The Legend Of Vox Machina Crew Completely Scrapped The Series' Original Pilot

Fantasy is all the rage on television. Sure, the genre has been popular before, and each decade has given us hugely influential and fantastic stories of magic and fantastical creatures, from "Xena: Warrior Princess" to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." But when "Game of Thrones" exploded onto the scene with a mature, gory, politically charged fantasy story, it kickstarted a fantasy TV race, forcing every studio and streaming service to run and make their own fantasy epic, no matter how much they had to pay for it.

Meanwhile, animation has always been at the forefront of fantasy television. There were Saturday morning cartoons like "Dungeons & Dragons" and "He-Man," shows like "Gargoyles" that focused more on worldbuilding and sequential storytelling, and also "Dragon Age: Absolution" and "The Dragon Prince," which deliver the kind of epic fantasy storytelling we commonly only see on the big screen.

And then there's "The Legend of Vox Machina." A show based on the hugely popular "Dungeons & Dragons" livestream wherein a group of voice actors plays a group of misfit adventurers who accidentally become the only people capable of saving the land. This is a phenomenal show that masterfully captures the chaos of RPG sessions, and one that gets going right off the bat with a fun and thrilling first episode that invites you into this world. What happens in the show's inaugural episodes, however, wasn't what was originally planned.

When "The Legend of Vox Machina" showrunner Brandon Auman spoke with CBR this January, he revealed that they simply threw out the original two-episode pilot and rewrote it into the version that made it to air. 

"We originally had a totally different two-episode pilot that we kind of just threw out," Auman said. "We reworked it from scratch in the room. I wasn't really feeling it and I sort of pitched out like, 'What if we go in this direction instead?' Then Sam and Travis chimed in — they had just great ideas, great thoughts. We came up with a totally different two-part pilot."

In the end, the two-episode premiere ended up adapting not a story from the livestream, nor an original story, but part of the pre-Critical Role livestream campaign that the cast played off camera.

The premiere introduces us to Vox Machina as the least competent or trustworthy group of adventurers in all the land, the kind of group you only call upon when literally every other option is dead — and as we see, they are all dead. The group takes the quest and soon discovers that the creature they're hunting is actually a dragon, who also turns into a human member of the council of a great kingdom. After some horrible failures and hilarious shenanigans, they manage to kill the dragon and gain the favor of the council.

This premiere episode shows how "The Legend of Vox Machina" is a good adaptation. It'd be impossible to accurately adapt every episode of the livestream, and not everyone would like to see a gorgeously animated show spend four episodes with the characters going shopping or sharpening their swords. It'd also be rather easy to just grab the names and the IP and make up a new story. Instead, the cartoon finds the right balance — it faithfully adapts the characters but gives us a story that the audience has never seen. 

In its later episodes, "The Legend of Vox Machina" also makes the smart choice of focusing on the big moments of the livestream and taking everything else as a suggestion rather than a rule. Because the livestream was also subject to real-life issues of scheduling, not every member of the group was available for every single session. The animated show can rewrite history and show what would happen if the entire party was together during the whole story (or split them up for dramatic purposes).

Whether you're a fan or not, it's delightful to watch the show's hilarious and silly sequences and then go online to see how they played out in the original campaign (like the formidable battle against a door). You don't need to watch the livestream, however, to fall in love with these characters. The show uses the live stream as a template to tell its own story, which can pull exact moments from your favorite episodes, episodes we didn't see, or episodes that might have been. The result is a true fantasy epic that mixes the best parts of improvised gaming and planned out, television storytelling. 

"The Legend Of Vox Machina" is streaming on Prime Video.