Janice Burgess worked on Sesame Street. She oversaw the production of Blue’s Clues, Gullah Gullah Island, Little Bill and she created The Backyardigans. She also had a hand in developing Bubble Guppies. She retired in 2014 ten years before her death. RIP to her for sure. She’s a Nick legend.
I can't believe this woman who built my childhood with The Backyardigans is now gone. 😭 But fret not, I'm still curious about the show's pilots. The second one should be talked about more after Me And My Friends reached a dead end. And it wouldn't be Nickelodeon lost media without them being found in the 2020s. Let's just hope either Backyardigans pitch resurfaces on the internet...
I actually looked at a possible plot for Me And My Friends pilot, saying the gang was planning to welcome a new kid who had just moved to the neighborhood. What if that new kid was Austin? He is referred to as "The new kangaroo on the block."
Oh also! I find it incredibly interesting that the first attempt to make the cgi characters dance was with motion capture! Especially since that didn't stick and they instead went with references to make it more precise! Which worked really well!
I find it honestly really interesting how different Uniqua looked in both Me and My Friends along, Me and My Friends Revisited, and in the final show. Like the difference between all of them is so interesting to me. And honestly, I'm so glad they went with the final change because it's absolutely adorable! Also, slightly unrelated, but as interesting as Me and My Friends is and as interested i am to see it, I'm so glad it wasn't picked up and that Janice and the team behind it were able to make a 2nd pilot. Because if it was, not only would we not have gotten the show it is today, but we also wouldn't have gotten Dora! Not only that, but if it did get greenlit, I think people would be a bit weirded out or even scared of the costumes to know how great of a show it would've been!
Yeah, if it was greenlit we wouldn't have gotten Dora the Explorer (an article said that it wasn't greenlit because Dora was). And if Dora the Explorer wasn't greenlit, then the backyardigans wouldn't have been revamped into the show it is today. And moreover it probably wouldn't have been as loved because of the costumes (unless they made the costumes look better later on). If Me and my friends got greenlit, we wouldn't have gotten *2* great shows!
That's fair since Me And My Friends looks so different from the final show so obviously its gonna pique someones interest, its why i really want to see it found too
Amazing video! Me and my friends (haha see what I did there) are also interested in the CGI pilot. MAMF is definitely overrated in comparison to it, and yeah, these oddities are so specific. I think what caught my eye the most was the total change of quality between the clips and screenshots. The first clip with good shading, lighting seems to be using mocap as well. But the second clip has no shading, really flat lighting and the animations are so clunky that I’m sure it can’t be mocap. I’ve seen enough mocap and it usually looks smooth as butter no matter the occasion. Another oddity is the lack of Tasha/Austin, but I have a theory for that. Maybe they just wanted to save up the budget since the quality was already so ambitious, so maybe they cut them both down because 3 characters is a fair number. I honestly wonder if there’s 2 different episodes of the pilot considering the huge quality shift (maybe another studio animated it?) or if it’s just a demo clip, we can’t know for sure but it’s so odd, and anyone would notice the quality shift…well, maybe they decided on flat lighting because it means more saturated colors (the colors would be more colorful which usually does better for kid shows, I suppose) but it’s weird they dropped the amazing quality the first clips had to a watered down version with flat shading and lighting. Hopefully the pilot gets leaked or found sometime, and yes, it definitely needs more attention (as well as Backyardigans dubs, there’s so much lost media involving them and nobody really mentions it), thanks for the video!
It could also be that the pilot clips may have been captured through different sources of media, like a screen recording or something, im not entirely sure🤔🤔
the full backyardigans pilots and The Fresh Beat Band (The Jumparounds at the time) Pilot I so want to find the full versions of, FBB's first produced and aired episode loco legs was done as the original pilot with a few clips of speech scenes and a bit of the song near the end. I would love to find a full versiona and see what the og version was like, its songs and props and set scenery
16:06 the words overrated and underrated have been miscontorted by the internet. People who don't think twice are going to automatically take it as you not caring about or taking a huge crap on something people are desperately trying to find. Some people don't care about the second pilot because it's very identical to the final version that they don't really care as much as to something like the Me and My Friends tape finally being discovered. They want to know more about the live action counterpart due to how completely different it looks.
