User blog:ARTaylor/Black Panther's Almost Made Series

The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that Larry Houston, director and storyboard artist on X-Men, had an entire spin-off series in mind when he put Black Panther into the show. The episode in question, "Sanctuary, Part One", featured the debut of Black Panther in a small cameo as he watches Magneto take a group of mutants to Asteroid M. The script called for "African Mutant Refugee #3" to do the viewing and Houston turned that into the King of Wakanda. Artist Mark Lewis designed the character based on Jack Kirby's work.

Houston said, "We had two X-Men episodes in Africa, one with Storm's mutant godchild and the other with Magneto gathering up mutants to take them to his mutant sanctuary Asteroid M. I was able to include the Black Panther into the show whenever they were in Africa, which some sharp-eyed fans were able to spot." He added, "I couldn't give him a speaking part, but it was a great opportunity."

Lewis said, "Of course, I didn't do a dead-on Kirby impression, because that wouldn't have fit stylistically into the look of the X-Men cartoon. But I did at least try to get some of that Kirby feel in his hands and some of the masses of his body."

Twenty-one days later, Black Panther got his first full appearance on the Fantastic Four episode "Prey of the Black Panther", directed and produced by Houston, where he was played by Keith David.

David said of the role, "I just wanted to bring the most authenticity to it as I possibly could and the most excitement about it, because I wanted it to flourish and continue."

Houston wanted to use the episode to launch a Black Panther series. He said, "The more inquiries I made about it becoming a regular series, it'd just keep getting put off and put off." He added, "The promise of doing the first animated Black Panther was one of the reasons I left directing the last year of the X-Men series." Houston had wanted to adapt Fantastic Four issues 52 and 53 into the series, which became the basis for "Prey of the Black Panther". Houston said of the recent live-action film, "I am...so glad to have lived long enough to see the comic book I bought off a spinner rack in 1966, as a child, to now see the Black Panther, and all of my other childhood heroes, on the big movie screen. And done right."

David was onboard for a series saying, "I had great hopes at that time that maybe they'll make this a series and I'll get to be in it. One of the things that manifested was that the proverbial 'they' weren't ready for it to be any more than it was. Because the more inquiries I made about it becoming a regular series, it'd just keep getting put off and put off. 'Oh, it's being thought about. It's being thought about." David said that he is as proud of Black Panther as he is of anything else and has no bad feelings at not getting to play the part regularly. He said, "There's a lot of economics involved. There's a lot of socio-ethnic politics involved. And now with the opening that we've had, it was taken full advantage of, which is a great thing. You can't cry about the past and what didn’t happen. I'm more interested in celebrating what is happening."

David was the only one in the running to play Black Panther at the time. Wesley Snipes, who went on to play Blade in three films, lobbied for a Black Panther film. He eventually did get his own six-episode series in 2010 with Academy Award nominated actor Djimon Hounsou in the titular role.