I’m just going to go ahead and guess that Glen Larson, although by all accounts an incredibly nice guy who happily lets people play with his toys, has good blackmail photos of somebody. How else to explain Manimal getting a film adaptation?
Sony Pictures Animation has picked up the movie rights to Manimal, a short-lived 1983 NBC series, and is developing the project as a live action/CG hybrid film.
Glen A. Larson, one of the most prolific TV producers of the ’80s (Magnum P.I., Knight Rider, Battlestar Galactica), created the show and is attached as a producer on the feature.
The basic plot is this: Dr. Jonathan Chase has learned how to change himself into different animals, although usually he turned into a hawk or a black panther since we’re guessing those were cheap. Instead of sharing this revolution in biology and medicine with the world and possibly changing absolutely everything about the human race, he decided his talents were best used to solve the kind of crimes the police are generally pretty good at figuring out.
The baffling thing is why this is even happening.
It’d be one thing if anybody cared about the show, but Manimal didn’t even make double digits in terms of episodes. To be fair, it was up against Dallas, which was pretty much a kiss of death in the eighties. Who knows, if it’d aired in another time slot it might have as many episodes as Knight Rider. But it’s never seen a DVD release, it’s not streaming on Netflix, I’m fairly certain even SyFy isn’t running episodes on weekends at 3am anymore.
So, Glen…who are those blackmail photos of? Or is Hollywood just THAT scared of new ideas?