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 a kind and smart teenage girl named Alaina Gleen and her imaginary friend Max Hat, living in the 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, so Alaina & Max, along with their other friends, must team up to stop Professor Higgins' plans

Thalia Ward created the title character for an unpublished comic book series in 1986, and later reluctantly pitched the series to CBS as a Saturday morning cartoon in 1988. 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 21, 1994, then to Cartoon Network during their Cartoon Cartoon Fridays block, on July 23, 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 8, 2010, Fox Animation Studios 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: Summer Vacation in 2017 respectively.  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 mixed reviews from critics and came as a 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 26 new episodes that began airing on February 9, 2019.

## Production

### 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.

### Broadcast

#### 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)

#### 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)

#### Japan

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

*More coming soon!*

## Episodes

*Main article: List of Alaina Gleen episodes*

## Home media

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.