Bakshi Book... And Film?

Jon Gibson and Chris McDonnell are working on what promises to be one of the most lavish, expensive but tempting gift options of 2008: a big coffee table biography-come-art-book about Ralph Bakshi. They've announced it today at Cartoon Brew, but they also set up their own page, rather secretly, in late 2006... a page which gives away something very interesting.

Welcome to the Ralph’s Spot Production Blog. We will be posting updates here on two projects that center around legendary director, cartoonist, and painter Ralph Bakshi.

Two projects? I'm assuming the other is a museum retrospective, but I'm hoping that, actually, it's a film. A decent Bakshi documentary would be a very good thing.

Disney's Wizards

Now we know what Disney's Wizards is, after the name popped up on a list of Dinsey registered URLs a few weeks back.

It's a TV show, likely to go by the full name The Wizards of Waverly Place. A half-hour sitcom, the series is expected to be the next big Disney Channel brand, probably even leading to a movie , just as Haunted High School Musical followed the non-Haunted version. The lead characters are a multi-cultural family who are, secretly, Wizards in training. What is this? Diff'rent Strokes by way of Sabrina the Teenage Witch? Well... actually, that's probably quite a likely description. We'll see.

Fred Savage is directing the first two episodes, apparently. Yes, Fred Savage. The one time child star who was in, of all films, The Wizard. What a magical coincidence.

Ahem.

We can at least all stop hoping now that Ralph Bakshi's Wizards was getting a Disney Channel spin-off.