The Remaking of Danger Mouse

   Danger Mouse is a British animated television series and a continuation of the 1981 series with the same name. The series revolves around titular character Danger Mouse, the "world's greatest secret agent", and his hamster sidekick Penfold, who protect the world from a variety of danger. With help from his boss Colonel K and the genius scientist Professor Squawkencluck, Danger Mouse is equipped to defeat his nemesis, Baron von Greenback. In 2013, Fremantle Media confirmed to Broadcast that a reboot of the series was being considered, and in June 2014 it was announced that a new series was being made for broadcast on CBBC in 2015. The reboot is produced by Boulder Media for Fremantle Media Kids. It is directed by Robert Cullen, with Brian Cosgrove, one of the original creators being a creative consultant. According to Eldon, the animation style is 'much the same as the original'. The series is animated in Toon Boom Harmony, as the animators thought that Flash was too limited.

   While Danger Mouse was never necessarily a part of my own childhood, this remake reminded me a great deal of the revival of Hanna-Barbera's Secret Squirrel back in 1993, retitled Super Secret Secret Squirrel and placed as a back-up segment to 2 Stupid Dogs, at least when it came to their character redesigns. If it isn't obvious, their redesigns from the original are noticeably sharper looking

   Considering how old the original series was, the challenge when reviving this show was to bring new life into it through its writing and designs. Seeing Danger Mouse as a comedy than a children's show, they saw it necessary to hire the right writers for the show. There is a minimum of 4 writers for each Danger Mouse episode, as compared to other UK shows that only really have one head writer to write all the jokes. They especially aspired to reach the same level in writing quality like The Simpsons during that show's golden age. And in the end, the key to it all is comedy, so putting it simply, write the show and take the swearing, drugs and sex out. American writers were brought in to make sure an episode was intelligible to audiences outside of the UK (Eg, if there had been a plot about a major tea shortage in one episode, it was pretty obvious that it would have been more of a british joke than an international one), throwing in US jokes while they were at it.

   The designers kept the painted backgrounds from the original as well as the character designs. Its visual style overall was incredibly vibrant looking while also dynamic enough to suit the action packed nature of the show. From the very beginning, they knew exactly how they wanted the show to look, it was just putting it all down on paper. It was most definitely a challenge to effectively blend live action and animated elements together, but they succeeded. 

  And as mentioned earlier, old character designs were only tweaked ever so slightly so that they had a more dynamic overall shape to them. Danger Mouse's nose for example was more accentuated as compared to the original, being given much more structure and definite shape than ever before. But other than that, his design wasn't actually drastically changed from the original. The essence of the original characters were kept in this reboot, that was one of the most important details when their designs were updated. The other challenge was to actually make sure that the new characters actually fit into that universe, that both old and new audience wouldn't have truly noticed whether they were actually from the original series or not.

   Their backgrounds contained mainly photographic elements (Having taken advantage of their incredibly high budget in that area, with it being 70%), looking real yet at the same time stylised. 2D elements were integrated into 3D (Such as reflections and shadows). Which brings up the fact about how incredibly under appreciated that the compositing department in animation studios actually are. Without them, many of these gorgeous backgrounds would have not been possible. There was however the challenge of preventing it from simply becoming a collage, and they really needed to make sure everything actually blended nicely.

   The process for the evolution of each scene goes as follows:

1. Storyboards
2. Background art
3. Adding depth to the background and props (Compositing department strikes again)
4. Atmosphere
5. The animation itself
6. Lighting
7. 3d elements (Such as vehicles)
8. Shadows
9. Extra effects (Such as car lights)