Spade Castle

"Here is Spade Castle, standing high on the Great Hill, looking down Paper Valley."

- Judith Rose narrating during the first episode.

Spade Castle (referred to as Spade Castle Stories in several sources during the show's initial run) is a Kuboian animated television series created by Judith Rose that premiered on Vision Network in early 1988. Because of its status as the first ever animated television series in Kuboia, it is fondly remembered and was repeated regularly until 2007.

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. Occasionally, the village that Spade Castle is located in, Paper Valley, is seen. It appears to be a mixture of a then-modern suburb and a fantasy village.

The first two series of Spade Castle had several features that were not present in the third and fourth series, including narration at the beginning and end of each episode by the show's creator Judith Rose, and some segments at the end of each episode such as "Club's Card Games" and "Who Is This?" The third and fourth series also have more animation compared to the first two series, which opted for a storybook-like feel.

Production
When plans for the first Kuboian television channel went underway in the mid-1980s, Judith Rose worked on a children's programme that could air for the channel's launch. 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 the reuse of specific elements, such as the card games seen at the end of each episode.

Episodes of Spade Castle generally aired on Wednesday mornings at 9:00a.m., where it shared a half-hour slot with either an episode of Animal Barn, or an episode of either The Shoe People, King Rollo and/or The Wombles.

The show's music consists mostly of compositions made by French musician Jean-Jacques Perrey and Pat Prilly, with the tracks "Blues In 3/4 Time" and "Colonie Céleste" being regularly used.

Characters
Rose opted to make the main characters shaped as playing card symbols because they would be easy to draw and she believed children would be able to recognise them easily. She said in an interview "I used everyday items for inspiration for characters. That's why there are so many talking objects."

Diamond and Club were originally written as biological siblings, though Rose opted to make them stepsiblings to showcase an alternative form of family relationships. Club's biological mother Clover is occasionally mentioned but never makes an on-screen appearance, with one episode implying she passed away when he was very young. Diamond's biological father is never mentioned except once in a series three episode. Although the show's fanbase have made multiple speculations regarding his whereabouts, Rose has neither confirmed nor disproved any of them.

Broadcast
Spade Castle was regularly ran by TVVC for almost twenty years, airing in reruns on Tiny Vision until 2007.

In the spring of 2013, reruns of the show, particularly the third and fourth series, began airing on Disney Junior (later called Little Disney) as part of its strategy to air the best of both retro and contemporary Kuboian pre-school shows.

International airings
Spade Castle aired on TV1 in Belgium, FR3 in France and Nederland 1 in the Netherlands. In the United States, it aired on The Disney Channel for a short period in the early 1990s, whilst in Canada, it aired on CBC.

In the United Kingdom, Spade Castle premiered on CITV in early 1989. Reruns were aired on Tiny TCC/Tiny Living and Channel 4 during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Home media releases
Vision Video released some episodes of the first two series of Spade Castle on VHS in four videos throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, with each video containing four episodes each. Later in 1993 and 1994, two "bumper" videos were released featuring eight episodes of the third and fourth series respectively.

Each of the four series were released on DVD in a "Complete Series" format throughout 2004 and 2005.

Books
Books based on Spade Castle were published throughout the 1990s, including short stories for young children, and activity books.