Kevin Smith Pitched a Plastic Man Cartoon Series Starring The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons

Though best known initially for his raunchy comedies in the 1990s and his “View Askewniverse” franchise of films, Kevin Smith’s outspoken opinions and love for comic books and superheroes has largely become what he’s known for these days. The Clerks and Chasing Amy writer/director has entire podcasts dedicated to this stuff, plus seven seasons of a tv show, but all of that is to say a lot of his projects in that realm somehow never end up happening. Speaking on his FatMan Beyond podcast, Smith opened up about one of those projects, an animated Plastic Man TV show, which he’d totally forgotten he’d developed a few years ago.

“I was deep diving into one of my laptops looking for an old photo and I found a script to Plastic Man that I wrote for a Plastic Man cartoon like two years ago or something like that,” Smith said. “I completely f-ckin forgot about it and they paid me to write it and then they didn’t do it and it was with um what’s his name from The Big Bang Theory, He was such a good dude, Jim Parsons. What a lovely dude but he was gonna be the voice of Plastic Man. So I looked at the script and I was like ‘Wow man they f-cking paid me to write this and it’s never going to happen.’”

As fans may recall, Smith has been attached to various superhero projects over the years with…..well none of them making their way into fruition, at least on the screen. Smith’s Superman Lives screenplay, a 1990s version that would have seen Nicolas Cage playing the Man of Steel and eventually landed Tim Burton, is perhaps his most famous superhero project that didn’t go. 

Others that Smith wrote include The Green Hornet, which eventually became a comic book series from Dynamite; Howard the Duck. an animated Marvel project that was originally set-up at Hulu; a Sam and Twitch TV show, based on the characters from Todd McFarlane’s Spawn; and The Six Million Dollar Man, based on the 1970s TV series which also became a comic at Dynamite. 

Smith has managed to make his way into some DC properties after they got off the ground though, directing episodes of Supergirl and The Flash on The CW.