Generations of Canadian kids enjoyed the animated antics of raccoons Bert, Melissa and Ralph in the classic Canuck cartoon, and the show’s creator believes viewers are ready for a Raccoons reboot, 30 years after the show made its debut.
Originally running from 1985-1992 (and years after that in reruns), Raccoons is poised a comeback, says series creator Kevin Gillis in an interview with Canadian Press (as reported by Global News).
“I’d been thinking about it for the last four or five years but ended up spending a lot my time developing interactive authoring platforms,”; says Gillis, who went on to found Skyreader Media Inc.
“Part of what’s really driving me here is we’ve had so many people who grew up on Raccoons all over the world who’ve been saying, “Wow, I loved that show. It was great, it was fun, why don’t you do a new one?’ Because they’re all raising kids now,”; he says, adding that within the past few months he’s been approached with offers to purchase Raccoons.
“In the last three months I had two companies reach out to say they’d like to just buy it,”; he says. “And that made me think.”;
What he’s thinking about isn’t whether to revive the beloved cartoon franchise, but how best to do it.
“If I take Raccoons into a brand new relaunch, do I do the obvious and age it up?”; he asks. “Is it Raccoons 10 years later? Or is it ‘Baby Raccoons’ like Looney Tunes did, Muppet Babies did? What might work the best is just go back a little bit from when they first met and they were teenagers in school. Because the relationships would have been formed then.”;
The show’s international success — “We were very fortunate we ended up in 180 countries around the world,”; Gillis adds — was unanticipated, and he credits bringing in comedians as writers to craft a multilayered show that could be enjoyed by both kids and their parents.
“I ended up hiring a lot of comedians to write and that brought an irreverence to the series. It was fun, it was funny, but at the same time it was very poignant and it wasn’t in-your-face didactic. We tried to have good clean fun.”
