Loeb spills the beans on the new Buffy animated series By Edward Gross

As though writer Jeph Loeb didn’t have his creative hands full with chronicling the monthly COMIC BOOK adVentures of BatmaN & SUPERMAN, and helping to define Clark Kent’s evolution into the Man of Steel as supervising producer of Smallville, he’s come back to Mutant Enemy Productions to serve as the co-executive producer of Buffy the Animated Series.

In the following interview, Loeb offers some tantalizing insights to the show to come, while simultaneously being annoyingly vague in a way that would do Buffy creator Joss Whedon himself proud.

CFQ: As far as I knew, Buffy the Animated Series was pretty much a goner. What happened?

JEPH LOEB: I always took the position, no matter what anybody else said, in Hollywood nothing of quality ever dies. Sometimes nothing ever dies. A good idea is a good idea. We had put together a Class A animation team. We had all 13 stories for the first season and nine scripts that were written by all Buffy writers and myself. We were beginning production. I spent a year and a half over there running the show. It just sort of stopped, everything was put in a box and we waited. Chris Buchanan, who runs Mutant Enemy, was really quite diligent about staying on top of Fox and making sure that Fox understood it had this incredibly valuable asset. That’s really, I think, what it came down to. And, for whatever reason, at a certain point three or four months ago, Fox agreed. They called Chris and said, “Where are we with this stuff and can you put the whole crew back together again?” All that was needed was a bunch of phone calls. Everybody was ready to go.

CFQ: But who was the old crew?

JEPH LOEB: Every great Buffy story is about resurrection. This is just another one of them. We just needed enough time for someone to take the stake out of it and it would rise again. There’s Joss and myself, the writers have all sort of scattered to the wind, but they’re all alive. On the animation side, we had Eric Randomski. He put together this extraordinary crew and it’s an embarrassment of riches. Everybody wants to work on this show. So that’s not a problem. In terms of voice work, for some of this stuff there’s going to be surprises, so we’re going to be vague. I can tell you that so far we’ve recorded Alyson as Willow, Nicholas as Xander and Tony for Giles. In terms of everything else, we hope folks just trust us. They’re not going to be disappointed. Now, what’s happened, just so that everyone’s clear, is what Fox asked us to do was put together what’s called a presentation reel. That is currently being animated. It’s in the process. By the end of the summer we’ll have this wonderful, kick-ass piece that Joss and I have decided we’re just going to put on a loop at home and just sit there and say, “Oh, look, it works; Oh, look, it’s moving; Oh, look, it’s going again.” We’ve just waited so long to have Buffy Animated walk and talk, that it’s incredibly exciting to get to this point now.