its too kiddy and cartoony. yes, its a cartoon, but so was batman TAS - also highly stylised but it worked - in fact just fucking hire bruce timm and paul dini. if that's not possible then please, darken the tone and uncutesy the animation. that marine looks like a plush.

Still, if they do manage to get some genuine atmosphere going, and get a quality voice cast, some better character designs, improve the animation, and do away with a few of the stupider aspects ('Newbie'? Fuck. Off.), which is pretty much a total reboot, then you never know I guess. Still, nowhere near hopeful based on what I've seen so far.

Maybe we got 'em demoralized...

After AVP and the equally kiddie-friendly AVP2 that's coming out soon, I want fucking guns and havoc and face-huggers and R-rated character stories. Let's get this aborted franchise back on track!

Ultimately, I agree with Mori that if you are the creator of something (or the rights holder) you shouldn't have OTHER people out there spending lots of money to create overly elaborate things (like this animation clip) who then PUT IT OUT FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION WITHOUT YOUR PERMISSION IN AN ATTEMPT TO DRUM UP BUSINESS FOR THEMSELVES OR MAKE MONEY FROM IT. That's the key point and seems an obvious no-no to anyone with an IQ higher than a carrot. That said, it seems to me that releasing this clip was rather lame on the part of this animation firm and seems it would constitute a violation of 20th Century Fox's rights.

Look, it's fun to be a geek and wonder what an ALIENS cartoon might look like, but let's be honest -- and I think I speak for creators everywhere when I say this -- none of us would want to see our personal creation borrowed without our consent (to be polite) or outright stolen and used against our will (to be more blunt) so that someone ELSE could make money from it.

On the flip side, speaking as someone whose done quite a bit of pitching, the notion of creating storyboards or digital paintings or an elaborate eye-catching AV short for a PRIVATE pitch meeting isn't uncommon at all. That's simply a tactic they teach you in Business School 101. Mori wrote "You have to get the rights first before you approach a network or try to pitch a game." That's a small debatable point and a very minor quibble -- I've found that's not necessarily true, least not from my experiences or people I've run into who are out pitching other things. Which brings us back to the core argument of intellectual rights and what someone should be allowed to do away from the actual creator or rights holder. Prior to going into pitch meetings these days, I've found that it's not uncommon for people to FIRST work up a kick-ass presentation -- that is, create all the things I rattled off above -- and THEN go into the meeting armed to the teeth, simply so they have a better shot at holding someone's attention. I'll accent this again with the disclaimer "from my experience", but in today's Hollywood no one wants to "hear" a pitch anymore. They'd rather "see" it to get an idea what the project might ultimately look like. That's becoming more and more common right from the first initial contact meeting. These days no one wants to spend a penny unless they absolutely, positively have to, so the more they can "see it", the more they're willing to listen to you. But again, that's just me speaking from my experiences...

I think the real issue here -- and this is where Moriarity was on target and I totally agree -- is that this ALIENS clip is no different than the GHOSTBUSTER video game clip that AICN recently posted. That is, where a company created a promotional pitch behind closed doors, but then purposefully went public with it FIRST rather than presenting it to the actual studio or rights holders. And let's not kid ourselves -- these ALIENS guys and those GHOSTBUSTERS guys made a conscious decision to do that. In both cases I'm sure they wanted it to seem like their project had accidentally "leaked" (wink, wink) through a private personal web site of someone involved (wink, wink).

In this case I'm sure they probably wanted someone at Fox to see it online and just as important hoped that same Fox person would also read some positive online buzz, all so that person would then run back to their boss and say "Hey, I saw this online and everyone was talking about it! We gotta bring these guys in!" To that end these guy are simply trying to do a calculated end-around the normal pitch process, trying to drum up support BEFORE they go in, as if that would make a difference to Fox. And frankly (in my opinion) that seems like a dumb miscalculation on their part since now Fox might be pretty damn mad that they released this without their permission OR this might have been a Hail Mary pass by the animation guys to drum up some buzz because -- unbeknownst to us -- behind the scenes Fox ALREADY passed on this, so basically they're desperately trying to revive the deal by getting some online buzz going.

All in all, I'm going to guess two things are now going to happen. (1) Pretty soon Fox is going to call AICN and tell you guys to pull down that link to show that they WON'T tolerate people putting out stuff that tramples on their intellectual property rights... and (2) Then they're going to call these guys up and tell them "Nice try, but you did it ass-backwards and pissed us off. So now don't bother calling us at all. We're not interested."

Or to be honest -- this being Hollywood, the capital city of "originality" (cough! cough!) -- these guys are likely to get a call from a grunty, low-level Fox attorney who will simply say, "Interesting idea about doing short ALIENS cartoons. Unfortunately for you...but what a coincidence for us!...we already had that exact same idea in development. So now that our asses are legally covered by me stating that to you, have a nice day." >CLICK!<

Alien? With these character designs? I think not.

That said, Mr Incredible put the final nail in the coffin for me. Because let's face it, once they did ALIENS as a cartoon -- and you just know they'd dumb it down by saying "But it's a cartoon! We want toys too! We HAVE to aim it at kids!" -- how far behind would the mass marketing of things like ALIENS: THE CEREAL really be? Even just joking, Mr Incredible's dead on target about that one. And I have to say, once I saw that box sitting on the grocery store shelf, complete with a cute cartoon Alien on the front leaping in the air or it's cute cartoon tail wrapped around the logo ("Fortified with egg-shaped marshamallows!") another part of my movie geekness would instantly curl up and die.

Of course the image of Cameron sitting at an early morning AVATAR production meeting, going over some notes and lost in thought, mindlessly reaching over to pour himself another bowl of ALIENS cereal sort of cracks me up and is now stuck in my head...

This whole idea is horrible. Everything cool in that animation was just ripped off from Cameron's Aliens. And the concept is flawed. This is a controlled area where they are just doing training? Then there is NO STORY. And for the love of God, did I really just see a Colonial Marine shoot his gun and go flying backwards?! Bluefields Creative, please change your company name to Bluefields UNcreative, it would be more fitting.