As a big fan of the Donkey Kong Country CG cartoon from the 90s and overall of French animation as well, I was pleased to find that in the 90s. While not an actual TV show, more like interlude between tv shows, it is still neat to find an official use of a Nintendo mascot in such a way, especially during this time frame. Sadly most of it has been lost since it’s not often these things were recorded or kept, luckily there’s plenty online and to be honest it’s not like they are peak entertainment.
In a way think of it like TOM segments from Toonami, where they could be short or even longer ones. at times. The show lasted for quite a long time from 1996 all the way to 2001, so well into the beginning of the Gamecube era. The segments were replaced by a rebranding called KD2A which no longer featured Donkey Kong. Many of them remind me of skits you’d find in say the Super Mario Bros Super Show, although aimed at a French audience.
What sold the show was the motion capture they could do with Donkey Kong, while the segments and movement might seem silly today, it was fresh and exciting to see a CG character be able to move so fluidly. So of course the company MediaLabs. So that’s why they move so much because they were showing off all the motion and life like movement they could do, which now is just seen as overdoing it, but it was a cool technology especially when you see the behind the scenes of how they were doing it. This was pretty novel.
These were the characters that were in the show:Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, Candy, Funky, Krushy, Porco, Narval, Perry Howie, Octo, Miss Paresseuse, Rabbide, Noam Simcox
La Planète de Donkey Kong
In reference to Planet of the Apes which is actually a French novel, we begin with The host was Mélanie Angélie who was there for most of the show except for the last year. You’d have segments where they’d meet say Albert Einstein or just have adventures at the beach, especiall on vacation. They’d put them in weird or odd situations, and of course relevant to the season like Halloween, Christmas etc. I like the interactions with the host Melanie although there aren’t that many at least online. I mean you have Donkey Kong dancing the macarena, it’s a product of its time.
DKTV Donkey Kong TV DKTV.cool
Eventually the show rebranded and later lost their host, the format changed slightly but the idea was the same, some short intermissions between shows showing the Donkey Kong crew. What makes it different is that here is they don’t have a human co-host although some humans and real life backgrounds are still common in many segments. The segments here relied more on parodies of different shows and movies, and putting the Donkey Kong characters in different situations parodying popular movies and tv shows with costumes to go along them which is great to see the reskins on the characters.
The actual show got a few variations from time to time other names the segments went by included: Les Vacances de Diddy, Donkey Kong Plage, DKTV stars, [email protected], Diddy.cool, Les Vacances de DKTV, [email protected], petitsmatins.cool. There was a large variaty of shows that would air in this programming block, it wasn’t just limited to cartoons, you’d get some other older audience shows, and even movies. Oof course French TV shows as well, I won’t list everything that’s been there just some to get an idea of the range:, Kenan & Kel, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, X-Men, X-Files, S Club 7, Weird Science, Goosebumps, Dodo Le Retour, and of course Donkey Kong Country.
