Craig Buck's Re"V"lections of The Final Battle, Part 1

"It was probably the most demanding summer of my life," reflects Buck. "Basically the four of us sat in a room and took the characters that Kenny had created in the original four hours and tried to take them into what I thought was going to be six pretty amazing hours of television. We were just maniacs all summer. We had a couple of hundred index cards spread on the floor and made sure that the story and characters were all falling together logically. When we finished, the network thought they were fabulous scripts, Warner Bros. thought they were fabulous scripts, and a couple of days later we were kicked off the lot.
   "Basically," he continues the scenario, "we wrote the six hours, made the sale to NBC through Warner Bros. and once they had given the production the go-ahead, they got rid of us unceremoniously and brought in a new team to do a cheaper version with someone who didn't care about hte material as much. Of course they had a very bad experience with Kenny on the original. He went significantly over budget and they didn't want that tohappen again. That in a nuthsell is the story of what happened."

Actually, there's more to the story, as will be revealed on Wednesday in part two of this interview.