Dexter’s Laboratory creator Genndy Tartakovsky is also known for creating culty action-packed cartoons, including Samurai Jack, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Primal, and Unicorn: Warriors Eternal. But despite his renown with animation buffs, Tartakovsky’s work hardly ever gets praise until after the fact, when the series has long since ended or been canceled. Which means Tartakovsky is still fighting to get his passion projects made.
On Friday, the creator leaked test footage for a project called Black Knight — not the live-action isekai starring Martin Lawrence, but a new action animation he was set to direct. On Instagram, Tartakovsky said the film never materialized due to a presumed lack of interest from the audience. The proof-of-concept reel showcases a towering 20-foot iron knight facing off against a lone fighter doing everything she can to bring it down. The premise feels straight out of a Soulslike — and now is the perfect moment for Tartakovsky to ride that wave.
In his post, Tartakovsky revealed, “About six years ago, we started development on a more adult animated action movie, The Black Knight.” While the studio liked the idea, execs worried audiences wouldn’t show up in theaters. To prove the concept, he and his team created a “down and dirty” test, but it still failed to get the green light. Now, borrowing a page from Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool playbook, Tartakovsky is sharing the test publicly in hopes that fan excitement “would change the studio’s mind.” Hesitant that he’s “already said too much,” he only teased one detail of the story: a 20-foot Knight Armor, operated from within by ropes, pulleys, and levers, set against a 14th-century backdrop.
Tartakovsky is responsible for two of the biggest shows Cartoon Network has ever had in Dexter and Samurai Jack (even if it had to be revived later due to cancellation), followed his fanbase into adulthood with the Primetime Emmy Award-winning HBO show Primal, which was in a similar vein to Samurai Jack, which also won 20 various awards with 13 nominations. He’s one of the United States’ last auteurs in animation, and yet he has to resort to the Deadpool playbook to get a movie made. Maybe he’s down on his luck because Fixed, his recent film for Netflix, didn’t go over well with critics.
It’s been this way nearly his whole career, and it’s a shame he hardly ever gets his due as an animator or creator until one of his shows ends or gets canceled, and he never has a chance to ride the wave of his success. Samurai Jack had to get canceled before it was revered by the general populous. Star Wars: The Clone Wars, to this day, contains some of the best action Star Wars has ever seen, but was canceled out of shortsightedness from Lucasfilm. He has a generational audience from the ’90s that he’s cultivated through various projects over the decades, and it’s about time one of his projects catapulted him into the stratosphere of a Matt Groening or Seth MacFarlane.
Despite garnering considerable appeal from the internet, it remains to be seen whether a studio interested in the project will see the light. But maybe if Alex Garland’s Elden Ring movie for A24 works out, and they can expand this universe a bit more, The Black Knight can be outfitted as an Elden Ring animation one day, and catch a wave and ride it to his heart’s content.
