The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle is a 2000 American live-action/animated adventure slapstick comedy film directed by Des McAnuff and produced by Universal Pictures, based on the television cartoon of the same name by Jay Ward. Animated characters Rocky and Bullwinkle share the screen with live actors portraying Fearless Leader (Robert De Niro, who also co-produced the film), Boris Badenov (Jason Alexander) and Natasha Fatale (Rene Russo) along with Randy Quaid, Piper Perabo, Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell. June Foray reprised her role as Rocky, while Keith Scott (no relation to original voice actor Bill Scott) voiced Bullwinkle and the film’s narrator. It also features cameo appearances by performers including James Rebhorn, Paget Brewster, Janeane Garofalo, John Goodman, David Alan Grier, Don Novello, Jon Polito, Carl Reiner, Whoopi Goldberg, Max Grodenchik, Norman Lloyd, Jonathan Winters and Billy Crystal. The film follows a young rookie FBI agent named Karen Sympathy enlisting the help of Rocky and Bullwinkle to stop Boris, Natasha, and Fearless Leader from taking over the United States.
Released on June 30, 2000, the film was a box office bomb, grossing $35.1 million worldwide against its $76 million budget (making it one of the biggest box office bombs in history) and received mixed reviews with criticisms toward its writing, plot, and humor while praising the performances, visual effects, and faithfulness to its source material.
Star vs. the Forces of Evil is an American animated magical girl television series created by Daron Nefcy and developed by Jordana Arkin and Dave Wasson, which aired on Disney Channel and Disney XD. It is the first Disney XD series created by a woman.
The series follows the adventures of Star Butterfly (voiced by Eden Sher), the young turbulent heir to the royal throne in the dimension of Mewni, who is sent to Earth to mellow her reckless behavior. There, she befriends and becomes roommates with human Marco Diaz (Adam McArthur) and begins a semi-normal life in Echo Creek, attending school and meeting new friends. Throughout the first season, the two travel to exotic dimensions using dimensional scissors while preventing the Mewman monster Ludo (Alan Tudyk) from stealing Star’s magic wand. As the series progresses, Star and Marco fall in love with each other, meet new friends, take on new enemies, and travel to even more weird and wild dimensions.
Star vs. the Forces of Evil typically follows a format of two 11 minute-long independent “segments” per episode for the first three seasons. The fourth season has a few more half-hour episodes than the first three. Greenlit for Disney Channel in 2013, the first episode of the series aired as a preview there on January 18, 2015. The series then moved to Disney XD on March 30, 2015, where its premiere on Disney XD became the most-watched animated series debut in the network’s history. The fourth and final season premiered on March 10, 2019, with the series returning to Disney Channel. The series ended on May 19, 2019.
Cinderella is a 1950 American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures. Based on Charles Perrault’s 1697 fairy tale of the same title, it is the 12th Disney animated feature film. The film was directed by Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, and Clyde Geronimi. It features the voices of Ilene Woods, Eleanor Audley, Verna Felton, Rhoda Williams, James MacDonald, Luis van Rooten, and Don Barclay.
During the early 1940s, Walt Disney Productions had suffered financially after losing connections to the European film markets due to the outbreak of World War II. Because of this, the studio endured box office bombs such as Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), and Bambi (1942), all of which would later become more successful with several re-releases in theaters and on home video. By 1947, the studio was over $4 million in debt and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Walt Disney and his animators returned to feature film production in 1948 after producing a string of package films with the idea of adapting Charles Perrault’s Cendrillon into an animated film.
Cinderella was released to theatres on February 15, 1950, receiving critical acclaim and becoming a box office success, which made it Disney’s biggest hit since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and helped reverse the studio’s fortunes. It also received three Academy Award nominations, including Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, Best Sound Recording, and Best Original Song for Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.
In 2018, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Brother Bear is a 2003 American animated musical fantasy comedy-drama film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The 44th Disney animated feature film, it was directed by Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker (in their feature directorial debuts) and produced by Chuck Williams, from a screenplay written by Tab Murphy, Lorne Cameron, David Hoselton, and the writing team of Steve Bencich and Ron J. Friedman. The film stars the voices of Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Suarez, Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, Jason Raize (in his only film role), and D.B. Sweeney. Brother Bear follows an Alaska native boy named Kenai as he pursues a bear and kills it, but the Spirits, incensed by this unnecessary death, change Kenai into a bear himself as punishment. In order to be human again, Kenai must travel to a mountain where the Northern lights touch the earth.
The film was the third and final Disney animated feature produced primarily by the Feature Animation studio at Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando, Florida; the studio was shut down in March 2004, not long after the release of this film in favor of computer animated features. The film, which was released in the United States on November 1, 2003, received mixed reviews from critics and received a nomination for Best Animated Feature at the 76th Academy Awards, losing to Pixar’s Finding Nemo. The film grossed $250 million against a $46 million budget.
Curious George is a 2006 animated adventure film based on the book series written by H. A. Rey and Margret Rey. It was directed by Matthew O’Callaghan, written by Ken Kaufman and produced by Ron Howard, David Kirschner, and Jon Shapiro. Featuring the voices of Will Ferrell, Drew Barrymore, David Cross, Eugene Levy, Joan Plowright, and Dick Van Dyke, it tells the story of how the Man with the Yellow Hat, a tour guide at a museum, first befriended a curious monkey named George and started going on adventures with him around the city.
It is the first theatrically-released animated film from Universal Pictures since 1995’s Balto, the first theatrical animated film from Universal Animation Studios (making this Universal’s first in-house theatrical animated film), and the first animated film from Imagine Entertainment. The film had languished in development hell at Imagine Entertainment since at least 1992, but it is possible that it was conceived years before. The film employs a notable blend of traditional animation and CGI scenery and objects that make up 20% of its environment. The soundtrack was composed by Heitor Pereira and features several songs by musician Jack Johnson.
Curious George was released in the United States by Universal Pictures on February 10, 2006. It was met with generally positive reviews and grossed $70 million worldwide against a budget of $50 million. Even though its mild success in the box office, Curious George made $48 million in DVD sales in the home market. It received five sequels, although all but one of them were released as direct-to-video films. A second theatrical Curious George film is in development, with Andrew Adamson set to direct.
Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies for the Film Curious George is the soundtrack to the film, featuring songs by Jack Johnson and others. In its first week on Billboard 200 albums chart, the soundtrack made it to the #1 spot, making it Jack Johnson’s first #1 album (In Between Dreams peaked at #2, On and On peaked at #3) and making it the first soundtrack to reach #1 since the Bad Boys II soundtrack in August 2003 and the first soundtrack to an animated film to top the Billboard 200 since the Pocahontas soundtrack reigned for one week in July 1995.
Top Cat is an American animated sitcom produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions and originally broadcast in prime time on the ABC network. It aired in a weekly evening time slot from September 27, 1961, to April 18, 1962, for a single season of 30 episodes. The show was a ratings failure in prime time, but became successful upon its time on Saturday morning television. The show also became very popular in Latin American countries (especially Mexico), and the United Kingdom.
Top Cat was created as a parody of The Phil Silvers Show with Arnold Stang imitating Sgt Bilko’s voice for the titular character. Hanna-Barbera sold the cartoon to ABC based on a drawing of the main character. This was only the second cartoon series to premiere on prime time network television in the United States.
The title character, Top Cat (T.C.) (voiced by Arnold Stang) is the leader of a gang of Manhattan alley cats living in Hoagy’s Alley: Fancy-Fancy, Spook, Benny the Ball, Brain, and Choo-Choo.
Top Cat and his gang were inspired by the East Side Kids, roguish, street-smart characters from a series of 1940s B movies, but their more immediate roots lay in The Phil Silvers Show (1955–59), a successful military comedy whose lead character (Sergeant Bilko, played by Silvers) was a fast-talking con artist. Maurice Gosfield, who played Private Duane Doberman in The Phil Silvers Show, provided the voice for Benny the Ball in Top Cat, and Benny’s chubby appearance was based on Gosfield’s. Additionally, Arnold Stang’s vocal characterization was originally based on an impression of Phil Silvers’s voice. During the original network run, the sponsor objected to the Silvers impersonation—insisting that he was buying Arnold Stang, not Phil Silvers—so in later episodes Stang modified the Top Cat voice, to a closer tone of his own voice.
The gang constantly hatch get-rich-quick schemes through scams but most of them usually backfire, and a frequent plot thread revolves around the local police officer, Charles “Charlie” Dibble (voiced by Allen Jenkins), ineffectually trying to either arrest them, evict them from the alley, get them to clean the alley, or stopping them using the policebox phone.
Like The Flintstones, all the episodes feature a cold open, which is a small scene from the episode that takes place in medias res, and after that, a long flashback that leads to the scene begins with the series’ theme song The Most Effectual Top Cat and features Top Cat’s misadventures that happen before the scene from the beginning plays. The story then continues from where it left off. In some episodes, the flashback stops near the middle when the same scene plays.
Animation historian Christopher P. Lehman says that the series can be seen as social commentary. The cats may represent disenfranchised people confined to living in a poor environment. Top Cat’s get-rich-quick schemes are efforts to escape to a better life. The gang faces a human police officer who frustrates their efforts and keeps them trapped in the alley. This enforcement of the social order by police ensures that the cats will not escape their current living conditions. Co-creator Bill Hanna said it was one of the wittiest and most sophisticated shows he produced with a rare appeal to audiences of all ages.
Goober and the Ghost Chasers is an animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions, broadcast on ABC from September 8, 1973, to August 30, 1975. A total of 16 half-hour episodes of Goober and the Ghost Chasers were produced. The show’s episodes were later serialized as part of the syndicated weekday series Fred Flintstone and Friends in 1977–78. On cable, it was shown as part of USA Cartoon Express and on Boomerang starting in 2000.
Like many animated television programs created by Hanna-Barbera in the 1970s, the show contained a laugh track created by the studio. Cartoon Network and Boomerang airings of the show have the track muted.
Similar to Hanna-Barbera’s successful Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, Goober and the Ghost Chasers also features a group of teenagers Ted (voiced by Jerry Dexter), Gilly (voiced by Ronnie Schell) and Tina (voiced by Jo Ann Harris) solving spooky mysteries with their Saluki Goober (voiced by Paul Winchell). Writing for Ghost Chasers Magazine, the group uses their equipment from the Apparition Kit (like the Specter Detector, the Poltergeist Powder, etc.) when it comes to determining whether the ghost is real or not. The major differences were that the ghosts they eventually find are real and would help in defeating the fake ghosts. Some of those people behind the mask of some fake ghosts are not criminals. Goober had the power to become invisible (but could not control it) and his closest human companion is reckless instead of cowardly. Also unlike Scooby-Doo, Goober can speak more clearly, but speaks only to “break the fourth wall” with a comment aimed at the viewers; otherwise, he merely barks.
In eight of the first 11 episodes, the Partridge Kids (from The Partridge Family) were regular members of the cast, with their live-action counterparts voicing the parts. They disappear after the eleventh episode and did not appear when other guest stars appeared.
Daria is an American adult animated sitcom created by Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn. The series ran from March 3, 1997, to January 21, 2002 (5 seasons and 65 episodes), on MTV. It focuses on the title character, Daria Morgendorffer, an intelligent, cynical high school student.
It is a spin-off of Mike Judge’s earlier animated series, Beavis and Butt-Head, in which Daria appeared as a recurring character. Although Judge allowed the character to star in a spin-off, he had no involvement in the production of Daria himself, as he was busy working on King of the Hill.
In June 2019, MTV announced a Daria animated spin-off series, Jodie (originally Daria & Jodie), with actress Tracy Grandstaff voicing the titular character and serving as an executive producer. The network characterized the series as the first in multiple projected Daria animated spinoffs. In June 2020, Comedy Central announced it had picked up the spinoff series along with Beavis and Butt-Head. In May 2022, it was announced that Jodie would instead be an animated film.
Once Upon a Time… Man (French: Il était une fois… l’homme) is a French animated TV series from 1978 directed by Albert Barillé. It is the first in the Once Upon a Time… franchise. The series explains world history in a format designed for children. The action focuses around one group. The same familiar characters appear in all episodes as they deal with the problems of their time.
Once Upon a Time… Man was purchased by most public broadcasting channels in Europe (and in many other countries) and is well-known by a significant percentage of the population. The program is known for explaining events to children from different viewpoints as the main characters come from many civilizations. Despite its age, the number of factual errors is very low and most countries re-run the animated series every few years.
The series’ opening and ending title sequences famously used Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor as the main title theme music. Shortening the piece to only 2 minutes in length, the introduction uses the very beginning, which jumps into the start of the middle section and finally the dramatic ending to coincide with the destruction of Earth at the end of the intro.
The show aired in the United States on the History Channel starting in January 1996.
A DVD boxed set of all the episodes of the series was produced by the French production company Procidis, and distributed locally by various distributors. The DVD series was produced in French, English (not sold in the UK or U.S.), Finnish, German, Dutch, Hebrew, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish and Polish. In 2011, an English-language, Region 1 DVD box set was made available in Canada and the United States. The set was produced and distributed by Imavision.
The episodes of Once Upon a Time… Man typically would follow one family, which most typically used the same set of archetypes that would be reused for the scenario. These same characters would later be used in the later additions to the Once Upon a Time… series, with some changes.
Maestro (Roger Carel) – The wise old man. He usually serves as the head of the tribe, as a religious priest, as an advisor to the king, or as an inventor. Maestro's hair is white and so long that it completely covers his body, and only his facial features, arms, and feet are ever visible; he is also distinguished by two hairs on the top of his head that look like antennae. Maestro often keeps objects in his beard and is sometimes seen fiddling around in it to find the one he wishes to present. He also serves as a mentor to the children of the series.
Peter / Pierre Carel (Roger Carel) – Another protagonist of the series, with brown hair, presented as an ordinary but likeable man. He is always married to Pierrette and is good friends with Jumbo. He is sometimes referred to as Pierrot. In some of the episodes set in the medieval era, Peter has blonde hair and is named Bert, but his personality and relationships are the same.
Jumbo / Le Gros (Yves Barsacq) – The strong young man with red curly hair, Jumbo is tall, somewhat clumsy, and very muscular. He prefers to solve problems with his fists, and his best friend Peter often needs to indicate for him not to attack.
Pierrette (Annie Balestra) – A kind blonde woman, typically married to Peter.
The Pest / Le Teigneux (Claude Bertrand) – A strong bully and one of two common recurring villains in the series (the other being the Dwarf). He is the major rival opposing Peter and Jumbo, and is either working against them or arguing with them.
The Dwarf / Le Nabot (Patrick Préjean) – The mastermind behind the Pest, the Dwarf is short and has red hair with three spikes pointing upward. He is often the only one who supports the Pest in his actions, and is often shown as a swindler.
The Clock – A rectangular box with eyes and hands, typically colored red, the Clock most commonly simply shows the year that the events on-screen are occurring. Occasionally, the Clock does intervene in the series in a minor role, typically to either have some emotional response like surprise or sadness to an event on-screen, or else to correct Maestro in-series when he has ideas too advanced for his historical time period.
Although historical figures would typically appear as themselves, occasionally one of the archetypes would be used, like Maestro as Leonardo da Vinci.
Episodes: 1 “And Earth was created…” “(Et La Terre Fut…)” aired September 30, 1978 and deals with the evolution of life before Man to the Stone Age.
2 “Neanderthal Man” “(L’Homme Du Neanderthal)” aired October 7, 1978 and covers the time of Paleolithic culture to the Ice age.
3 “Cro-Magnon Man” “(Le Cro-Magnon)” aired October 14, 1978 and shows the history of Cro-Magnon culture.
4 “The Fertile Valleys” “(Les vallées fertiles)” aired October 21, 1978 and details the rise of agriculture, as well as ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Babylon and Israel.
5 “The First Empires” “(Les Premiers Empires)” aired October 28, 1978 and details the empires of Babylon, Assyria, Persia and others from about BC 2000 to BC 323.
6 “The Age of Pericles” “(Le siècle de Périclès)” aired November 4, 1978 and chronicles Ancient Greece.
7 “The Pax Romana” “(Pax Romana)” aired November 11, 1978 and focuses on the time of Julius Caesar, before the Pax Romana commenced. In the last part of this episode, the birth and life of Jesus Christ are told.
8 “The Conquest of Islam” “(Les conquêtes de l’Islam)” aired November 18, 1978 during the Byzantine Empire, the reign of Justinian I (reigned 527–565), and the spread of Islam between the 7th and 8th centuries.
9 “Carolingians” “(Carolingens)” aired November 25, 1978 and features the Carolingian Empire.
10 “The Age of Vikings” “(L’âge des Vikings)” aired December 2, 1978 and chronicles the Vikings times.
11 “The Cathedral Builders” “(Les bâtisseurs de cathédrales)” aired December 9, 1978 and focuses on the Middle Ages in the time of the Crusades.
12 “The Travels of Marco Polo” “(Les Voyages De Marco Polo)” aired December 16, 1978 and told the history of Marco Polo.
13 “The Hundred Years’ War” aired December 23, 1978 chronicles to the end of the Hundred Years’ War.
14 “The Quattrocento” “(Le Quattrocentro)” aired December 30, 1978 told the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
15 “The Golden Age of Spain” “(Le siècle d’or espagnol)” aired January 6, 1979 and chronicled the history of the Spanish Golden Age. This episode was censored in Spain.
16 “Elizabethan England” “(L’Angleterre d’Élizabeth)” aired January 13, 1979 and focused mostly on the voyages of Sir Francis Drake.
17 “The Golden Age of the Low Countries” aired January 20, 1979 and told of the history of the Dutch Golden Age.
18 “The Great Reign of Louis XIV” aired January 27, 1979 and chronicled the history of Louis XIV.
19 “Peter the Great and his Times” “(Pierre le Grand et son époque)” aired February 3, 1979 and told the history of Peter the Great.
20 “The Age of Reason” aired March 3, 1979 and chronicled the history of the Age of Enlightenment.
21 “America” “(L’Amerique)” aired March 10, 1979 and told of the New World between 1492 and the American Civil War.
22 “The French Revolution” aired March 17, 1979 and detailed the history of the French Revolution.
23 “The Awakening of the People” aired March 24, 1979 chronicled the mid-nineteenth century and the development of railroad.
24 “The Belle Époque” aired March 31, 1979 and focused on the later decade of the nineteenth century, the development of automobiles and the twentieth century up to World War One.
25 “The Crazy Years” aired April 7, 1979 and chronicled the development of aviation, Roaring Twenties, Great Depression and World War Two.
26 “Once Upon a Time… the Earth (and tomorrow?)” “(Il était une fois… la terre (Et demain?)” aired April 14, 1979.
The Adventures of Tintin (French: Les Aventures de Tintin) is a series of 24 bande dessinée albums created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under the pen name Hergé. The series was one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century. By 2007, a century after Hergé’s birth in 1907, Tintin had been published in more than 70 languages with sales of more than 200 million copies, and had been adapted for radio, television, theatre and film.
The series first appeared in French on January 10, 1929, in Le Petit Vingtième (The Little Twentieth), a youth supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century). The success of the series led to serialised strips published in Belgium’s leading newspaper Le Soir (The Evening) and spun into a successful Tintin magazine. In 1950, Hergé created Studios Hergé, which produced the canonical versions of 11 Tintin albums.
The series is set during a largely realistic 20th century. Its hero is Tintin, a courageous young Belgian reporter and adventurer aided by his faithful dog Snowy (Milou in the original French edition). Other allies include the brash and cynical Captain Haddock, the intelligent but hearing-impaired Professor Calculus (French: Professeur Tournesol), incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson (French: Dupont et Dupond), and the opera diva Bianca Castafiore.
The series has been admired for its clean, expressive drawings in Hergé’s signature ligne claire (“clear line”) style. Its well-researched plots straddle the action-adventure and mystery genres and draw upon themes of politics, history and technology, offset by moments of slapstick comedy.
The Adventures of Tintin (1991–92) was the more successful Tintin television series. An adaptation of twenty-one Tintin books, it was directed by Stéphane Bernasconi and was produced by Ellipse (France) and Canadian Nelvana on behalf of the Hergé Foundation. The series adhered closely to the albums to such an extent that panels from the original were often transposed directly to the screen. The series aired in over fifty countries and was released on DVD.