Les Jules: Chienne de vie...

This is yet another cartoon whose only point of existence seems to be bother me. What I mean by that is that I LOVED it as a kid, but this is such a rare cartoon, that it is impossible to locate (a situation I'm sure many of us can relate to. But no, you have no idea of how hard this is to find).

For starters we have our very first problem with this toon: it was a co-production between France and Spain, but the people in charge of it thought that it would be a good idea NOT translate it to English (even when the UK was a few kilometers away AND was translated to Latin-Spanish). So yeah, anglophones would not see this unless they happened to have a foreign channel in their cable operator. Good start, right? (Just to prove how bad this decision was, the English Wikipedia doesn't have a page for the show, while that exists in the Spanish AND French wikis).

Our second problem comes from another complete set of weirdness: this cartoon was released in 1997, but looks like it was made in the late 70s (at best). I'm not kidding, check out the intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUF36r0sftU And I think that what had always shocked me the most about this is that Cartoon Network Latin-America aired this RIGHT BEFORE Tintin (they even got to appear together a couple of times, co-starring some bumpers for the channel), making it EVEN MORE EVIDENT that the show couldn't hold up with the present standards. So, in between all of the above and the fact that there only were 27 episodes (one of which that apparently never got translated into any other language than French) it’s getting quite obvious why this cartoon it’s so darn hard to find... and that bothers me because IT WAS GOOD.

Some of the entries were really funny, and the rest would make use of some plot lines that were not common even then (at the peak of the 90s animation). It just kept you guessing what was going to happen the entire time. And besides all of that, they had a really long cast that kept using over and over... its been a long time since I watched an entire episode of this but -aside for the main duo- I think they all pretty much shared the same amount of screentime.

And I wanna stop for a minute to make a point here: There are cartoons like Urikupen Kyujotai (another one of my all-time favorites) that were shown to death, but nobody remmebers becuase it was never really popular, and then there is something like «Les Jules: Chienne de vie...», which was really good and seems to have a cult following, but was pretty much neglected at the time (whose idea was to air it that late at nite... as in the AM?). This is a cartoon that is obscure for all the wrong reasons, man.

I don't know if I ever gonna find an episode of this (somebody must have it recorded on a dusty VHS tape, I would bet money on it) but the fact that that is because a streak of bad decisions rather than because the show was bad and nobody liked it it's what bothers me about it.

Well, now you know about it. And therefore my job is done.

First posted here: http://80scartoons.net/forum/viewtop...?p=26153#26153