Just when you thought Disney and Square-Exix were at one stage cool, calm, and collected about how they treated the Kingdom Hearts franchise, not losing their minds and pumping out attached media, and side-stories in abundance until well after the launch of Kingdom Hearts II in 2005 – Well you would be wrong in this thinking. As it turns out, everybodies overly complicated character collision franchise has long been eyeing off other forms of media, it just simply didn’t work out at the time; that’s right, Kingdom Hearts was at one point going to be an animated series.
The news comes courtesy of Seth Kearsley, the Executive Producer of Brown and Friends, who, back in the day was responsible for a host of hit animated titles including Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights, the Looney Tunes Show, and, as it turns out, a pilot for a Kingdom Hearts animated series, one that ultimately never amounted to anything. We think of Disney in 2022 as the company that squeezes every drop out of their beloved IP, but it turns out they wanted to do the same all the way back in 2003 as well, and Kearsley was to be a part of it. Now he’s looking for a way to make this long, lost pilot available for all.
This has all come to light in 2022 because Kearsley took to Twitter saying the following, “Who knows an easy way to import VHS to digital?” and in doing so posted a video of a VHS (kids, that’s what us oldies used before your whiz-bang DVDs!) that was labeled with ‘KINGDOM HEARTS, “KH DVD V.6 MOV” ALT” and was dated as 23 August, 2003. Not only did Kearsley find the old tape, but he also managed to dig up old production notes, scripts, and more from the unaired series, and one by one he shared them with the world via Twitter.
He posted pictures of the cast list which included all the names you would expect, Bobby Edner as Sora, David Gallagher as Riku, Hayden Panitterie as Kairi, and even Susanne Blakeslee as iconic Disney character Malificent.
Kearsley has made it clear that he wants to get this unaired pilot online somehow, though he has admittedly hit some obstacles so far, with a follow up tweet reading “Thanks for everyone’s input. Super helpful. I do have a version on my computer but it’s an earlier version that doesn’t have the final music on it…which might be a blessing in disguise because I would get hit with so many copyright claims for all of the different cues.”
Whether we get to ultimately see this unaired Kingdom Hearts animated series pilot or not remains to be seen, but it is fascinating to see how quickly Disney and Square-Enix were in looking to cash-in on the original game’s success.
