Spielberg has produced plenty of TV shows over the years, often to mixed reviews. One of the few to receive unanimous praise is Animaniacs, and during its run a number of films were put into development, most of which sadly never got the greenlight.

The full list of films can be seen on the blog of Tom Ruegger, who produced Animaniacs along with a number of other Spielberg animations, but the above film - This Means Warners - stood out to me because it seems to blend Hollywood and war, much like 1941.

Spielberg has recycled a handful of elements from his disastrous 1979 film, notably by re-staging the dancehall brawl at the start of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and it seems he may have been doing something similar with Animaniacs. What a shame it didn’t come off.

In 1988, the New York Times ran this piece to celebrate the recent release of Empire of the Sun and Spielberg’s 40th birthday. It’s an in-depth article that focuses mostly on the film, but also explores other areas of Spielberg’s life and film-making.

One of those areas is his interest in World War Two, which has been apparent in Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, 1941 and the Indiana Jones films, along with Empire of the Sun.

“I’m closer to the 40’s personally than I am to the 80’s. I love that period. My father filled my head with war stories - he was a radioman on a B-25 fighting the Japanese in Burma. I have identified with that period of innocence and tremendous jeopardy all my life. I collect documentaries, and I think I have every one made on that period. It was the end of an era, the end of innocence, and I have been clinging to it for most of my adult life.

“But hitting 40, I really had to come to terms with what I’ve been tenaciously clinging to, which was a celebration of a kind of naivete that has been reconfirmed countless times in the amount of people who have gone to see ‘E.T.,’ ‘Back to the Future’ and ‘Goonies.’ But I just reached a saturation point, and I thought ‘Empire’ was a great way of performing an exorcism on that period.

”I wanted to draw a parallel story between the death of this boy’s innocence and the death of the innocence of the entire world. When that white light goes off in Nagasaki and the boy witnesses the light - whether he really sees it or his mind sees it doesn’t matter. Two innocents have come to an end and a saddened world has begun.

”I don’t think I’ve made a dark movie. ‘But it’s as dark as I’ve allowed myself to get, and that was perversely very compelling to me.”