At the time Stones left Disney, the studio was looking for more boy adventure shows similar to Jonny Quest. © Cartoon Network.

I had six months to get those ideas through the process to a certain point, and then they weren't going to go forward. Then just before I left they gave me something else to develop. On the International Disney Channel, the standard Disney characters are much more popular than they are here.

JS: The comics are still huge in Europe.

TS: International wanted to develop some things based on the earlier features, so I did a little development on a Robin Hood series.

That movie, when you look at it, was made by middle-aged men, and all the characters were middle-aged men. Robin Hood, frankly should have been more in his late teens or at most early twenties. I took the liberty to change some designs. The fox got a lot shorter, he got a lot closer to Ken Anderson's original designs and there was just a younger spirit to whole thing. There were a few new characters: Will Scarlet was brand new — I think we made her "Willi," she was female. It was a nice mix, but it was pretty much a throwback to Disney Afternoon.

It wasn't like I always wanted to do another Disney Afternoon show, but there was a need and I stepped in to do it. Taste-wise, what I was really headed more toward was some of the stuff we did on Atlantis, where an adult could watch this and really be entertained. The idea of taking animation, and trying to get other emotions besides just laughs, not just saying, "Look, there's a scary house," but to make you feel the house is scary for a reason. To actually use filmmaking techniques. Nothing they were doing was going into the harder action adventure.

JS: You wanted to go in this direction, push the medium a little more.

TS: Ironically my last project there was closest to my first stuff when I first came to the company working on The Rescuers. That's not necessarily what I'd like to do throughout my career.

We only got as far as the character designs and the series bible — they didn't even take it to script. The design part was fun, which is paying off for me now because usually I'd do just enough to hand that off to somebody on my staff. Designing a character myself was a lot of fun.

JS: Between Scooby-Doo, Robin Hood and Brer Rabbit, you haven't really gotten away from the funny animals just yet. Do you have a dream project in your pocket, or are you just waiting to see what comes your way next?

Stones dream project would be to make an animated Hellboy series. © Sony Pictures 2004.

TS: My dream project would be in a word, Hellboy.

JS: The Animated Series.

TS: Yeah. While everyone's trying to do primetime animated comedy, this is something different; this could be like X-Files. People didn't go for it, not because they didn't take it seriously, but in the early days of television you had half-hour dramas like Dragnet. In essence Hellboy would be a half-hour drama or a spooky story. The problem is what do you hook it up to, what's the other show that fills out the rest of the hour, because they think in terms of hour blocks. Maybe you could link it up with a half-hour fantasy comedy that they might be an interesting pairing, but they would see it as a huge risk.

I just loved what Mike Mignola did with the comic. I could see it easily as an animated film, so I did a teaser reel using images out of his comic with the word balloons Photoshopped out. I panned and scanned them to a music track. I got to work with Mike on the Atlantis series, and he's now got a copy of that little pitch reel.