Long before streaming platforms made animated revivals routine, there was a serious effort to expand the Buffyverse into animation. Buffy: The Animated Series was conceived as a continuation rather than a novelty—one that would return the characters to high school, embrace stylized visuals, and lean fully into the show’s humor, action, and mythology without the physical limitations of live action. Though the project never made it to series, its existence has lingered as one of the great “what ifs” of the Buffy legacy.
What follows is an archival conversation with Jeph Loeb, who was set to serve as a key creative force on the animated series alongside Joss Whedon. In this interview, Loeb walks through the thinking behind Buffy: The Animated Series at the time—from its intended tone and storytelling goals to how it was designed to complement, rather than replace, the original show. It’s a rare firsthand look at a project that came close enough to feel real, and far enough away to remain tantalizingly unrealized.
VAMPIRES & SLAYERS: 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 knew – when I say we, I mean the entire crew, but Joss in particular – we had the goods. It wasn’t like we were all sitting around going, “Gee, it would be neat to do a cartoon.” 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. It wasn’t as though this was an idea. 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 Bucannan, who runs Mutant Enemy, was really quite diligent about staying on top of Fox and making sure that Fox understood it had this incredible valuable asset. That’s really, I think, what it came down to. We had said from the very beginning that when Buffy went off the air, what Buffy Animated essentially was, was a great marketing tool to keep the show alive in DVD, in syndication markets and foreign markets. It’s a way to continue to grow the audience. 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?” That was a bunch of phone calls. Everybody was ready to go.
VAMPIRES & SLAYERS: But who was the old crew?
LOEB: There’s Joss and myself, the writers have all sort of scattered to the wind, but they’re all alive [laughs]. My favorite thought on this is that 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. On the animation side, we had Eric Randomski, and if you want to know who Eric is, find the Batman Animated book that Chip Kidd did and you will see a forward by Bruce Timm, who is largely given credit for the success of that series, and deservedly so. However, the very surprising thing is that Bruce gives a tremendous amount of credit to the look and design and sort of inspiration of the show to Eric, who was on the show for the first two seasons and did a number of things in terms of pushing the envelope of where animation could be. It’s hard to sort of remember that Batman Animated was, like, 10 years ago. Since that time, animation hasn’t really made another great leap forward. There have been a lot of interesting things that have happened, but in terms of television, a lot of it has to do with what you can do with the money and the market, and the market growing and shrinking and all sorts of things. Like I said, that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been good work, it’s just that Eric tends to move things into the future. His other big credit was that he was the lead animator in charge of Spawn.
Regardless of how anyone feels about Spawn, when you look at it, it’s pretty spectacular. And that’s Eric; that’s just how he sees the world and it comes very easy to him. So 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 Allyson 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. Certain scenes were selected from the pilot that Joss and I wrote, so we could voice those and animate those and be able to show Fox what it was they actually had. So it really was the next step prior to kicking into gear. That is currently being animated. It’s in the process. I would say 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 don’t really care if they make the show. We’ve just waited so long to have Buffy Animated walk and talk, that it’s incredibly exciting to get to this point now. In reality our feeling is that people are going to see it, are going to get blown away by it and there are a number of people interested in moving forward and moving forward in exactly the way we wanted to. Again, all of that is stuff that is ongoing conversations that Chris has and Mutant Enemy has. There’s much more news to come. I don’t mean to be deliberately vague, but I mean to be deliberately vague. And that’s about what I can tell you. It’s a lot of fun, as it should be.
VAMPIRES & SLAYERS: How does the tone of Buffy Animated differ from the live action show?
LOEB: There are two basic differences. First of all, Buffy Animated takes place in year one. She’s met Angel, at the moment he’s just this mysterious guy. She knows he’s a vamp, but other than that, she doesn’t really know anything. So the whole Angelus thing hasn’t come into play yet, and it may not. At the same time, there are darker aspects to what we’re doing, but the show is absolutely geared to go a little younger, simply because the nature of animation is such that what would be the point of doing an animated version of a live-action show that’s exactly the same. Do we really want to see cartoons have sex?
VAMPIRES & SLAYERS: Some people might.
LOEB: [laughs] Some people might, but it’s really much more back to the grounding principles of Buffy, which was as a metaphor for high school anxieties, high school troubles and how they manifest themselves. That metaphor is never stronger than when you’re in the middle of high school and you’re trying to figure things out. So Buffy has moved to Sunnydale, she’s friends with Xander and Willow and she has begun to accept her role as Slayer. But it’s a long, long way to go, as we know. That’s the joy of telling the stories, we can do things that are ironic in the sense that she can say things like, “I’ll never do that,” and we know that later on she does. You can’t do that when you’re doing the live show, because you don’t know where the show is going. We have all of that history to be able to look at. There’s that side of it, and the other side of it is that these were stories that for one reason or another Joss always wanted to tell, but time got away. For example, Willow and Buffy going babysitting. By the time they got around to something like that in the live show, they were too old to do that. We never saw why Buffy doesn’t have a driver’s license and by the time we could have done that story, she was too old. In other words, these are the stories that fall in between the stories that you know and love, except the plan at this moment is not to move out of year one. But we’re still trying to figure out how to get Spike on the show. That’s all about Joss trying to figure out how to do it without changing everything up. It is important to respect the work from the past. Then there are just certain things that the budget would not allow that we’re able to do. That’s really the most fun, that we can do – we’re not, but we could – Attack of the 50 Foot Buffy, because on television that would ridiculous, but in animation it could be quite fun.
VAMPIRES & SLAYERS: One of the strengths where the live action show was concerned was the opportunity for evolution. By staying locked in the same time period forever, will that allow growth on the animated front?
LOEB: I think there’s a happy medium between those thoughts. I don’t think, given Joss’ role in the show as overseer and creator of all things Buffy, that he would allow anything to just lie there.
Tags: Buffy the Vampire Slayer