• by April 12, 2004

'PRIDE' AND THE PEACOCK - It would have sounded like a bad idea before Montecore, a 600-pound white Siberian tiger, mauled Roy Horn on stage in front of a shocked audience at the Mirage casino in Las Vegas, but the fact that NBC has opted to move forward with "Father of the Pride," an animated TV series that depicts the sitcom-like lives of Siegfried & Roy's white lions sounds like a really bad dream. The show, "Father of the Pride," which was pitched to agency executives as part of the peacock network's prime-time development meetings, sounds high-concept and even a bit outlandish, but it's already a favorite to land a berth on NBC's Monday or Tuesday night schedules, according to Jeffrey Katzenberg, founder of DreamWorks, the studio that is producing the animated series. While the series likely will not address the motives that caused Montecore to bite Horn in the neck and drag him 30-feet off stage, DreamWorks executives say it will focus on a variety of other modern day issues troubling big cats prowling the Las Vegas strip: "in-law troubles and intergenerational conflicts."

Katzenberg, who once had a huge success with a similar storyline while running Walt Disney Co.'s animation operations (remember "Lion King"?) admits he grew a little squeamish on prospects for the project after Horn's attack. "If Roy had not pulled through this, I think it would have been very hard and insensitive," Katzenberg recently told a TV reporter.

Certainly, it's one thing for a network to opt to keep an existing series on the air when such tragedy occurs - as ABC did when John Ritter died a few episodes into this season's "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter" - it's another thing when a show hasn't even gotten out of development. And especially so when it's a show that's projected to cost between $2 million and $2.5 million per episode to produce given the high quality animation DreamWorks expects to deliver.

Interestingly, "Father of the Pride" became a project when DreamWorks had trouble selling NBC on the idea of an animated TV series spin-off of its blockbuster hit "Shrek." Apparently, the NBC brass thought "Shrek" would work for kids, but not for adults. These are the same NBC honchos who think an animated series about anthropomorphic tigers who cavort with aged German performers on the Las Vegas strip.