A test animation (that was literally canceled 2 days ago) surfaced of a Crash Bandicoot cartoon. Apparently the series was going to air on Amazon Prime, but a joke got it canned. It seemed pretty fishy at first, but one of the writers leaked an entire series bible onto Reddit, the post was taken down, but the animation is well done. I do feel it's a little too fast and the designs could use some tweaking.
Well I can see the potential in the style and rubberhose-styled comedy, but the execution was definitely mishandled. Too much "its suppose to be crazy and funny" in your face.
I'd be down for a Crash Bandicoot cartoon, having gotten back into the series with the N. Sane Trilogy, but the show would only really work if it was the pace of the old Looney Toons cartoons. The test animation is just too blindingly fast to really work with Crash Bandicoot. The pace might have worked with specific characters like Ripper Roo, but not for the whole series. Also Cortex's voice is horrible and sounds like a generic Tom Kenny villain voice (that's not a jab at Tom Kenny, btw). Cortex is a fun villain because he basically is a pansy that acts tough when things are going his way and his voice reflects that. This is simply a generic mad scientist voice for a character with what I would consider a highly unique voice. Art style is where I feel torn about. On one hand, Crash Bandicoot originally had a 2D animated intro and outro for the first game, but Sony told them that they want to fully embrace the fact that they are 3D. So having a show of Crash Bandicoot being 2D animated feels odd to me. On the other hand, I like the look of the 2D animation used here. It's very stylized and makes it stand out from other cartoons while still looking like the original characters. Though it's tough to appreciate when it's flapping around all over the screen. I dunno, it's an odd one, that's for sure. Can't say I feel too bad about it's cancellation though. If they DO eventually create a Crash Bandicoot show, I hope they would make it roughly the same pace as an old Daffy Duck cartoon; which is to say, pretty zany but at an easy-to-digest pace.
According to that guy, it was more complicated than that. Activision was apparently difficult to work with, and after Netflix worked with them for the Skylanders series, they warned the other animation studios. Amazon Prime was the only one working with them, but it was still too much conflict. The joke might've been the last straw, rather than the cause. That was just a test voice to go along with the clip. They would've casted an actual voice actor (most likely Lex Lang) if it was greenlit for production.
