The Legend of Calamity Jane

Salix Babylonika

This show is the exact right amount of stupid and incredibly awesome to appeal to my sensibilities. Maybe it'll appeal to yours, too.

Some background:

The Legend of Calamity Jane was an animated television series produced by Canal+ and France 3. The series followed the adventures of Calamity Jane in Deadwood, South Dakota. The episode "I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia" takes place during the opening of the Centennial Exposition, establishing the shows as being set in 1876. The series was gritty and had a very European animation style. It aired in France and Canada from 1997 to 1998 and in Portugal in 2002.

In the United States, three episodes were aired on The WB in 1997.[1] The network gave the series heavy promotion, but they quietly pulled it from their line-up after only three weeks. No reason was ever given (although the show's violence was the most likely plausible explanation). It was stated on Warner Bros.' website that the show would return later in the year,[2] and that Superman: The Animated Series would be filling in for its timeslot,[3] but this proved to be untrue.[1]

Basically, most people think the series was yanked due to the fact that for a Saturday morning kids' cartoon it's real fuckin' violent. Someone nearly gets hanged in the first five minutes of the show and everybody--hero and villain--has extremely realistic revolvers, shotguns, and rifles. It's not hard to imagine that this elicited some complaints from parental watch groups.

I've only seen the first episode (out of just 13 that were ever made) so far but I adore it despite not really being into westerns, hopefully you'll like it too.

As a side note, there seems to be some disagreement about the exact intended order of the episodes. Wikipedia lists "As Easy As 1, 2, 3" as the fourth episode, but Rotarydialz' episode uploads have it as the second, so who knows?

Crystal

Looks my style.

Haven

Huh. I remember the commercials but never saw the show.

Salix Babylonika

No time like the present!

Rotarydialz' uploads have been up since 2010 so I'm thinking that whoever was behind the cartoon (I can't seem to find any info on who actually made it. Maybe Anonus would know?) no longer cares about the copyright. Thankfully.

The copying is somewhat imperfect (there's clipped bits of commercials strewn about and the first episode cuts to black a few seconds before it seems like it's supposed to, just as an example) and seems to be ripped from a VHS tape but IMO that kinda just adds to the experience.

Incidentally, this shit aired directly after Pinky & The Brain. Talk about a mood whiplash.

Get it cuz Jane uses a whip

Salix Babylonika

calling @Anonus I think u might find this interesting

Tre

Seems interesting enough. I briefly wondered what this was when looking at some of KWB's old print ads a while back, but I was a two-year-old when it aired so I don't really remember it from my childhood.

As far as kids' shows of the era go, the tone of it is very ahead of its time -- definitely might have been more at home on post-2008 Cartoon Network (maybe during their 'You Are Here' days) than late 90's Kids' WB.

Salix Babylonika

Honestly I think you'd have a hard time getting this on the air even now.

Hanging is not generally a subject broached in cartoons.

Salix Babylonika

Also people would get pissed about Jane correcting white people a handful of times in this episode alone.

Anonus

One of the reasons The WB canned the show is because the Kids' WB! block was generating low ratings at the time, and this show was an easy casualty because Warner Bros. didn't own it. The same was the case with the Jim Henson Company's B.R.A.T.S. of the Lost Nebula. It was more a victim of network politics than anything.

Salix Babylonika

Huh, interesting.

Salix Babylonika

do you have any idea who made the thing? That I can't seem to find anywhere.

Anonus

Nobody seems to know, and these uploads irritatingly lack the show's end credits, which doesn't help.

Salix Babylonika

Peculiar.

Anonus

as for who owns the show, it's entirely possible that the copyright is not held by any one company

independent, foreign animation studios (even ones as prominent as Cinar/Cookie Jar and Nelvana once were) often have to get financing from co-production partners and give up certain territorial rights to them in return

everywhere I've looked says that the show was co-produced by Canal+ and France 3, but nothing about the animation productions. Some add Warner Bros. Animation, which I don't buy because this show uses a lot of computer shortcuts that they'd have the luxury of their service studios avoiding due to higher production values

Salix Babylonika

I think that last misconception is probably just because the whole thing looks vaguely Timmversey on a first glance.

Tre

TVT and an Animation Magazine interview with Jean Maccurdy (then president of Warner Bros. Animation) credit it to a mysterious animation studio by the name of Contre Allée:

“Ah, I’m very excited! It’s done almost like Batman, it is so cool! It has an interesting deal: We purchased it from a studio in France called Contre Allée which had developed the concept and did the initial design. It is a very small studio, so we were trying to put it together. We did the deal through Itel, which is a London distribution company, and we were trying to figure out how to do the actual pre-production and overseas production, so they’ve hired us to do it. It’s like this wonderful circle deal, with Warners Animation doing the pre-production and overseas production, and Contre Allée doing the script writing and design and post. We’ve finally found a heroine that I think boys will watch, too. It’s an animated Western. I’m very excited. Wait till you see Calamity Jane.”

No info seems to be available on any other work done by the studio, however.

Sredni Vashtar

I'd buy that it was made by a small French studio that folded or changed names soon after.

Salix Babylonika

A shame it never quite took off.

Anonus

>It was a show that launched in 1997 on Kids WB! (which, back then, stood for Warner Bros., not web browser).

oh goody, one of those "you kids today with your gizmos and doodads" lines

nobody uses "WB" to mean "web browser"

Salix Babylonika

But for srs tho the first episode was great.

I think I'll watch more tonight.

Salix Babylonika

Anonus said:

>It was a show that launched in 1997 on Kids WB! (which, back then, stood for Warner Bros., not web browser).

oh goody, one of those "you kids today with your gizmos and doodads" lines

nobody uses "WB" to mean "web browser"

Actually kinda incredible to me that anyone would even think that "wb" has been used--ever--as short for "web browser"

that's some like, someone holding a gun to your head and commanding you to invent a piece of millennial slang in ten seconds or less.

Section42L

If I were to mistake "WB" for anything, it would be "welcome back" not "web browser".