A Kitty Bobo Show
Created by
  • Kevin Kaliher
  • Meaghan Dunn
Written byMeaghan Dunn
Directed by
  • Meaghan Dunn (art)
  • Kevin Kaliher (animation)
Voices of
ComposerClay Morrow
Country of originUnited States
Original languageEnglish
Production
Cinematography
Running time7–8 minutes
Production companyCartoon Network Studios
Original release
NetworkCartoon Network
ReleaseAugust 17, 2001 (2001-08-17)

A Kitty Bobo Show is an American animated pilot created by Kevin Kaliher and Meaghan Dunn, and produced by and for Cartoon Network Studios (Cartoon Network). The pilot revolves around the eponymous character, Kitty Bobo (Dante Basco), as he tries to prove his coolness to his friends.

The premise is roughly based on Dunn's life as a Korean adoptee, and the main character had previously been featured in a comic strip by Dunn titled Kimchi Girl. The pilot aired on August 17, 2001, on the network as part of their Big Pick competition, a marathon of ten pilots with viewers selecting one to be produced for the network's fall 2002 season; the series lost second place to Codename: Kids Next Door.

Synopsis

The pilot episode is titled "Cellphones".

Kitty Bobo is riding the subway to Pochee's Diner, where his friends, Paul Dog, Maggie and Monkey Carl, are waiting for him. Outside the dinner, Kitty Bobo pretends to talk to someone on his new cell phone to make his friends jealous. Once inside, boasts about it, shows off his ringtone, "The Kitty Bobo Kool Kustom Ringer Song", and refuses to reveal where he got the phone from. Maggie tells Kitty Bobo that everyone has a cellphone, but Paul corrects her: "Everyone, except us."

Maggie asks her friends to go to the movies with her. Paul and Monkey Carl say they cannot, and Kitty Bobo is still on his phone. Maggie, angry about her friend's distraction, grabs Kitty Bobo and drags him into the movie theater. She is excited for the movie, "Blood Sucking Babies", as she has been waiting all summer to see it. Kitty Bobo's cell phone rings in the theater. Maggie, angry with Kitty Bobo, tells him to turn off the phone, since they're at the movies. He puts it on vibrate mode. However, the cellphone continues to vibrate throughout the movie. Maggie slaps him and his phone flies out of his pocket. He runs to the front of the theater to get it, and answers his phone in front of the screen. Everybody gets angry and throws food at him, and he is kicked out of the theater.

That night, Kitty Bobo meets up with Paul, again. Kitty Bobo tries to prove that he is cooler than Garfitti, since he has a phone. He calls Paul through a payphone and tells Garfitti, that's his honey. When he thinks Garfitti walked away, he tells Paul that the plan worked, even though Garfitti hears them, and hits Paul away from the phone and calls Paul "Honey." He gets on Paul's payphone, and talks to Kitty Bobo, telling that he is there with his Honey. He also tells Kitty Bobo that he will never be cool even if he has a cell phone.

The next morning, while on his bike, Kitty Bobo calls Maggie and tells her that he is downtown. Maggie tells him to stop talking about his cellphone and makes plans to meet up with him later in the day. He calls Paul and also makes plans to meet up with him at Pochee's. He texts Monkey Carl, who asks Kitty Bobo what he's doing. He tells Monkey Carl that he is just being cool, but since he's not watching the road he accidentally rides into a construction site and crashes his bike through the wall. He screams in horror when he realizes his cell phone is broken.

He goes to Pochee's Diner and tells his friends the bad news. He then realizes that almost everybody, including his friends, has a cell phone. The story ends with him, screaming in horror, again, as the camera zooms out to show everybody with cell phones.

Characters

  • Kitty Bobo (voiced by Dante Basco) – A 19–21-year-old brown cat, who is the main character, Kitty Bobo is always trying to be fashionable, act cool before others, and become popular. Nevertheless, his awkward attempts to do so and his lack of consciousness of the world around him, constantly bring embarrassment to him and his friends, mostly for Maggie who considers Kitty Bobo's clueless personality a real nuisance. Despite being a cat, Kitty Bobo was raised by a couple of dogs "Mr. and Mrs. Bobo" whom he has a typical parents-child relationship.
  • Maggie (voiced by Lela Lee) – A 19–21-year-old pink cat, who is one of Kitty Bobo's best and closest friends. Maggie is down-to-earth, moody, mature, hard to impress and somehow apathetic. Maggie is constantly annoyed by Kitty Bobo's awkward attempts to become cool and acts as the voice of reason in most of the cases. Nevertheless, despite Kitty's immaturity, Maggie might be somehow interested in Kitty Bobo, as Paul suggested by saying "You two have a good time", before She and kitty Bobo entered in a cinema alone. Maggie works in an office company; she loves horror movies and is a fan of punctuality.
  • Paul Dog (voiced by Chris Williams) – A 19–21-year-old dog, who is one of Kitty Bobo's best and closest friends. Paul is laid back, easy going, he likes to stay in his comfort zone and cares little for what others think of him. Just as Maggie, he is irritated by Kitty Bobo's awkwardness, but in contrast to Maggie he is willing to help Kitty Bobo in his plans to impress others.
  • Monkey Carl (voiced by Nick Jameson) – A 19–21-year-old monkey, who is one of Kitty Bobo's best and closest friends. Carl is lethargic, dispassionate, and the quietest of the group, but is constantly surprised by Kitty Bobo's lack of judgment. He likes computers and staying at home, he also has a very curious accent.

Production

Concept art by Meaghan Dunn, featuring the main characters (see image details for character identification).

A Kitty Bobo Show was created by Kevin Kaliher and Meaghan Dunn; both were married as well as Korean adoptees.[1][2] Kaliher graduated from the California Institute of the Arts and was hired by Cartoon Network to work as a storyboard artist on Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls. Dunn, an adoptee of American-Jewish parents, based the main character on her life experiences as an immigrant. In years prior to making the pilot, she had started a nonprofit organization for helping adopted children locate their biological parents.[3] The character of Kitty Bobo had also been featured a comic strip by Dunn titled Kimchi Girl, which had been published in Korean Quarterly since its inception in 1997.[4] Kaliher felt much of the impetus for the pilot came while searching for his birth family in Korea.[1] However, Dunn later remarked that the pilot "had nothing to do with" her life.[5]

The pilot was optioned by The Walt Disney Company before being turned down.[5] Cartoon Network first approached Dunn in Los Angeles, then a comic shop employee. The network, impressed by her work in independent comics, which had spread through word of mouth, landed her a job at Cartoon Network Studios, and a few years later, she and Kaliher produced the pilot.[3]


Broadcast and reception

A Kitty Bobo Show aired on August 17, 2001, on Cartoon Network as part of their Big Pick competition, a marathon of ten pilots with viewers selecting one to be produced for the network's fall 2002 season. More than 200,000 votes were cast during the marathon, with 50,000 more being entered online. The pilot earned second place, losing to the pilot episode of Codename: Kids Next Door.[6]

Editors of KoreAm reported that Korean-American adoptees would be able to see a reflection of themselves in the pilot.[1] In a retrospective review of the show, Amid Amidi of the animation entertainment blog Cartoon Brew wrote that, relative to pilots produced by the network, Kitty Bobo had "some potential".[7] He regarded its color styling and "appealing design" to be most memorable, while recalling it to have "decent storytelling" as well.[7] Also writing retrospectively, Adam Finley of AOL TV, stated that, while "not side-splitting by any means," the pilot contained a few comedic elements.[8] He praised the art style, contrasting it from other Cartoon Network programming. He ultimately opined that the short did not deserve to win, but that it would provide "a little more variety in style" for the network.[8]

Legacy

A storyboard for the second episode had been fully produced and completed in 2002, and it was ordered by Cartoon Network itself; in its plot Kitty Bobo is kicked out of his home and moves in with Monkey Carl (he proves to be a poor guest). Had the series been picked up, A Kitty Bobo Show would be the first to have a woman as a creator and showrunner (before Julie McNally Cahill as co-creator of My Gym Partner's a Monkey, Rebecca Sugar as sole creator of Steven Universe and Julia Pott as the creator of Summer Camp Island).[3] Dunn divorced Kaliher in 2005 and moved to the East Coast along with her daughter to work as creative director for a 3D pharmaceutical studio in Baltimore.[5] In fall of 2005, Kaliher pitched to Walt Disney Television Animation a pilot's revised version, with the characters a bit younger.[9] Kaliher released a 50-page bible in 2006, exploring the Kitty Bobo's universe in more depth.[7] Kaliher has since left the animation industry to pursue a career in software development.

Dunn returned in August 2010 to her hometown of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to start her own animation and graphic-design company named Dunnamic.[5] Following a stream of strictly commercial work, she created an idea for another animated series titled Chloe and the Stars. Dunn kept files from her work at Cartoon Network on a hard drive, which needed to be repaired before they could be retrieved. With her company no longer a startup, she and her employees developed the final designs for the characters of Chloe and the Stars and storyboarded its pilot. Upon receiving an animatic of the pilot, Frederator Studios agreed to donate and promote the series on Kickstarter.[3] As a perk for donating $75 or more to the series, backers would have receive the storyboard for the second episode of Kitty Bobo.[10] It was later promoted as a "Staff Pick" on the website.[11] However, it only made $11,623 out of its $35,000 goal. Dunn moved the project to Indiegogo but it made even less money than on Kickstarter since it made $831 out of its $10,000 goal.[12]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Adoptees relate to cartoon image". San Francisco Chronicle. Hearst Communications. August 26, 2001. Archived from the original on August 19, 2014. Retrieved May 23, 2014.
  2. ↑ Checker, Melissa; Fishman, Maggie (2013). Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America. Columbia University Press. p. 228. ISBN 978-0231502429.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "Kickstarter Spotlight: Dunnamic's Chloe and the Stars: A Show 13 Years in the Making". Comics Bulletin. August 14, 2014. Archived from the original on August 19, 2014. Retrieved August 19, 2014.
  4. ↑ "Korean quarterly". Korean Quarterly. 1997. ISSN 1536-156X. OCLC 38838808 – via WorldCat.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Mastrull, Diane (October 31, 2011). "Doylestown woman follows her dream in animation—and her own studio". Philly.com. Philadelphia Media Network. Archived from the original on August 19, 2014. Retrieved May 23, 2014.
  6. ↑ DeMott, Rick (August 28, 2001). "Kids Next Door Wins The Big Pick On Cartoon Network". Animation World News. Animation World Network. Archived from the original on August 19, 2014. Retrieved May 23, 2014.
  7. 1 2 3 Amidi, Amid (August 23, 2006). "Kitty Bobo Resurrected". Cartoon Brew. Archived from the original on August 19, 2014. Retrieved May 23, 2014.
  8. 1 2 Finley, Adam (January 5, 2007). "A Kitty Bobo Show—Video". AOL TV (US ed.). AOL Inc. Archived from the original on August 19, 2014. Retrieved May 23, 2014.
  9. ↑ "a kitty bobo rework for Disney". Archived from the original on 2015-10-06.
  10. ↑ "Chloe and the Stars". Kickstarter. August 5, 2014. Archived from the original on August 19, 2014. Retrieved August 18, 2014.
  11. ↑ Gutelle, Sam (August 12, 2014). "Fund This: Chloe And The Stars Seeks $35,000 To Go out of This World". Tubefilter. Archived from the original on August 19, 2014. Retrieved August 18, 2014.
  12. ↑ "Chloe and the Stars". Archived from the original on 2015-09-28. Retrieved 2015-09-13.

Further reading

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