| Runtime: | 25 minutes |
| Creator: | Morris |
| Executive Producer: | Bruno-René Huchez Hélène Fatou |
| Company: | Dargaud IDDH FR3 |
| Composer: | Claude Bolling |
| Country: | France |
| Language: | French |
| Network: | FR3 (France) |
| Num Series: | 1 |
| Num Episodes: | 26[1] |
Lucky Luke is an animated television series based on the comic book series of the same name created by a Belgian cartoonist Morris.[2]
The series adapts some adventures from the Belgian album series Lucky Luke.
Eight years after the first Lucky Luke series, his second television series arrives on French screens. It does not benefit from a prime-time access broadcast (19:55 p.m.) and gets a broadcast slot on Sunday afternoon. The broadcast schedule and the lack of media coverage (unlike the first series) may partly explain its relative anonymity. For their part, following the failure of the first series on American television networks, Hanna-Barbera refused to produce the second series. Dargaud then entrusted the project to IDDH, an audiovisual company located in Angoulême.[3] Morris made the model sheets while Philippe Landrot directs the end credits (who is already the director of the opening credits since the first series). The latter as well as the writers of the series in albums (Xavier Fauche, Jean Léturgie, Lo Hartog van Banda) ensure the adaptation validated by Morris and Gilberte Goscinny.
The series consists of episodes from the albums not adapted in the first series, (The Judge, Tortillas for the Daltons, The Ghost Town, etc.) and short stories to which have added new scripted material (The Alibi, Dangerous Passage and The Battle of the Rice). One episode even converges two different short stories (Challenge to Lucky Luke and Wyatt Earp's Equal). On the voice cast side, Jacques Thébault reprises the role of Lucky Luke from the previous series,[3] as well as Pierre Tornado as the role of Averell Dalton which would also be his final time voicing the character that he had previously played for each animated adaptation. The rest of the cast has however been completely new and many recurring characters would change voices throughout the series (even Pierre Tornade would be replaced by another actor imitating his voice for a short line of Averell in Fingers), sometimes within the same episode. Claude Bolling provides the instrumental credits of the beginning and reuses some musical commas. He also reuses his own music from the first two Lucky Luke feature films.
Due to the departure of Hanna-Barbera from production, Lucky Luke finds himself, in this series, free from all the constraints imposed by American television for the first series. Ethnic minorities are back, placed in their historical context. At the same time, we find between the characters the same balance as in the albums: Jolly Jumper and Rantanplan intervene much more rarely. However, Lucky Luke still doesn't smoke (only an allusion to his past as a smoker is present in the episode The Alibi).
The official order of the episodes has some inconsistencies, especially concerning the characters supposed to have met for the first time by Lucky Luke during the episode Canyon Apache, while he already knows them in The Peddler. In France, the series was broadcast for the first time on September 15, 1991 on FR3, then rebroadcast on the same channel on June 7, 1992.[4] In Quebec, it was broadcast on December 1, 1993 on the Super Écran channel.
The series has often been labeled as season 2 of the 1984 series.
Ten years after the creation of this second series, a third appears under the title The New Adventures of Lucky Luke produced by the company Xilam in 2001.[5] The voice of Lucky Luke would then be attributed to Antoine de Caunes.
The series was released on videocassette in the 1990s and was distributed by Citel Video.[4] The complete series was also released on DVD in 5 volumes on October 2010 also by Citel. The episodes are out of order:
The complete series was also released on DVD in Canada containing French and English language soundtracks.