Honest, no.
I was in London last year but only used the Tube.
I'm exceptionally good at coming up with innovative ideas that other people have already thought of.
On the other hand, I also come up with genuinely new concepts that I can't get backing for, only to find that someone succeeds with almost exactly the same idea later.
Shrek was one of those, and the whole Freddy Krueger schlock horror thing was a story I wrote in high school.
I developed an animation series pilot with the BBC in about 1989 about a monster who comes to live in a village populated by characters from fairy tales and nursery rhymes. The BBC thought the animation was great, but didn't like the concept.
The original Shrek book by Steig was written about this time (my concept predates it) but even in that book the fairy tale characters do not feature. So could my concept have reached the US, where Dreamworks turned it into a mega hit?
It's unlikely but possible.
Many of my colleagues at Cosgrove Hall went to work in London for Spielberg's company called Amblimation, and then later moved to California where the outfit changed its name to Dreamworks. Who knows what stuff was chucked around in ideas meetings?
These things happen all the time. I was in Australia when the animation company I worked for bought the rights to my strip Blacknose The Pirate.
They took it to a meeting in France where ANOTHER company swore that they had the rights to make the same series! The second company thought had inherited Blacknose when they bought out a previous company (to whom I had sold a one year option many years before).
Like I said, it happens all the time. I know big animation companies who have paid six figure sums for rights to concepts just to stop other companies getting their hands on them.
People have been made millionaires overnight whose projects will never see the light of day.
Tricky chap, the old animation production game.
