Madeline (TV series)

Did You Know?

• In 1960, the Madeline stories were adapted to a one-hour color episode for the NBC series The Shirley Temple Show, with Gina Gillespie as Madeline and Imogene Coca as Miss Clavel.
• The original 1988 special was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program (One Hour or Less).
• The theme song 'I'm Madeline' was reprised in each of the five subsequent specials after the first.

Cast and characters

The main character of the show is Madeline, a redheaded French girl who is kind, caring, and adventurous. Despite being the shortest in her group, she is also the bravest. She lives in a boarding school for girls in Paris, France, with eleven other students and their teacher, Miss Clavel. Tracey-Lee Smyth provided Madeline’s voice for the first season, while Andrea Libman voiced her in seasons two and three.

Miss Clavel, voiced by Louise Vallance, is the headmistress and educator who runs the school. She is a caring and wise mother figure to the girls, and she and her students say grace before every meal. In the very first episode, she famously rushed Madeline to the hospital in the middle of the night for an emergency appendix removal. The eleven other girls at the school are Anne, Chloe, Danielle, Ellie, Janine, Lulu, Monique, Nicole, Nona, Sylvie, and Yvette.

In the early seasons and specials, only Chloe, Danielle, and Nicole had major parts, but by the third season, all the girls became more vocal and active, each showing their own personality. Chloe was voiced by Vanessa King in seasons one and two, and by Veronika Sztopa in season three. Danielle was voiced by Kelly Sheridan in season one, Tracey-Lee Smyth in season two, and Chantal Strand in season three. Nicole was voiced by Kristin Fairlie in season one, Veronika Sztopa in season two, and Britt Irvin in season three.

Pepito, the son of the Spanish ambassador to France, lives next door to the school. Voiced by A.J. Bond in season one, David Morse in season two, and Michael Heyward or Kyle Labine in season three, he starts off naughty, mean, and spoiled, but soon becomes best friends with Madeline and the others. Genevieve, voiced by Louise Vallance, is the school’s pet dog, who was once a stray. Madeline is especially fond of her because Genevieve once saved her from drowning in the Seine River.

Lord Cucuface, voiced by French Tickner, is the administrator overseeing a chain of institutions that includes the girls’ school, and he is a close friend of Miss Clavel. The Narrator, voiced by Christopher Plummer in the specials and seasons one and two, and by Christopher Gaze in season three, appears in every episode to describe the action, often reading directly from the books.

Development

The first Madeline animated special aired on HBO on November 7, 1988, adapting Ludwig Bemelmans’ original book. Judy Rothman wrote the teleplay and later became a key writer, story editor, and lyricist for nearly all Madeline animated projects. DIC Enterprises and CINAR, now part of WildBrain, produced the special. Christopher Plummer narrated, with original music and songs by Joe Raposo, lyrics by Rothman and Howard Ashman.

The voice cast included Marsha Moreau as Madeline, Judith Orban as Miss Clavel, Julian Bailey as Pepito, Anik Matern as Chloe, Liz MacRae as Danielle, and Sonja Ball as Nicole. The special earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Animated Program. Its success prompted CINAR and France Animation to produce five more specials for The Family Channel, all adapted by Rothman from the remaining five books. The original cast and Plummer returned.

After Raposo’s death in 1989, Jeffrey Zahn composed the music for these specials, which each reprised the theme song “I’m Madeline.” The Family Channel then ordered a television series from DIC. Its first season ran 20 episodes from 1993 to 1994. Plummer again narrated, but most voice actors from the specials were replaced.

Each episode featured one song, written by various legendary songwriters, composers, and lyricists, plus the opening theme.

Episodes

The feature-length film Madeline: Lost in Paris came out on August 3, 1999, released by Buena Vista Home Video through Walt Disney Home Video. In it, Madeline gets tricked by a man claiming to be her "Uncle" Horst, and she learns what family really means. Andrea Libman, who voiced Madeline in the second and third seasons of the TV series, returned for this role. Shout!

Factory later put the film out on DVD on April 3, 2010. In 2002, DIC made another film as part of its Movie Toons series, called My Fair Madeline. Here, Madeline gets blamed for something she didn't do during a trip to the Louvre and gets sent to a finishing school in London, while she works to stop two thieves. Almost all the voice actors were swapped out for this one: Chantal Strand took over as Madeline, and Whoopi Goldberg played Miss Clavel.

It first aired on Nickelodeon on November 17, 2002, and later came out on VHS and DVD from MGM Home Entertainment, with additional international broadcasts on Disney Channel, Toon Disney, and Playhouse Disney. The last Madeline production ever made was a 2005 film called Madeline in Tahiti. Madeline and her friends head to Tahiti to keep Miss Clavel from retiring, with Pepito tagging along, and they also stop a bad guy from setting off the Tahiti-nui volcano.

Chantal Strand returned as Madeline, while other characters were recast or kept their voices from My Fair Madeline; notably, Ashleigh Ball voiced both Danielle and Nona. Walt Disney Home Entertainment planned to release it on DVD in the United States in 2006, but that never happened. It did get DVD releases in some other places in June 2007, and eventually became available in the U.S. on iTunes and Amazon Video in 2015, and on YouTube in 2019.

Home media releases

The initial 1993 series first appeared on single VHS tapes from Golden Book Video, while Sony Wonder handled both VHS and DVD releases, with each DVD typically pairing two episodes and occasionally including the original specials. For the 2000 series, Lions Gate Home Entertainment and Trimark Home Video issued VHS and DVD sets in 2001 and 2002; these DVD sets swapped the theme song for "Our Madeline" to align with the Sing-a-Long editions. In 2008, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment put out two DVDs, "Next Stop, America" and "Meet Me in Paris," each holding three episodes.

Shout! Factory followed in 2010 with five single-disc collections. Mill Creek Entertainment then released three single-disc sets in September 2013: "The New Adventures of Madeline - Adventures in Paris" (six episodes from the 2000 series), "Madeline's Merry Musical Melodies" (musical segments from the show), and "Bonjour Madeline" (all six original TV specials). These three discs were repackaged as a three-pack in May 2014, and in August 2015 Mill Creek issued "Madeline: The Complete Collection" on Region 1 DVD—a six-disc set containing all six specials from DIC Entertainment and CINAR (1988–1991) plus all 59 episodes from the 1993, 1995, and 2000–2001 series.

In 2001, DIC produced two direct-to-video sing-along releases, "Sing-a-Long with Madeline and her Friends" and "Sing-a-Long Around the World with Madeline," featuring songs and clips from season three. Lions Gate and Trimark originally distributed them on September 25, 2001, and March 25, 2002, respectively; Mill Creek later combined them as "Madeline's Merry Musical Melodies" on September 10, 2013, and they also became available for digital download.