As ironic as it may sound, many people have been thinking about Banjo-Kazooie lately despite it not having a new game and not having any meaningful content in recent years outside of a DLC character in a certain Nintendo fighting game. The reason that many have been thinking about the duo and series is because of what’s been happening at Microsoft, including the layoffs that have occurred lately, which featured the loss of two original members of the Rare team, who created the duo. With them gone, and Xbox seemingly acting like a “sinking ship,” many wonder if we’ll ever see anything new with them.
The sad irony continued with Time Extension, who remembered that in the 2000s, there was actually discussion between Microsoft, Rare, and 4Kids Entertainment to make a Banjo-Kazooie TV series! Yes, really, this almost happened. The site reached out to Emilio Lopez, who was a part of the project, and he revealed how early it was worked on.
“I was on the project Banjo from the very start. I originally worked on TMNT 2003 and was supposed to be let go after production wrapped because our time as freelancers had lapsed, but we had a versatile team on TMNT 2003 and the studio found that it was better to keep our little team together to help develop other possible shows to keep the lights on.”
That leads us to the catalyst for the entire event: Pokémon. You see, 4Kids had the rights to the franchise, but they lost it, and that led to a problem that they needed to fill to keep kids watching their channel over rival Kids WB:
“The loss of the Pokémon franchise left a huge hole and so began an initiative to develop new shows. The Viva Piñata TV show, Chaotic, Banjo Kazooie, and “Project Pikapods” were the results of this initiative.”
So, why were the duo of Banjo and Kazooie picked for a TV series? That would be because, at the time, they were getting ready to have their latest game released, the first on the Xbox platform, and many at 4Kids believed it would be a perfect match to have the game come out with an animated series.
Art of the duo was made, and everything seemed to be going well, and then…it just stopped, and no one really knows why it stopped, including Lopez:
“For whatever reason Microsoft did not see this as something that they wanted to invest in.”
A very familiar phrase we hear from Microsoft nowadays, and thus, Banjo and Kazooie remain dormant still.
