Years ago I was approached by Klasky-Csupo to pitch a pilot idea based on some artwork they’d created. This isn’t uncommon, since cartoons are a particularly visual form of entertainment, and people want to fall in love with what the characters look like on a page before they even see them walking around dodging anvils or solving mysteries on the screen.

The test art was really, as they say in the biz, “fun,” and featured a rabbit in a space suit, an angry coyote or two, a giant mutant carrot creature, etc. etc. You know, the usual. They’d been taking pitches for a while, so I assumed they were getting a lot of proposals where the rabbit was the dauntless explorer and the coyote was his evil nemesis. I decided this was too obvious, and thought I’d mix it up. In my version, the rabbit was a clueless ambassador from earth sent to open relations with mars, and the coyote was his harried assistant who had to clean up behind every blunder he made.

The good folks at Klasky went for it, and the result was “Commander Bunsworth: First Rabbit on Mars!” The pilot was received very well in the halls of Nickelodeon, but ultimately wasn’t picked up for the usual misty reasons that seem to pervade the development process.

So now I present it to you, probably violating some kind of copyright in the process. Too bad, I say. Too bad.