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.

Characters
(TBA)

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.

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 epsiodes) in a two-disc SD on Blu-ray set on November 2, 2022.