Spade Castle

Spade Castle is a Kuboian animated television series created by Judith Rose. It premiered in early 1988, and spawned three series, which were regularly aired until 2008. Due to its status as the first ever animated series in the country, it has been widely celebrated and remains popular to the current day.

Premise
The titular Spade Castle is a large castle where the Symbol family and some of their friends live. The show's main characters consist of four floating creatures that are shapted to French-suited playing card symbols; Club and his father King Spade, and Diamond and her mother Queen Heart - Diamond and Club are stepsiblings due to the marriage of their parents.

The show mostly focuses on the Symbol family and what they get up to in their spare time, which typically involves playing games with their friends in Spade Castle. On very rare occasions, the unnamed village that Spade Castle is located in is seen - it appears to be a mixture of a then-modern suburb and a fantasy village.

The first two series featured narration by the show's creator Judith Rose and had limited animation, with the show having a storybook-like feel. The third series abandons the narration in favour of having the characters talking. The first two series also had short segments at the end of each episode to fill up the runtime, including interactive card games.

1988 series
When plans for the first Kuboian television channel went underway in the mid-1980s, two children's programmes were created to air in time for the channel's launch. A traditionally animated series called Space Castle, and a stop-motion series called Animal Barn.

According to show creator Judith Rose, Spade Castle was created on a very tight budget, and she was expected to have at least thirteen episodes finished by the end of 1987. In order to do this, the first series suffered from very limited and frequently looped animation and reuse of specific elements, such as the card games seen at the end of each episode.

The show premeierd on 10th January, 1988, with new episodes airing on Sunday mornings at 10:30a.m. A second series of twelve episodes was later aired in 1989.

1997 series
In late 1995, a third series of Space Castle entered production, being produced by Red Grape Studios. A majority of the producers of the original two series returned, with the new series being developed by Hollis Davies, who previously wrote several episodes for Ouraine. Unlike the first two series, the episodes of the third series only ran for eleven minutes instead of fifteen, had much more fluid animation and featured the characters talking instead of there being narration. Rose hoped that the changes would bring new life to the show, which had been considered dated, whilst still maintaining its original charm.

The third series of Spade Castle premiered on Tiny Vision on 17th August, 1997. A total of twenty episodes were produced. These episodes were later reran on KT from 1999 to 2008.

International airings
In the United Kingdom, the first two series of Spade Castle ran on Children's BBC from 1989 until 1997, when the third series premiered on the block. The first two series later aired on Nick Jr. from 1999 to 2001. The third series meanwhile was reran on CBeebies from 2002 to 2006, and Tiny Pop from 2007 to 2010.