Productivity Killer!

Raincoaster has dredged up some less-than-repressed memories.

I never got Chez Héléne. I grew up in French Canada, where I assume it wasn't supposed to be needed, according the Parti Quebecois master plan. The hostess spoke almost entirely in French, but the audience crossed language lines. Shows you what kids are capable of when adults don't interfere, I suppose.

But while looking it up I found a few things from my own kidhood, and I'm too busy with work to write a real post (though it tempteth me greatly O Avid Fan, it doth!):

Bobino & Bobinette (also here).
It's weird. Having grown up with black and white TV, I don't remember the intro looking quite like that.

Nic 'n' Pic [WARNING: LOUD theme!] was a series which I actually saw in both English and French. And in colour, somewhere. We were one of the last families I ever knew to buy a colour television, but at the time I was young enough to watch these shows I knew only a few people who had télécouleur

But my heart belonged to Princesse Saphire. It was by Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and much of the body of classic "Japanimation", as it was known. Tezuka was a brilliant perfectionist, master of the form and of character development. His last film was a re-vision of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

I have remembered this theme and the swamp opening across an intervening umpty-ump years with astounding accuracy. Possibly it's due to the impact the show had on me.



I didn't speak French at all well when I was watching it, so I have no idea how many episodes I saw before I realized the main character was a girl (in my defence, a girl dressed as a boy--it was a law-of-inheritance issue).

I've loved tough chicks ever since.