It’s the final piece of the puzzle. Dungeons & Dragons was an animated series on CBS Saturday morning television between 1983 and 1985, running 27 episodes over three seasons. It was one of the greatest disappointments to D&D fandom that there was never a final episode where the six friends finally got to go home. The show was canceled before the final episode could be produced, leaving millions of fans in the lurch. There was a TV Commercial released by the Brazilian branch of Renault that finished the story, but while it pulled at the heartstrings, it didn’t tell the whole story, and really centered on selling cars.
The final episode, however, wouldn’t die. The script has since been published online and was performed as an audio drama as a special feature for the BCI Eclipse DVD edition of the series. Now a group of dedicated fans, led by Marshall Hubbard and Ryan Nead, have combined some of the original footage from the show with new animation to create the closest thing to an official final episode for the series that anyone will ever see. Original cast member Katie Leigh reprises her role of Shelia, and the music was reconstructed from the original series.
Dungeons & Dragons as an animated series was a co-production of Marvel Studios and TSR, the original publishers of the role playing game by the same name. This would have put it in the same time frame as the original X-Men animated TV series.
Hubbarnd and Nead tried their best to adhere to the letter of the original Michael Reaves script. Reaves’ script ends at 28 minutes on an “open ending” that he was instructed to write by the producers, should the series continue to a 4th season. The extra events that occur after that are Ryan Nead’s, drawing from concepts and events as they appeared in previous stories.
If you’re interested and want to know more, there’s a question and answer page on Facebook detailing the production.
You can also tune in to Shane Plays here on SCIFI.radio next Monday morning at 11 am Pacific time, when the creators of the fan film conclusion to the Dungeons & Dragons animated TV series will be interviewed by the show host Shane Stacks.
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