Nico (TV series)
Nico (known as "Nicholas" in most non-Spanish-speaking countries) is a 2001 Spanish animated television series produced by BRB Internacional, Televisión Española and the National Organization of the Spanish Blind. The title character, Nico, is a boy that is blind. Blind people in the cartoon are usually referred to as "visually impaired" (invidente) regardless of how severe, or otherwise, their blindness is. The series raised awareness of progresses being made in cities as they became more blind-friendly. It also educated children about blind people. Characters. Nico is initially introduced as moving to a new school , where the rest of the main characters, his classmates, are introduced. In the first episode, he states that he progressively lost his sight, and was therefore integrated into a school for visually impaired people for the last few years. This is later retconned to him being blind from birth: This was expressed explicitly in one episode, he tells a supermodel that has recently lost her sight that it is best to have been able to see once, than to never have seen like him. Other characters include: Episode guide. A list of episodes Duration. Each of the 26 episodes lasts  26–30 minutes. Episode structure. The episodes usually showed a modern city, but frequently featured improbable plots (one episode, for example, included a time machine that took a handful of characters to the past). Usually, there was a background story involving the animal characters Tom and/or Boris. Many episodes happening in a believable scenario featured a reduction in visibility (e.g. smoke from a building on fire) where Nico would save the day by quickly telling people how to "see" without using their eyes, enabling them to, in the above case, escape the building before the fire spread. Closure. Each episode closed  with a "Watch Out!" (¡Cuidado!) segment narrated by Tom. It consisted of stating a little-known fact of what blind people can now do. Each segment typically started out with something along the lines of "You think someone that is visually impaired can't go skiing?" and then proceeded to explain, in the given example, that blind people can ski if a guide skis in front of them with a speaker on his/her backpack to shout warnings at the skier, and the blind person following the sound of his/her guide's skis sliding on the snow. The example  would then be followed by some sort of more or less comical note, to which Tom winked at the audience. (In the above case, Tom commented that crossing the path between a blind skier's guide and the blind skier can lead to accidents, while the accident depicted on screen isn't particularly that of the blind skier, but of the person who got in the way.) Often, these "Watch Out!" notes were a show of a much later episode. Immediately afterwards, Nico's voice would give an advance of what the next episode would be about, while brief images  of that episode appeared on screen. During the credits, a comical sequence where Boris chased a dragonfly was shown.