Alaina Gleen (TV series)

Alaina Gleen is an American animated television series originally created by Thalia Ward for CBS. The first television series produced by Thalia Ward Productions for Fox Television Animation, it centers on an kind and smart teenage girl named Alaina Gleen, her imaginary friend Max Hat and her friends Jason Baxter and Lucy Ramirez, 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 wants 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Thalia Ward created the title character for an unpublished comic book series in 1987, and later reluctantly pitched the series to CBS as a Saturday morning cartoon in 1989.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 Fox Kids channel on May 22, 1993, then to Cartoon Network during their Cartoon Cartoon Fridays block, on July 2, 1999. It has been commercially successful, establishing the title character as the mascot of Thalia Ward Productions; it has spawned a successful franchise and adaptations into other media, such as comics and video games. The series ended on August 6, 2004 with a total of 12 seasons and 294 episodes, tying Alaina Gleen as the second longest-running American animated television series, behind The Simpsons. 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 an fourth film coming in 2021. An animated series based on the reboot films, titled Alaina Gleen's Adventures, premiered on Fox Family on September 23, 2016 and ended on May 18, 2018; it received heavily negative reviews from critics and came as a huge disappointment to most fans who were saddened that the show did not return to its original formula. Eventually in September 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 will premiere on April 3, 2020.

Premise
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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 was 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 (2003-2014, 2019-)
 * Cartoon Network (1999-2007)
 * Boomerang (2008-2016, 2018)
 * Telemundo (Latin American Spanish, 1995-2004, 2009-15)
 * Disney Channel (2019-)

Canada

 * YTV (English, 1993-2006, 2019)
 * Teletoon (English/French, 1998-2011)
 * Teletoon Retro (English/French, 2008-2018)
 * 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 (1995-2002)
 * Disney Channel (2019)
 * RTÉ2 (2001-2010, 2019)

Italy

 * Italia 1 (1993-2006, 2019)

Japan
More coming soon!
 * NHK (1994-2006)
 * Fuji TV (1999-2002)
 * TV Tokyo (2019)

Original cancellation
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Disney Channel and Fox Family revival
On September 6, 2018, it was announced that Fox had picked up the show for 24 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.

Ratings
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Critical reception
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Awards and nominations
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Legacy
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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 2009. From there on, Shout made a plan to put out the final seven seasons in 2010. Season 7 saw a release in April 2010, followed by Seasons 8, 9 and 10 in October 2010 and Seasons 11 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 2014, but Shout re-released the set in December 2017 in "shelf-friendly" packaging in five volumes.