Ben 10 (partially found pitch pilot of Cartoon Network animated series; early-mid 2000s)

This article has been tagged as Needing work due to its poor writing and slight plagiarism.

The series' early logo.

Status: Partially Found

Ben 10 (retroactively known as Ben 10 Classic) is an American animated TV series created by Man of Action (a group consisting of Duncan Rouleau, Joe Casey, Joe Kelly, and Steven T. Seagle), and produced by Cartoon Network Studios. The series is about a 10-year-old boy named Ben Tennyson who gets a watch-style alien device called the "Omnitrix". Attached to his wrist, it allows him to transform into 10 different alien creatures with different abilities, allowing him to fight evil from earth and space with his cousin Gwen and grandfather Max. The series first aired on Cartoon Network as a sneak peek on December 27, 2005, as part of "Sneak Peek Week", airing alongside other shows, including My Gym Partner's a Monkey, Robotboy and Zixx. The show later began airing on January 13, 2006 and ended on April 15, 2008. However there are rumors about a pilot episode of Ben 10 created the same year as the series, however the rumors stopped. In 2020 after the Duncan Rouleau interview that he said that those screenshots were fan art until 2021 when footage of the pilot was found.

The Rumors

The rumors started in 2018 by an anonymous Reddit user (that deleted he's account after the post) claiming about an unaired pilot that was created the same year as the first episode of the series. The rumors started also with post he shared some screenshots until the Duncan Rouleau interview.^[1]

The Duncan Rouleau Interview

In August 2020 Man of Action co-founder Duncan Rouleau agreed to get an interview to help promote the 2016 reboot series' film Ben 10 Versus the Universe: The Movie. The interview happened by The Ink Tank doing the interview he was asked about the early develoment of Ben 10 later a member of The Ink Tank sawed to him that the screenshots he said that were fan art until Dave Johnson revealed that the pilot was real.

Dave Johnson Steps In

After the interview Twitter user Tron Trovlta asked if the Pilot was real or not but Dave responded by saying that Gwen's mushroom shirt was change to a cat because Cartoon Network didn't want to promote any drugs. He also shared concept art of the characters in his portfolio until Roxy found footage of the pilot.^[2]

Resurfaced Footage

In 2021, a user named Roxy, owner of a blog called "Ben 10: Lost and Found" was browsing archived versions of International Cartoon Network Websites on Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Within one of the files, Roxy found 14 seconds of animation from the test footage. On November 20th, 2021, The Ink Tank released a video discussing the new finding, featuring a brief appearance by Roxy (in the form of an alien species from the show) discussing how she found the clips.

The video would find its way to Nollan Obena, art director and background artist for the original series, who had the following to say:

"Ran into this post on my feed. Great detective work. Yep. It was a test for the oversees studios. We test the studios we want to use by having them animate a few scenes from the storyboards. Character interactions for acting and of course a transformation scene. I love that you also had pages from the zine we put together for ComicCon."

With this added context, it can be safely assumed that there are multiple takes of the test footage by different animation studios, namely Sunmin Pictures, Rough Draft Korea, and Lotto Animation, the latter who's take may be the version the footage is from, as Lotto is credited as the animation studio behind the episode, and part of their work is reused in the final release, during Four Arms' battle with the reanimated mammoth.