Alaina Gleen (TV series)

Alaina Gleen is an American animated children's television series originally created by Thalia Ward for CBS. The first television series produced by Thalia Ward Productions for 20th Television Animation, it centers on a kind and smart teenage girl named Alaina Gleen, her imaginary friend Max Hat and her friends Jason Baxter and Lucy Jones, living in the fictional town of Applewood, Colorado and parodies American culture and society. They try to live in a normal everyday life to occasionally prevent attacks from a professor named Hinkle Higgins and his henchmen who want to capture Max, so the gang must team up to stop Professor Higgins' plans.

Thalia Ward created the title character for an unpublished comic book series in 1987, and later reluctantly pitched the series to CBS as a Saturday morning cartoon in 1989. The network gave the staff a large amount of creative freedom, with the writers targeting both children and adults.

The series originally premiered on CBS on November 17, 1990, which led to a series of half-hour episodes, and was later moved to the Fox Kids block on February 6, 1993, then to Cartoon Network during their Cartoon Cartoon Fridays block, on July 9, 1999.

Alaina Gleen received wide critical acclaim throughout its first eight or nine seasons, which are generally considered its "Golden Age". It gained over 25 awards during its original run, including 5 Daytime Emmy Awards, 7 Kids' Choice Awards, with Time calling it "the best and funniest animated phenomenon of the 90s decade" and has been largely commercially successful; it has spawned a successful franchise and adaptations into other media, such as comics, toys, and video games. The series ended on August 13, 2004 with a total of 12 seasons and 295 episodes, tying Alaina Gleen as the second longest-running American animated television series, behind The Simpsons at that time. As a result of the show's popularity, a feature-length film, titled The Alaina Gleen Movie, was released into theaters on September 17, 2004, a month after the series finale.

On October 22, 2010, 20th Century Fox Animation released a computer-animated reboot film under the same name as a new incarnation of the original series; it was followed by two sequels, Alaina Gleen 2 in 2013 and Alaina Gleen: Imaginary Vacation in 2017 respectively with a fourth film coming in 2021. In May 2018, 20th Century Fox announced that Disney Channel and Fox Family had picked up the original series for 24 new episodes that began airing on February 8, 2019. The series has been renewed for a fourteenth season, which premiered on April 3, 2020. In addition, a direct-to-video crossover film featuring the Kate & Chris characters titled Kate & Alaina was released on both Blu-ray and Digital HD on September 24, 2019.

Premise
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Characters
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Development
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Writing
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Voice actors
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Animation
The series' first and second seasons were produced by Hanna-Barbera, and was produced in association with Wang Film Productions in Taiwan, Mr. Big Cartoons in Australia, and Fil-Cartoons in the Philippines. However, due to difficulties with the animation studios, production was switched from Hanna-Barbera to Klasky-Csupo for the third and fourth seasons. By season 5, co-founder Gabor Csupo wanted to have one producer to oversee the animation; Ward refused; and production was switched to Film Roman and Rough Draft Studios for the remainder of the series run.

Music
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United States

 * CBS (1990-93)
 * Syndication (1993-2005)
 * Fox Kids (1993-2002; reruns from 1999)
 * Fox Family (2005-2018, 2019-)
 * Cartoon Network (1999-2007)
 * Telemundo (Latin American Spanish, 1995-2004, 2009-2012)
 * Disney Channel (2019-)

Canada

 * YTV (English, 1991-2000, 2019-)
 * Teletoon (English/French, 2000-2008)
 * Fox Family (English, 2020-)
 * Disney Channel (English, 2019-)
 * Teletoon Retro (English/French, 2008-2015)
 * CBC/Radio-Canda (1992)

Latin America & Brazil

 * ZAZ (1994)
 * Cablin (1993-94)
 * Chilevision (1995-98)
 * Canal 5 (1998-2005, 2012, 2019-)
 * Magic Kids (1997-2006)
 * Rede Globo (2000-2007, 2019)

Spain

 * Canal+ (1995-2003)
 * Clan TVE (2006-2010, 2019-)

France

 * Gulli (2005-2012, 2019-)

United Kingdom & Ireland

 * CITV (1993-98)
 * Channel 4 (1998-2006)
 * Pop (2008-09)
 * Nicktoons (2019)
 * Fox Kids (1996-2002)
 * Disney Channel (2019-)
 * RTÉ2 (2001-2010, 2019-)

Italy

 * Italia 1 (1993-2006, 2019-)

Japan
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 * NHK (1994-2006)
 * Fuji TV (1999-2002)
 * TV Tokyo (2019-)

Airing on Cartoon Network
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Original cancellation
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Disney Channel and Fox Family revival
On August 17, 2018, after years of rumors, speculation and outcry that the original series would come back to television, it was announced that Fox had picked up the show for 26 new half-hour episodes that will begin airing simultaneously on February 8, 2019 on both Fox Family and Disney Channel (following the Disney acquisition of Fox). A smaller writing crew will return. Thaila Ward announced that the original cast (Catherine Cavadini, Tom Kenny, Jason Marsden, Jodi Benson, Jim Cummings, Billy West, Dan Castellaneta, Jeff Bennett, Charlie Adler, and Kath Soucie) would be returning for the new episodes.

When the revival of Alaina Gleen aired February 8, 2019, on Fox Family, it helped the network to its highest-rated day in 2019 and its highest-rated Friday nighttime in the network's history. The revival aired on Disney Channel the next day. In May 2019, it was announced that Alaina Gleen had been renewed for a fourteenth season, consisting of at least 23 episodes, scheduled to air in spring 2020. The first episode of season 14 premiered on April 3, 2020.

Ratings
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Critical reception
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Awards and nominations
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Controversy
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Legacy
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Spin-offs
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Books
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Television films
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Theatrical films
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Direct-to-video crossover film
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Music
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Theme park attractions
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Other appearances in games
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Live performances
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Merchandise
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Home media
CBS/Fox Video released four videos of Alaina Gleen between 1993 and 1995. From 1996 to 2004, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released several VHS tapes of the series, each containing four episodes of the series.

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment later released the first two seasons on DVD in 2002 and 2004, but in April 2006, Fox gave Shout! Factory the rights to release the series. Season 3 was released that November, followed by season 4 in 2007. That same month, Shout announced that Season 4 would be released "sometime in 2006", but Shout delayed the release to an unknown date before finally releasing Season 4 in December 2007 and Seasons 5 and 6 in November 2008 and June 2009. From there on, Shout made a plan to put out the final six seasons in 2010. Season 7 saw a release in November 2009, followed by Seasons 8, 9, 10, and 11 in 2010 and 12 in February 2011, completing the entire series.

Following the DVD and Blu-ray release of the 2010 computer-animated reboot, Shout released a boxset containing all seasons of the show and a bonus disc. The set went out of print in October 2015 along with the season DVDs. On March 11, 2020, Disney and Fox announced that the complete series (including Season 13) of Alaina Gleen would be released for the first time on Blu-ray and a shelf-friendly DVD box set with the Blu-ray containing a new 1080p restoration and a remastered DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 audio remix on every episode of the show and was released on November 17, 2020 to commentate the 30th anniversary of the series.

As of April 2020, the show is available to stream on Disney+ in the United States and Canada.

Gallery
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