‘Danny Phantom’: Butch Hartman’s 10-Years-Later Story Needs To Be a Series

Danny Phantom was a rather unique superhero cartoon that ran for three seasons on Nickelodeon in the mid-2000s. It followed the story of a teen boy who obtained ghost powers when messing with his parents’ ghost-hunting equipment. He uses his newfound abilities to battle ghosts who try to break free of the Ghost Zone and protect the world.

A handful of years ago, Danny Phantom creator Butch Hartman posted videos himself drawing concepts of what Danny, his friends, his family, and his archnemesis would look like ten years after the series finale. In order to determine what his characters would look like in the future, he also had to come up with what they would be doing and where they would be in their lives. Tucker and Sam would be full time ghost-fighters alongside Danny and skilled in using Fenton technology to do so. Danny would grow even further into the superhero lifestyle and have more of a comic book style look. With better control over his ghost powers, this makes a lot of sense.

Danny’s sister, Jazz, would become a more enthusiastic member of Team Phantom and become more interested in the tech side of things. Danny’s father, Jack, would up his ghost-hunting game and fight alongside his son. However, he’d lose limbs and receive many scars after his years of battling ghosts, replacing various parts of his body with robotic ones and embracing the cyborg life. Maddie, Danny’s mother, would dive even further into being an action-oriented character, kick way more butt, and use a slew of more weapons to take on evil ghosts. She’s become like a character from Mad Max or The Walking Dead

Then there’s the show’s diabolical evil villain, Vlad Plasmius. According to Hartman, there are a couple of things that could happen with Vlad. One is that he’d be back and actually succeed in a scheme to create a clone of Danny and essentially have an evil version of 14 year-old Danny from the original series. The other is that he’d been forced to work for a race of alien slavers after they found him on the asteroid he was left on in the series finale and would be out for revenge once he breaks free.

Dani Phantom was Danny’s younger female clone who was successfully created in the series but never fully embraced Vlad’s influence. In his 10-years-later concept, Hartman designs Dani in a way that makes her seem like she walks the line between good and evil and plays with the idea of her going fully dark or not.

In the original series finale, “Phantom Planet,” Danny and the other ghosts save Earth by making it transparent so an asteroid can move through it instead of colliding with it, and Vlad Plasmius becomes trapped in space. That being said, there’s still plenty of ghosts in the Ghost Zone looking to wreak havoc in the realm of the living which means that there’s still plenty left to do in a Danny Phantom reboot.

The ideas that Hartman has for these characters ten years in the future sound truly incredible. They could easily lead to a lot of entertainment for fans of the original series. Because of this, it would be phenomenal to see this “10-years-later” story actually be turned into its own series some day. It may not be likely to happen, but it’s something that fans would flock to.

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