USA Today
By Elizabeth Snead
PARK CITY, Utah -- Kevin Smith brought a short film to the Sundance Film Festival this year. A very short film.
The Dogma director is showing a snippet of the animated version of Clerks, his 1994 Sundance hit. The 'toon is
destined for ABC in March (to be aired after 9 p.m.) and will be featured in ads during Sunday's Super Bowl.
Like the movie, it features unkempt, stoned slackers who work in a convenience store and video rental shop. The
original actors -- Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Jason Mewes and Smith -- are doing voices for their characters,
Dante, Randall, Jay and Silent Bob.
But the dialogue is cleaner than the four-letter-word-filled film version. ''This job would be great if it weren't for the
customers,'' quips Randall in the three-minute segment shown Monday afternoon.
Episodes will feature famous voices -- including Gwyneth Paltrow, Charles Barkley, Ben Affleck and Jerry Seinfeld --
playing themselves as customers ejected from the video shop. In one of the first shows, Alec Baldwin plays Leonardo
Leonardo, an evil, greedy millionaire.
Don't expect The Simpsons or simplistic South Park. The style is sharp-edged animŽ. And the faces are humanistic,
with characters resembling their real-life counterparts.
Who is the target audience for the new Clerks?
''At the end of the day, I don't want to say we don't care about the audience, but we made it for ourselves,'' says David
Mandel, a former Seinfeld writer. ''We also made the show about the guys who watch TV, so they sort of are the
audience.''
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