Arthur (TV series)

This article is about the series. You may be looking for the character.

Logo from opening theme song

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Arthur is a Canadian-American animated educational children's television program. It is based on a book series of the same name, created by Marc Brown in 1976. Brown himself, as well as some of his family, has been heavily involved in the show's production. The TV series debuted on October 7, 1996 on PBS, making it the longest-running animated children's television series as of 2022. On July 27, 2021, it was announced that the final season of the series would air in 2022. The final episodes aired on February 21, 2022, which marked the end of the original broadcast run of the series on PBS; however, reruns will continue thereafter. It has won numerous awards, including several Emmys, the George Foster Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting, and a BAFTA.

Arthur was the second longest-running American animated series after The Simpsons until 2023, when it was surpassed by adult cartoon South Park with the premiere of its Season 26.

Educational objectives

Aimed at viewers between the ages of 4 and 8, Arthur's goal is to help foster children's interest in literature and to encourage positive social skills. Each episode follows an anthropomorphic 8-year-old aardvark named Arthur Read and his family and friends through engaging, emotional stories that explore issues faced by children, like bullying and losing baby teeth, while also addressing with more nuanced topics, such as cancer, bed-wetting, adoption, video game addiction, etc. It is a comedy that tells these stories from a child's point of view without moralizing or talking down. Situations on Arthur develop in realistic ways, and don't always turn out as people or Arthur and his friends might think.

Broadcast

The original broadcast run of Arthur in the United States on PBS lasted from October 7, 1996 to February 21, 2022. The series continues to air reruns during the daytime kids' block, as well as the PBS KIDS Channel. It has consistently earned high ratings on public television. PBS offers select episodes on the Arthur website for free, and many seasons are available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. There are over 100 countries around the world that air the program.

Production

Development

Development for the show started as early as 1993, when Carol Greenwald began working with Marc Brown to adapt his books to animation for public television. He had previously turned down several similar offers presented by other commercial networks.

In November 1994, Greg Bailey was hired as director.

After securing adequate funding grants from PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and The National Endowment for Children's Education Television, CINAR (later Cookie Jar Entertainment, which was acquired by DHX Media, now WildBrain) led production. The show was officially greenlit by WGBH in January 1995, and this initiated the production process including voice auditions, negotiations between CINAR and AKOM for animation work, and additional fundraising. The series debuted on PBS in October 1996.

In 2012, the production of the series shifted from Cookie Jar Entertainment to 9 Story Media Group and finally Oasis Animation. It was a co-production of WGBH throughout the duration of the show.

Animation

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The first eleven seasons of Arthur were animated by a South Korean animation studio, AKOM Productions. Pre-production frames (drawings on paper) were sent from CINAR in Canada to South Korea and were polished, colored and fully animated with watercolor backgrounds. The finalized animation was sent back to CINAR in tapes to be edited with vocals and music. The fully completed episode was sent to WGBH and home media distributors such as Random House in floppy disks to be released to the public via television airings on PBS stations and VHS/DVD releases respectively.^{[citation needed]}

The first season of Arthur started production in May 1995 with the episode "D.W.'s Imaginary Friend," being the first episode produced.^{[citation needed]} The animation was achieved using the traditional and widely used at the time, cel technique in which animated characters and objects are hand drawn using ink on one side and colored using paint on the other, frame by frame. A professional camera would them be used to capture all the cels in a sequence similar to stop motion. The cels are deposited over watercolor backgrounds when being shot with a camera. To save time, sometimes heads or characters that are moving are drawn on a separate cels that are placed over the cel that contains the body or characters that are not required to move at the moment.

Specific movements and lip-syncing are timed in order for them to happen at the exact time according to the script however, with this season being a learning curve for all its production members, character reactions or movements can be accidentally delayed on top of other errors. Likely due to little reference material, rushed production timeline, and the inexperience of the crew members with producing an Arthur episode with its style not yet fully being realized, season one has many noticeable coloring errors and examples of characters being drawn off-model. The unique Arthur outline style was hard to master with animators having to hold the writing utensil a specific way in order to achieve it. It would later become an demand for Arthur characters to be animated realistically when it came to movement, many animation sequences would be rejected because they were "too cartoony." As a result of episodes being sent back for revision, Arthur episodes are premiered slightly out of order in accordance to production order.^{[citation needed]}

With Arthur being WGBH's first animated series and PBS' second fully animated show behind The Magic School Bus (which was not fully produced by them), the budget needed to produce the 30 episodes season of Arthur was underestimated with production cost going over the budget. Money had to be made back through merchandise.^{[citation needed]}

For the first fifteen seasons, the show used traditional hand-drawn animation, with only the coloring done digitally. Beginning with the sixteenth season, the show was created using digital computer animation software, such as Flash and Toon Boom. This also coincided with widescreen, high-definition broadcasts on PBS (where available), though this 16:9 option had been available in some non-U.S. markets since Season 12.

Music

The first season prominently uses music from an unknown banjo composer who, according to crew member Peter Huggan in an online interview, "lives quite well off the royalties from Arthur." The banjo music is reminiscent of a farm which accompanies the theme of every character being an animal in the show, but would be used less in later seasons. Examples of royalty free stock music cues were also most common in season 1. Canadian composer Raymond C. Fabi (also referred to as Ray Fabi) became the main composer of the show and got his start in the first season composing demos of cues that could be altered in usage depending on the scene. The cues by Fabi are more piano-heavy. Fabi composed additional freestyle jazz demos, which were introduced in the second second and used throughout the remainder of the show.

The flashback cue and how it would be used in the show was realized by the end of the first season. The first version sounded more generic and was phased out and replaced by its higher pitch counterpart by the end of the season. Only the higher pitch cue was used for the remainder of the show starting with season 2.

End of production

The final season of Arthur was part of a production contract between PBS, WGBH and Oasis Animation, which was announced in 2018 and included production services for the final four seasons of the show (Seasons 22, 23, 24 and 25, in addition to the specials "The Rhythm and Roots of Arthur," "An Arthur Thanksgiving" and "Arthur's First Day"). Production of the television series ended in 2019. The episodes and specials resulting from this deal were aired on a periodic, staggered release schedule from 2019 to 2022.

Following the broadcast of the final episode in February 2022, Greenwald and Brown explained to the Hollywood Reporter that the final season was intentionally planned as the series' end. The decision to end the television show with twenty-five seasons was a collective agreement among many members of the production team, including Brown, Greenwald, head writer Peter Hirsch, and director Greg Bailey. Brown elaborated further:

"We had thought about this a few years ago, and we thought we still had ideas and stories to do, but wouldn’t 25 years be a nice number that we could end with? We agreed because we’ve done over 600 stories for kids, and those are subjects that will not be dated anytime soon. They’ll continue to be helpful to kids for many years on PBS. They haven’t closed the door in that way. The other thing that helped us make this decision was that we have new ways to talk to kids with a podcast, [and] with games that kids can play that are educational. PBS has left the welcome mat out for us to do spots on PBS that deal with important subjects that are more timely, so we can jump in with these characters that are familiar to kids and talk about important issues that they’re dealing with at any given time." – Marc Brown

Despite this, there was some apparent opposition to ending the show. In the Finding D.W. podcast by Jason Szwimer, series writer Kathy Waugh expressed concern that PBS had made a mistake in concluding the series; she believed the show is "evergreen" and could go on forever.

Although the television series is no longer in production, new Arthur content continues to be produced, including digital shorts, online games, and The Arthur Podcast.

Episodes

Main article: List of episodes

Season		Episodes	Originally aired
			Season premiere	Season finale
	1	30	October 7, 1996	November 15, 1996
	2	20	October 20, 1997	April 17, 1998
	3	15	November 16, 1998	January 1, 1999
	4	10	October 4, 1999	October 18, 1999
	5	10	September 25, 2000	November 27, 2000
	6	10	September 24, 2001	November 26, 2001
	7	10	October 8, 2002	November 29, 2002
	8	10	September 15, 2003	December 26, 2003
	9	10	December 27, 2004	April 8, 2005
	10	10	May 15, 2006	May 26, 2006
	11	10	June 25, 2007	September 7, 2007
	12	10	October 6, 2008	April 24, 2009
	13	10	October 12, 2009	April 9, 2010
	14	10	October 11, 2010	April 28, 2011
	15	10	October 10, 2011	June 15, 2012
	16	10	October 15, 2012	May 10, 2013
	17	10	November 11, 2013	May 14, 2014
	18	10	September 29, 2014	September 10, 2015
	19	10	June 2, 2015	May 26, 2016
	20	7	October 10, 2016	June 1, 2017
	21	7	October 24, 2017	February 15, 2018
	22	4	May 13, 2019	May 16, 2019
	23	3	October 14, 2019	October 16, 2019
	24	3	March 8, 2021	March 10, 2021
	25	4	February 21, 2022

Meta references

The characters in Arthur are self-aware that they are on television. For example, in many opening scenes, Arthur narrates to the audience. The opening theme song also features D.W. flipping through an Arthur book, and then seeing him on television.

Characters have referred to members of the cast and crew in Arthur, such as Buster saying, "Roll the tape, Greg!" in "Crushed," referring to Greg Bailey, the director of the show.

Likewise, music from the series is known by the characters. In "Breezy Listening Blues," Arthur hears a slowed down version of "Believe in Yourself" and says, "I've heard this somewhere." In "D.W., Dancing Queen," Binky quotes lines from the same song. When D.W. asks if he made it up, Binky replies, "No, I heard it somewhere, but I can't remember where." As well as this, D.W. hums a few bars from the song in "Mom and Dad Have a Great Big Fight."

In the episode "The Making of Arthur," Arthur submits a one-minute video into a movie contest conducted by Matt Damon, and the conclusion of the episode suggests that Damon and Arthur begin filming the series opening intro theme song. This creates a paradox in which the creator's work is creating itself.

Trivia

• Arthur is notable for being the first daily television program to provide video description service for the sight-impaired starting in 1997.
• In total, there are 25 seasons consisting of 253 half-hour episodes and 7 one-hour specials. This collectively equates to an even 500 titled narrative stories.
• A spin-off series, Postcards from Buster, ran from 2004 to 2012.
• Although the television series has ended production, the franchise continues to thrive. As of 2023, The Arthur Podcast, which is based on the television episodes, is the most streamed podcast from PBS Kids.

Gallery

External links

• Official PBS Kids website
• Arthur on IMDb
• Arthur on Wikipedia