Sunday, December 14, 2008

'The Spirit' That Never Was

In Neil Gaiman's comics series THE SANDMAN, he wrote of a library that exists in The Dreaming that contains shelves and shelves of books that were written only in dreams.

If that library has a film section, it should have a place of honor for the SPIRIT animated film that was in development in the early '80's. This article by Steven Paul Leiva tells about his collaboration on future Oscar winner Brad Bird, STAR WARS producer Gary Kurtz, future Pixar founder John Lasseter, and others on what could have been a seminal animated superhero feature -- if it had ever found funding.

There was a SPIRIT movie made in the '80's; but it was a TV movie that aired on ABC in the summer doldrums of 1987, and starred Sam Jones as the masked crime fighter and Nana Visitor as Ellen Dolan. It was a pale shadow of the comic, and failed to capture the -- I have to say it -- spirit of the original.

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