The pilot episode of the canceled Kingdom Hearts animated series from 2003 has appeared online after someone working on the show uploaded it to YouTube.
Seth Kearsley, who worked as executive producer on the project before it was scrapped, has been teasing on Twitter over the last few weeks that they were in possession of the original Kingdom Hearts pilot animatic on VHS. Now, they've uploaded the entire 11-minute pilot to YouTube.
Talk of a Kingdom Hearts animated TV show has been floating around online for a long time now, but other than the odd storyboard or script, we've never seen anything really from it. That is of course, until now. According to Kearsley, who replied to a fan on Twitter, the Kingdom Hearts TV series was commissioned by Disney but later scrapped due to Disney and Square Enix "doing more games."
As you can imagine, what with this just being just the pilot of the proposed show, the animatic doesn't look exactly like how the final product would. Simply speaking, this is just a collection of storyboard animations pieced together to get an idea of what the actual show would look like. You can see what would have been for yourself below.
So what happens in the pilot? Well, just like at the start of the first Kingdom Hearts game, Sora, Riku, and Kairi are hanging out on Destiny Islands when a bunch of Heartless show up and separate the trio, spreading them out across far-off worlds. Deviating slightly from the game's plot, Sora is then traveling with Donald and Goofy and manages to find Riku in Agrabah. Think of it as a condensed - and slightly altered for TV - version of the plot of the first game. As Kearsley said themselves: "I had 11 minutes to set up the entire concept and tell a story."
If you recognize a few of the voices in the pilot, that's because a lot of the original cast apparently returned for the series. As revealed in another tweet by Kearsley, which featured a photo of the pilot's cast list, David Gallagher came back to voice Riku, as well as Hayden Panettiere as Kairi, Tony Anselmo as Donald, Bill Farmer as Goofy, and a few others. The only main difference was that Sora is not voiced by Haley Joel Osment this time around and instead is voiced by actor Bobby Edner.
It's so surreal seeing what could have been and has led to many fans asking for a new Kingdom Hearts series for Disney+. Although not completely out of the realm of possibility, it might be a bit of a tall order now considering that the Kingdom Hearts series as grown exponentially in the last 20 years. Trying to fit all of that lore into a single animated series may be a bit of a challenge, even for the most dedicated Kingdom Hearts fan.
But hey, at least we've definitely got Kingdom Hearts 4 to look forward to!
