The X-Files has always been a cartoon at heart. Dana Scully’s hair has always been a little too red. Fox “Spooky” Mulder’s unimaginative suit and tie was a caricature of federal officer wear. It’s fitting that Fox is developing an animated comedy spinoff of The X-Files which will be executive produced by the series creator Chris Carter, according to Variety. The spinoff will be called The X-Files: Albuquerque.
Fox hasn’t quite committed to the script or presentation yet. The spinoff will not revolve around the characters David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson brought to life. It will revolve around an office of misfit agents who take on the cases the bureau’s X-Files consider too ridiculous to bother with. They take the castoffs, the ones that would only fit into B movies.
The pilot will be written by Rocky Russo and Jeremy Sosenko, who wrote Paradise PD for Netflix. They will also executive produce alongside Carter and Gabe Rotter, a former writer on the original The X-Files. The series will be animated by Bento Box studio.
This a reunion of sorts, and not the first time Carter’s team delved into Fox’s cartoon territory. One of the most baffling, and annoying cases Mulder and Scully investigated was “The Springfield Files.” Aired during The Simpsons season 8, it also featured the voice of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock and In Search of narrator Leonard Nimoy. The FBI duo dropped out of an important drug sting operation to investigate an “unsubstantiated UFO sighting in the heartland of America.” Even “Junior Skeptic Magazine” didn’t buy that. But “when you consider the wonders that exist all around us… voodoo priests of Haiti, the Tibetan numerologists of Appalachia, the unsolved mysteries of Unsolved Mysteries,” Mulder counters. “The truth is out there.”
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The X-Files was inspired by The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Agent Scully was initially a skeptic, assigned to keep an eye on Agent Mulder and offer rational explanations for his otherworldly conclusions and unnatural obsession with Bigfoot. Ultimately they became targets of the government who were trying to keep the existence of extraterrestrial life a secret. The pair also kept the non-platonic relations well hidden until after the original run.
The X-Files ran on Fox for nine seasons from 1993 through 2002. The search for that elusive truth pawned two feature films before it was revived in 2016 for two seasons.
There is no The X-Files: Albuquerque release date or casting news yet. Keep watching the skies.