Welcome to Television
This community is for discussion of anything related to television or streaming.
Other Communities
Television Communities
A community for discussion of anything related to Television via broadcast or streaming.
Rules:
List of Best Rated TV Series as voted by the Fediverse
From Nelvana, a Canadian cartoon company that has died just recently:
Dumb Bunnies
George & Martha
Maurice Sendak's Sevin Little Monsters
Best & Bester
Birdz
Blazing Dragons
Braceface
Cadillacs and Dinosaurs
The Day My Butt Went Psycho
The Detentionaire
Jacob Two-Two
Moville Mysteries
My Pet Monster
Stickin' Around
Bob & Margaret
Commited
DeltaState
It's a French show but it's also dubbed in English which is how I saw it. It's about a guy and his pet baby seal and their adventures. Most of it has a pro-environment angle if memory serves. It's a whacky show for kids. Nobody I know has ever heard of it besides my brother.
Claymation, look for Pingu ('80-06)
Other children's media (not animated) you might want: Captain Kangaroo ('61), The Friendly Giant ('58-85), Fraggle Rock ('83-87), Polka Dot Door ('71-2k), and a french show Passe Partout ('77-92). This with the other suggestions should eat some storage
I'm Dutch but we watched a lot of German television. So I grew up on Pumuckl and "die Sendung mit der Maus".
The Dutch exported the wonderful Alfred J Kwak
This was after my time, but you're right.
Here in Canada we had a couple shows that stood out.
First wasn't Canadian but a British Import but they still showed it a lot here. Count Duckula. Basically this duck is a vampire except he doesn't drink blood, he's a vegetarian. And it was kinda like Doctor Who as there were several different "generations" of Count Duckula would would die and come back and each one had it's own personality with the most recent one, the one the show is about, being a vegetarian vampire.
Next would be held near and dear to many Canadians my age, The Raccoons. A small group of Raccoons that try to save their forest from deforestation by an evil guy. The thing about the Raccoons was while it was a kids show it had plot points that were very mature and sophisticated that honestly anyone of any age could enjoy it. romance, action, humour, etc were all quite mature. Also the ending theme "Run with us" was a hell of a damn banger. But some of the stories did get quite dark. I remember as a kid honestly being scared of a couple Raccoons episodes. also it'd be a crime for me not to post the awesome ending theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEkSzcGIfW0
But for whatever reason a lot of Canadian cartoons, like The Raccoons, were quite mature. Reboot and Beasties comes to mind (Transformers: Beast Wars for those in the US). Reboot started out fairly light hearted but the story quickly went to a more mature and dark setting. Same with Beasties. Beasties was interesting because in later seasons they had way more callbacks and plot points from the original G1 Transformers 80s cartoon where the show kinda transitioned from being a kids show to one where Teenagers could enjoy it because they watched the original 80s Transformers. Like it took what happened to the original Transformers and matured the story to the point that the show is so incredibly influential to the overall Transformers lore today that most of the plot and story elements still exist.
finally you have Totally Spies which while likely isn't a hidden gem it is Canadian. It started out as a joint French/Canadian project but the later seasons were done entirely in Canada. a psychologist could have a field day with that show.
I didn't watch Schnappi as a kid, but I stumbled across it when my kids were young and they appreciated the bizarre stuff it showed. I linked one with the full song, but the one I stumbled across back then had Schnappi smoking a blunt (or maybe a cigarette) and reacting to it. I know barely any German, so all I understand is "Schnappi the Little Crocodile".
Check out Misseri Animations from Italy.
Through the 80s, there were classics like:
A.E.I.O.U.
Red & Blue
Quaq Quao
I grew up exposed to French and European media. A few shows come to mind.
Nobody's Boy: Remi
If you can find it, it is a powerfully emotional watch. Unfortunately I don't know if an adequately dubbed or even subbed version is available. It is on YouTube in French but the auto translated subs are awful.
The Mysterious Cities of Gold
A great Franco-Japanese classic. Dubbed versions are out there.
All of the Asterix cartoons are decent and available dubbed as well.
Fast forward in time to the 90s and the show called Reboot is pretty solid. It was made in Canada and I heard that most Americans never heard of it. The first entirely CGI show. Someone rescued the original high def footage recently too so it should be out there.
The Remi one was also available in Dutch, titled "alleen op de wereld", alone in the world.
I actually do have reboot, and vaguely recall it being on air where I lived, which wasn't Canada but close (2hrs drive, we got their OTA signals)
Im also familiar with asterix, i have some of the animated stuff and have played some of the games even :) good stuff, enjoyable!
I’ll take a look for the other things, thanks :D
Robo Story
"Always remember that you are the lowest of the low"
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0996250/
The Trap Door
"Don't you open that trap door! You're a fool if you dare!"
The Trap Door
“Don’t you open that trap door! You’re a fool if you dare!”
I'm pretty sure this is what I was thinking of as soon as I opened the thread, lol. Kind of traumatising
I used to watch a lot of The Trap Door with my younger brother (it was his favourite show for a while). Iconic theme song!
Lift Off. It aired throughout the 90s and was sort of like a weirder Sesame Street for Australian kids. It occupies a strange place in my brain because it's one of the first TV shows I ever watched and is therefore memorable in that sense, but it was also so weird that it feels like a dream I had which has been distorted by time.
Plasmo. I'm not sure if they still do this with kids programming but it was quite common for there to be several of these shows with very short episodes scattered throughout the after-school kids broadcast, usually as gap fillers between the longer shows that would start on the hour or half hour. This one had quite heavy themes for how short and simple it was. One of the characters kinda looked like an Ithorian from Star Wars. That's all I can remember!
Little Elvis was a banger of a kids show.
I found this one a bit weird at times after a couple of Japanese folks introduced me to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usavich
Look up anything and everything by Švankmajer.