Joe's Real Weird School Life (1994 animated series)

Joe's Real Weird School Life is a Canadian-American animated television series based on a stationery brand created by freelance cartoonist Joseph Walker and a co-production of Magic World Productions and Saban Entertainment. The show was broadcast on syndication before moving to Fox Kids and Fox Family in the USA and on YTV in Canada from September 1994 to June 2000 for six seasons.

The series details the daily life of Joe, a boy from a strange country as an exchange student at a junior high, trying to cope with a "real" life while various strange things occasionally happen at his school.

The show is known for alternating between an action-comedy and dramedy tone depending on the episode's story, lending itself to a wide array of situations as strange as preventing an alien invasion or as realistic as solving social problems at his school. Beginning in its third season, the show adopted a new "school year" every two seasons with Joe and his friends finishing junior high at the end of its sixth season.

Premise
Joe, a 13-year-old boy from the fictional country Nonsensico, moves to Canada to become an exchange student at Sir David Wilson Junior High School. There, he tries to fit in at school due to his strange and eccentric personality and differing views of life, although he manages to make friends there, specifically Louis, Diane and Tanya. Because he is a strange person in a real place, the characters occasionally find themselves in situations out of the ordinary or they can figure out how to solve problems occurring with a character's life or at the school.

Students

 * Joseph Longjohns O'Boggledrips II "Joseph Benjamin Walker" - The protagonist of the series, who starts out aged 12 (shortly before his 13th birthday) attending seventh grade at Sir David Wilson Junior High and aged 15 in ninth grade by the final season. Being an exchange student from his homeland Nonsensico (where the people are weird and strange things always happen), his free spirit and strangeness almost always bother others, with very few offering any respect for him. For much of the series, he also has ailurophobia, not helped at all by Tanya's love of cats and is sometimes used a weapon towards him. He begins as a socially oblivious and eccentric yet affable person, later on developing excessive feelings of shame and anxiety from how hard the different life hits him. Even so, he still tries hard to live happily and make any day a good one for himself and whoever is nearby, even when things often go South.
 * Louis MacLeod-Calvert - A classmate of Joe and easily his foil, being very smart, mature and down-to-Earth in contrast to Joe's oddball personality. Not to mention a tendency to be brutally honest in a deadpan tone, often in response to his or others' foolishness. He is also son of a well-off family expecting him to excel as much as possible academically, some episodes also showing that constantly living up to expectations stresses him out considerably.  More often than not, he is the voice of reason when Joe's antics go too far and he can be uptight at times but for what it's worth, he does make an effort to help Joe cope with the almost literal school of hard knocks.
 * Diane Coleman - Another friend and classmate of Joe, who is mature and anchored to reality like Louis but way more tolerant, if excessively encouraging, of Joe's strangeness. She prefers to resolve conflict with diplomatic reason and gentle persuasion, which often works with Joe but also puts her at risk of getting deceived or exploited (as is shown in some episodes).
 * Tanya Hadley - A friend of Joe, Liam and Danielle. She is somewhat perky and ditzy, but not slow on the uptake, in ways that even Joe himself considers weird. She is obsessed with cats, much to Joe's chagrin.
 * Kirsten Meyer - A student in Joe's class who, along with her friends, likes to bully him and certain other students. She is very loud-mouthed, arrogant, lazy and selfish, preferring to take the easy road out of work and relishing in the praise given to her by teachers who unfairly punish Joe for something she did. Occasionally, however, she has received comeuppance for wrongdoings worse than simply picking on Joe.
 * Vanessa Ritchie - A companion of Kirsten who also partakes in tormenting Joe and occasionally other students as well. She shares tendencies towards arrogance and selfishness with her pal but is much smarter and more manipulative as well as a straight A-student and suck-up to the teachers, often doing the most work with Kirsten's schemes (for which she often gets no credit) and taking considerable delight in toying with Joe's/others' emotions and generally deceiving them.
 * Samantha Robertson - A third companion of Kirsten and Vanessa, who is a lot more outwardly rambunctious and just plain malicious than both girls, acting as the attacker who loves to get a quick rise out of her victims, especially Joe and his pals.

School Staff

 * Mrs. Wordsworth - The English teacher who also has Joe and his classmates for homeroom, with a habit of talking in partially antiquated dialogue due to her fixation on literacy (particularly with old classics). Though she means well and tries to maintain order in class, she's not exactly the best judge of character regarding how rotten Kirsten and her posse tend to be (though one episode hints she has had a bad experience with parents of kids she attempted to report for disruptive behavior and it probably explains why).
 * Ms. Henderson - The school principal with perfectionist tendencies prioritizing order and a good image of the school over the well-being of its students (although she's not above reprimanding or giving moderate discipline to Kirsten and co when they've gone too far).
 * Mr. Alberts - The intolerant and morose vice principal who doesn't take kindly to unruly students, particularly Joe (even after doing everything he can to save the school from oddball threats) and is in fact openly biased towards the kid, whilst being more lenient on Kirsten when she plays victim. He is also a suck-up to Ms. Henderson (some episodes show he even tries taking her out on dates but she is always too busy to say yes) and it can be inferred his determination to catch bad kids in the act also serves to impress.

Production
Joseph Walker created the character Joe during his art college days as a coping mechanism when remembering his rough time at junior high. He also felt a need to design something he could use to help himself earn money (as his job prospects were limited and his family suffered financial hardships).

After a friend taught him how to make erasers, he began to use the character of Joe for homemade stationery and sell it at Ontarian craft shows. It was during one of these events that brand management company Cromwell House noticed the brand and arranged to market it nationwide (potentially to the United States as well).

Due to Cromwell House's ties with Magic World, Joseph Haddad and Michael Warren also expressed interest in the brand, inviting Walker to discuss development of an animated television series.

The series was among the earliest in North America to make use of then-fledgling digital ink and paint technology (at the time being used extensively by Disney for their feature films), with animation subcontracted to D'Ocon Films in Spain and Wang Film Productions in Taiwan.

Home media
Six VHS tapes of the show were released by PolyGram Video in North America from 1995-1996. Each tape contained four episodes.

In 1997, after the acquisition of Saban by Fox Kids Worldwide the previous year, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment took over home video rights for the series. Three VHS tapes were released in the summer of 1997 under the Fox Kids Video label with more released in the following years until 2001 when both Saban and Fox Family Worldwide were purchased by Disney.

Along with F.U.R. and some other Magic World shows, NCircle Entertainment acquired DVD rights to the series in 2007, with DVDs released that year and in 2008. This ownership was relinquished in 2012, with Mill Creek Entertainment releasing season box sets for the first time in North America from 2014 to 2016.

As with other works in their backlog, Magic World Home Entertainment released the complete series (plus special episodes) in a two-disc SD on Blu-ray set on November 2, 2022.