Don't hold your breath for Ripper - looks like none of Mutant enemy's spin-off projects are moving forward at the moment.

"Apart from Angel, no spinoff [is] in the works right now," Joss Whedon told the Sci Fi Wire web site. "I think it's a very likely possibility, but there isn't anything happening right now. We all just kind of want to bask and relax."

As far as the status of Ripper goes, "I wanted to do something on the BBC," said Joss. "We talked about a two-hour pilot. We talked about some episodes. We talked about a two-hour movie. It's gone through a lot of things. But the one conclusion I've come to, if I do something, I'll do it not as a setup so much as a story about Giles.

"I realise that, like Angel, you can use it as a premise, perhaps, to build something about ghost stories, and that would be fine. What I'm interested in is the character that Tony plays, not some mystery he might solve. And that's sort of a paradigm shift in what I might do with it. But I'm still very invested in the Ripper story."

As for Buffy: Animated, which has so far been unable to find a network prepared to screen it, Joss claims the problem is really about the quality of the animation he'd like to see.

"We still have a bunch of really good scripts. But I won't do it at a price. That's a show that has to look wonderful. It has to be as good as it can be. And a lot of animation houses just can't contain that. So the money isn't there right now. So right now, I'm not planning on it."