Richard Scarry's Busytown (Cancelled 2002 Paramount film)

Richard Scarry's Busytown (Also known as The Busy World of Richard Scarry, or Richard Scarry's Best Movie Ever) was an idea started in 1999 and pitched in 2002 by director and animator Keith Richards of Spark Entertainment, who wanted to create a movie based on Richard Scarry's Busytown books and the Paramount series.

Summary
Busytown was going to be a film similar to Busytown Mysteries, a series produced after the film. The plot was roughly along the lines of Huckle Cat and Lowly Worm solving a mystery of several citizens' possessions mysteriously disappearing.

History
In 1999, Keith Richards came up with the idea of a feature film based on the "Busytown" franchise. However, Paramount Pictures and Cookie Jar (Cinar at the time) owned the media rights to Busytown, so Spark could not develop the movie without their consent. To avoid any trouble, Richards decided to pitch the idea to Paramount and see how things would go from there.

The pitch included 1 short film based on the intro to the television series, and 2 scripted, storyboarded and roughly animated short films (The Busiest Firefighters Ever and Huckle Cat's Busy Day).

Pickup
In 1999, Paramount's executives reacted positively and agreed to fund and distribute Busytown to theatres, but gave the film a deadline of winter 2001, and gave a tight budget of 20 million USD, about half the budget of Disney's The Little Mermaid.

Cancellation
December 2001 had arrived, and Busytown was only about 40% complete, with a plot that was still being finished, and funding that was too low for the film to reach completion. Grudgingly, Paramount gave the crew $15 million more, and delayed the film to September 2002. But on April 16th, 2002, it was clear that there was still not enough time nor money. Thus, Paramount announced that they were no longer interested in Keith Richards' Busytown and that they were terminating the feature.

Future
After this, the series Busytown Mysteries was released in 2007, with a similar sleuthing aspect from the script of the film. In 2014, Richards made an agreement to air the 2 archived pitch shorts as bonuses in 2 Busytown DVDS. This never happened, so Richards put them on Spark's YouTube channel.