Our childhood witnessed many fictional animated series and TaleSpin was one of them. This animated series was about the famous character from The Jungle Book, Baloo. In this series, Baloo was a pilot in his own company Baloo’s Air Service in a fictional city called Cape Suzette situated in Usland (a fictional country too), where he met an orphan boy named Kit Cloudkicker. Kit was an air pirate and helped Baloo as a navigator. The story revolves around the strong relationship between these two.
Released on 5th May, 1990, this series lasted for only two seasons (65 episodes) and ended on 8th August, 1991. Like every animated series, TaleSpin has also some untold stories which are as follows:
- Phil Harris, who was the original voice of the Baloo from The Jungle Book was replaced by Ed Gilbert due to the age factor. He was called for the first voice over, but due to his age (85 years), he couldn’t deliver the same voice of Baloo as he did in The Jungle Book film (1967).
- Apart from Baloo, characters like Sher Khan and Louie were also taken from The Jungle Book. They got a little makeover through the new costumes.
- This series was a rush project, developed by Jymn Magon and Mark Zaslove on a short notice from Disney for the creation of a 30 minute animated series to fill up afternoon schedule. Though, this series was released in May, it became regular on channels from September 1990.
- Though the whole series was fictional, the aircraft Conwing L-16 (named Sea Duck) was a close resemblance of the real Fairchild C-82 transport and Grumman HU-16 amphibian.
- The status of the owner of Baloo’s air craft service Rebecca Cunningham was kept complicated. Initially, her relationship was supposed to be a divorcee, but the animators decided to leave on the audiences to assume her relationship status.
This Disney creation was one of the famous animated series of 1990s, which was later made into video games too. Disney also released its whole series in 3 volumes. The controversial episode “Flying Dupes” was also released in its 3rd volume, which wasn’t aired on the television.
These interesting fictional animations have persuaded many students to take animation as a career. In fact, the field of animation has become one of the most flourishing fields and opened up a number of job opportunities for the animators; be a part of this creative field by opting for animation courses offered by Hi-Tech Animation institute in Kolkata.
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