Concluding our extensive interview with Tad Stones, Joe Strike talks with the animation vet more about Darkwing Duck and direct-to-video projects.
Tad Stones early in his career.
Life After Darkwing
Tad Stones:
I learned so much on Rescue Rangers that I felt I corrected on Darkwing Duck. I had just wanted to do 30% better, but my feeling is 70% of what I wanted came through. Even so, we still made mistakes. There were times when DW was a little more rubbery than I wanted him to be. We would do a gag where he reaches out of frame and pulls in something. Well, the storyboard guy instead of putting him next to the frame put him in the middle of the room and then suddenly he was Super-Stretch. We were writing something we assumed was a small room and layout would come in with a big room, and suddenly it was "this gag doesn't well it would if they drew the room smaller."
I was just chomping at the bit to do another show where we've got the process under control and everyone's trained to think this way, now we've fixed this and we're gonna be even better. I pitched a science fiction series. Everybody on staff loved it except the key guy. Gary Krisel just couldn't see it. We would pitch it, and he would parrot back, kind of saying "so where is this?" "Well, it's right here." It was almost like showing him a piece of black paper and saying "this is how space is going to look," and it was if he were saying "can you make it darker, can you put more black in it?" He just never connected with the material. It never even got pitched to Michael [Eisner] or Jeffrey [Katzenberg]. I never got past Gary, and that was something I had done totally on my time, I think I did 36 pitch cards in full color, and he just didn't see it, so it just kind of died right there.
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