Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

I’m not a Disney man. (I don’t get Disney Adults.) The only Disney animated shows I liked were Gargoyles, Motorcity, Tron: Uprising, and Gravity Falls.

However, I’m fascinated by the revelation that Darkwing Duck creator Tad Stones pitched to Walt Disney Television Animation a series idea called Warp Wilde in 1992. I never knew about Warp Wilde—until 29 boards featuring concept art for a second attempt to pitch Warp Wilde were put up for auction last year, at about the same time Phineas and Ferb, the Disney Channel’s animated hit show about a pair of stepbrothers during summer vacation, came back with new episodes after a 10-year hiatus.

Stones originally envisioned Warp Wilde as a show about a military man in the future who was demoted to the job of guarding the kids of extraterrestrial ambassadors while he investigated a villainous plot to bring down the Intergalactic Federation. It sounds like a precursor to The Pacifier, the 2005 Disney live-action comedy that starred Vin Diesel as a Navy SEAL forced to babysit the kids of a scientist whose life he failed to save during a rescue mission.

“I pitched a science fiction series. Everybody on staff loved it except the key guy. [Disney Television Animation president] Gary Krisel just couldn’t see it,” said Stones about Warp Wilde to interviewer Joe Strike in 2004. “Warp Wild [sic] was about a space trucker who finds himself saddled it sounds exactly like Darkwing with kids [sic], but it was a whole different dynamic. There was a robot maid, but she was an ex-military model and would kind of go psycho and drop back into her military model.”

Due to company politics at the time, the Warp Wilde pilot was rewritten without Stones’s involvement. His Pacifier-like premise was changed by an unidentified Disney animator to a more Jetsons-like premise about a kid in the future named Warp Wilde, his teenage sister, their parents, the family’s robot maid, and Lynx, an alien girl who’s Warp’s best friend, which is why the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Hoyt Curtin’s ebullient and jazzy end title theme from The Jetsons’s first season—my favorite Curtin instrumental.

The unearthed concept art, which Stones drew despite being kicked out of the writing half of the Warp Wilde project, comes from the version of the project after it was Jetson-ized. Stones’s original vision of Warp Wilde as a show about a space trucker dealing with kids—this was supposed to be a Disney kids’ show, so these kids would have been less messed up than the pair of hormonal and overly sheltered teens Brock Samson guarded on The Venture Bros.—would have been a lot more appealing to me than the version of Warp Wilde that’s depicted in the artwork.

The unidentified animator who jettisoned the space trucker angle and Jetsoned Stones’s series idea was clearly thinking, “There’s a whole generation of kids who never watched the antics of George, Jane, Judy, Elroy, Astro, Rosie the Robot Maid, and Mr. Spacely, so this show will be for them.” Meanwhile, I watched The Jetsons’s second and third seasons when they first aired—there was a 22-year gap between the Hanna-Barbera show’s first and second seasons—and they were okay when I was a kid, but I never thought, “Hmm, we need another Jetsons.”

Despite that, Stones’s artwork looks great.

The last few boards imagined an episode where Warp plays with an enlarging ray and fires it at a harmless lizard that grows to dinosaur size. Seven-year-old me would have been into that dino-on-the-loose episode.

But I was way past seven by the time Warp Wilde would have come out (had it become an actual show). I outgrew dinosaurs. I preferred Batman: The Animated Series and the more grown-up worlds of John Woo/Chow Yun-Fat movies, Homicide: Life on the Street, The Fugitive (both the noirish ’60s TV version and the 1993 movie version), and the Jay Tarses neo-noir show Smoldering Lust, whose too-hot-for-NBC theme song I’d post on Bluesky as my answer if I ever participated in one of those “Name a show you’re positive no one remembers but you” things over on that site.

According to the description of Stones’s artwork on the auction site, the pitch where Warp Wilde was reimagined as a new Jetsons wasn’t picked up by Disney. Stones planned to work on the pitch again and revert Warp Wilde back to his original vision of a military vet surrounded by kids who keep getting in the way of his investigations, but he wasn’t able to pitch the show again because the studio reassigned him to the Disney Afternoon version of Aladdin.

This would not be the last TV project that had “Wilde” in the title and was cursed. Warp Wilde was followed by Wilde Again, which evolved into The Naked Truth, the constantly retooled ’90s sitcom that would not rest until it found the right workplace setting for Téa Leoni as disgraced photojournalist Nora Wilde, but then NBC said, “Okay, time to put The Naked Truth to rest.” And in 2010, Arrested Development fans were just not into Will Arnett playing a wealthy narcissist again—this time opposite Keri Russell—on Running Wilde, Mitchell Hurwitz’s first show (that was neither a rejected pilot nor a cartoon) since AD.

Man, TV creators should avoid the surname Wilde like it was Disney’s The Lone Ranger.