Was Disneys Bonkers Seriously a Reworked Roger Rabbit Cartoon Series

Was Disney’s Bonkers Seriously a Reworked Roger Rabbit Cartoon Series?

In the latest TV Legends Revealed, find out if Disney’s Bonkers cartoon series was originally intended to be a Roger Rabbit cartoon series!

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Was Disneys Bonkers Seriously a Reworked Roger Rabbit Cartoon Series

TV URBAN LEGEND: Disney’s Bonkers was created by reworking a failed attempt at a Roger Rabbit cartoon series.

Disney’s Bonkers was a short-lived, but clever series about a failed cartoon star, Bonkers D. Bobcat, who becomes a “toon cop.”

Was Disneys Bonkers Seriously a Reworked Roger Rabbit Cartoon Series

The series had a bunch of tie-in merchandise, including a Super Nintendo video game!

As you might imagine, a lot of the ideas explored in Bonkers were similar to those that were addressed in the hit 1988 film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

In that film, Roger Rabbit is a popular cartoon star who gets framed for murder and he has to team up with a human detective, Eddie Valiant, to get to the bottom of the crime. At the end of the film, while it is not explicitly stated, it sure looks like Roger and Eddie will continue to work together, with Roger finding the detective work more fulfilling than his cartoon job.

So, for a show like Bonkers, with a similar premise, to debut a few years later, has led to a persistent legend that animators tried to do a Roger Rabbit TV series but it just couldn’t get together, so the idea was recycled and revamped and turned into Bonkers.

However, Greg Weisman, the famed animation writer who was a key part of the team that developed the series, explained that that was not the case, “Certainly, Roger provided inspiration for Bonkers. And I suppose one could say that if some higher up had come to us and said, “Do you want to do the TV version of Roger Rabbit?” (which never happened) than we would have jumped at the chance and most likely Bonkers never would have happened.

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But Bonkers was developed as its own entity, originally entitled “Toon Cop”. Roger was never our Toon Cop.”

Weisman later noted, “We were of course inspired by Roger Rabbit, but we knew our entire show was going to be animated, so we needed to emphasize contrasts both visual and otherwise. Our working title was Toon Cop. I developed the series with Bonkers, Jitters, Miranda, Sgt. Grating, etc.” The Toon Cop idea was dropped as the title specifically BECAUSE it seemed a bit too close to the Toon Patrol from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The legend is…

STATUS: False

Thanks to the great Greg Weisman for the information!

Be sure to check out my archive of TV Legends Revealed for more urban legends about the world of TV. Click here for more legends specifically about animation.

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is [email protected].

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/disney-bonkers-roger-rabbit-recycled-cartoon-series/

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