Around the first full week of April, Cartoon Network will be premiering their new series Adventure Time With Finn and Jake and from what I've seen from the sneak previews, it could be cartoon that helps bring Cartoon Network out of there slump ever since that whole CN Real debacle. Well for those of you who don't know or don't frequent YouTube, Adventure Time started out as a six minute short meant for a Nickelodeon animated variety show that never came into fruition. In fact, a lot of animated series in general start of as shorts. However, Cartoon Network's cartoons always seemed to originate in the forms of shorts. The What-a-Cartoon Show, a Cartoon Network animated variety show in the 90s, gave birth to shows like Dexter's Laboratory, Powerpuff Girls and Courage the Cowardly Dog as well as other Cartoon Cartoons that aired on the network during the late 90s-early 00s. A couple of other Cartoon Network series got green-lit thanks to shorts, but today I will be talking about a short that didn't quite make it. Today’s subject: A Kitty Bobo Show.
Before I get into the short itself, let me go into how the short appeared on Cartoon Network. Back in 2000, the What-a-Cartoon Show had been off the air for awhile so Cartoon Network decided to organize a summer event where they would show cartoon shorts and the viewers would get to vote online for which short would get made into a cartoon series. This was known as the Big Pick and the Big Pick helped introduce to the world The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy series as well as the short-lived Sheep in the Big City and the EXTREMELY short-lived Whatever Happened to Robot Jones?. So that event was so successful in getting ratings, they did it again in 2001 with the Big Pick 2. The event kicked off on August 24 with the premier of last year's winner Billy and Mandy (then known as Grim and Evil) and continued showing the pilots they premiered over the summer along with episodes of Courage the Cowardly Dog, Ed, Edd n Eddy and such.
One of these cartoon pilots that premiered during the summer was A Kitty Bobo Show, created by Kevin Kaliher. The pilot can be viewed here:
For those of you who do not have the time or desire to watch the above pilot, here's a brief summary. The short centers around Kitty Bobo, a teenage cat who has just gotten his own cell phone and is pretty much annoying his friends to call him on it just so he can appear cool. In the end, he ends up breaking it in a freak accident (i.e. texting while biking) and irony ensues when his friends get their own cell phones and he's left without one.
Looking back on this show that never was, it’s kind of disappointing that never did grace the airwaves. For one thing, I found the art style to be amazing and (dare I say) unique for its time. It sort of had a combination of traditional, Flash and cut-out animation. It really did fit in with the whole urban setting the show took place in. In fact, according to a promotional poster for the show, the animators would have the characters were different outfits (subverting the whole limited wardrobe trope). Another thing I liked about this show was the characters. The main characters had the personalities of people you hang out with: the wannabe, the laid-back voice of reason, and the stoic guy who rarely speaks ect.
Now it does have some drawbacks. For one thing, some of the writing is pretty dated since it came out less than a decade ago. Some of Kitty Bobo's slang can be particularly grating, but it can be justified because, believe it or not, words like "homies" and "honeys" were once cool. That, or it could just exemplify how desperate Kitty Bobo is to be cool.
I do kind of wish this show got on to Cartoon Network. A Kitty Bobo Show actually got second place in the Big Pick 2, running up to Codename: Kids Next Door. In fact, from what I've heard, a lot of the animators in CN Studios at the time saw real potential in the show and it got a positive response on most animation forums. So if it was a fan and professional favorite, why didn't it become a series?
In fact, around 2006-2007, Kevin Kaliher posted on his blog that he had plans to revive A Kitty Bobo Show. He sort of filled in the gaps in the pilot like why Kitty Bobo's parents were dogs and such. Sadly, according to his blog, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel and Cartoon Network didn't accept his pitches so A Kitty Bobo Show was shelved once again, this time maybe permanently. So only time will tell if Kaliher decides to try again a third time to get this show of the ground.
So that's A Kitty Bobo Show, a short that had great potential, but never got the chance. On the other hand, who knows? Maybe during the Cartoon Network Upfront on April 21, it may be surprise series. Though even I, a fairly wide-eyed idealist, know that there are better chances of Jimi Hendrix descending from Heaven on a cyborg unicorn than that happening, an animation fan can dream can't he?
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