Animated Black Panther coming to BET

Marvel Comics has signed a deal to turn one of its superheroes, the Black Panther, into a primetime animated series for BET, starting early next year.

BET made the announcement at its upfront presentation in New York as the highlight of a batch of new series being readied for the 2008-09 season, under the supervision of Reginald Hudlin, president of entertainment for BET.

My take on this is that this should have happened along time ago since Hudlin has been writing this book for a couple years. I can’t wait to see some of the animation.

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Posted under Animation

This post was written by Lobo on April 18, 2008

Official

BET animation has been in existence for almost 3 years now has spent millions and has produced not even a single animated short (read a book was before BET animation officially launched...and sucked). Where is hannibal? I saw a roughcut trailer for it (huh?) at a comiccon and that's it. What I saw looked terribly generic uninspired and pretty forgettable to.
Black Panther. Dreadful idea. I thought the point was to make product where we define ourselves. I love Kirby but he wasn't a black man (he was damn cool though). Reggie has to get some guts and make his own character. This is all moot because I guarantee you this...Black Panther will never be made. BET animation is simply too clueless to finish anything

Jarrell

Animated Black Panther + BET = Epic Failure. Fanboys aren't going to watch BET. Not for any reason. They not going to be able to find it. Also, what's going to be the marketing scheme to get them to go to BET?

Bedlam

Here's my diatribe about BET:

Univision and Telemundo should have been the models for BET. Initially BET was MTV and then there was a time when it was like Univision and Telemundo (that was during Ed Gordon's prime, the height of Donnie Simpson's popularity, and when Teen Summit was a relevant TV show); BET has always seemed to want to be like MTV or VH1 type of Network. And frankly, those Networks show nonsense, gossip shows, terrible videos, and stereotypical programming, all the things that we complain about BET. This was made worse when Bob sold it to Viacom. They have even gone as far as having a Best Week Ever clone.

Also, Bob was about making money. I can remember the days of BET when Sunday morning was filled with Gospel, and after noon a switch when on and all you got was paid advertising programming. The same thing during the week would happen after Midnight Love would go off and you get those 30 minute commercials until 9AM the next morning. When you have a high profit margin and don't spend money on development, that's how you end up with crappy programming, cheap programming, and syndicated shows on the cheap. All of the talent, Ananda Lewis (let's just agree to disagree upfront about how talented she is), Ed Gordon, Tony Brown, James Brown (the sports commentator) etc. were gone because of money. The great syndicated shows cost more than BET was willing to pay.

Now, how can Black Panther be successful? If BET is only providing financial support and nothing else and Viacom keeps its dirty fingers out of it, and the production is basically shopped out, and if Hudlin personally oversees its production, it could work. Do i think it will. Probably not.

Is this a vanity project for Hudlin? I think so. President of Entertainment for BET since 2005...Has he tried to get the Bernie Mac show on BET? No. What about Everybody Hates Chis? No. How about getting Spawn the Animated series? Nope. What has he brought us? Hell Date. Iron Ring (a clone of on of Spike TV's shows). Black Poker Stars Invitational (even Bravo has left their Celebrity Poker Tournament on the shelf). College Hill (Real World clone). and Different Strokes, a show about a great white man who shows his benevolence by adopting poor black boys? And the worst of the worst black movies ever made. To Reggie, whatever.

Bedlam

I feel the same way. Every since Bob sold BET to Viacom, they have seemed to make it a place for the interns who couldn't get on at MTV or VH1. And it seems that they are following the model of those two networks, which kinda sucks, since it should be one or the other, if anything. I could go into a long diatribe about what I think the programming should be like on BET, but it wouldn't do anything since I gave up on BET a long time ago. I had the unfortunate chance of turning to BET when Hell Date was on, and haven't been back to that channel since.

Mike Belgrove

I was talking about BET's Black Panther show over on Highbrid Nation. I honestly feel like its one of the best ideas to come out of BET in a long time. Let's face it over the last few years BET has become nothing more than "MTV starring black people". And MTV really isn't the best model for a network to follow. I plan to keep an eye on how this develops. Could it signal a change in the direction of BET?...lol probably not.