Something New Friday: "Sheep In The Big City" Part 1

A note to the reader before I begin; this article is about a TV show and I've never talked about one of those for more than two paragraphs on here before, and I ended up going all in with bringing up anything I found interesting. Because of this the article was too long for just one Friday, so instead of cutting out good history and tangents, I'll simply cut the article into multiple parts, with part two being published next Friday. Sheep In The Big City was a Cartoon Network show very few people have seen. It first ran for two seasons from 2000 to 2002, with 27 episodes including the pilot. The show was a stranger to most reruns, and has only had 3 episodes released on home media in the PAL region. In the United States, where the show was produced and first aired, only the first episode was available as a bonus on a Power Puffs Girls DVD. This show sutch a, well, a black sheep in the cartoon network lineup. How did a cartoon about a sheep become more obscure than "Whatever Happened To Robot Jones?" My best guess is the show's concept itself being seen as too "radio unfriendly" for reshowing by whoever decides that at the Cartoon Network. The premise of the show, in a nutshell, is absurd: Sheep In The Big City is a cartoon about a sheep that moved to the big city because he is actively being pursued by a secret branch of the United States military that plans to use him to power a sheep powdered ray gun. Sheep In The Big City was created by Mo Willems. Willems is best known nowadays for his children's books, such as the Caldecott Medal winning "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!" And it's sequels, alongside the "Elephant and Piggie" series of books. But before he was a prestiged children's author, he was making prestiged children's cartoons. Previous to "Sheep", Willems worked on two major shows I see as relevant to this discussion. The first show was Sesame Street. And it's a big place to start from. While on the show he created a number of shorts, notably the "Susie Kabloozie" segments, which ran on the show from 1994 to 2002. The segments featured the antics of Susie Kablooie, a very imaginative and excitable young girl and her green cat Feff, who doesn't talk but still manages to act as a straight man for Susie. Williams won an outstanding 6 Emmy awards for his work on Sesame Street during this time. The next cartoon he worked on was a different set of shorts. "The Off-Beats" was created for Nickelodeon, and was both shown as their own as shorts and as segments in the show "Kablam". The Series focused on a group of misfit children and their talking dog as they go through life and get bullied by "the populars" , a group of ill spirited children who move as a single mass, similar "the Delightful Children from Down the Lane" from "Codename: Kids Next Door" . (I doubt this is a coincidence as Willems wrote on every episode for the first two seasons of KND). But Willems left Nickelodeon for Cartoon Network who were giving him his own TV show. And like most TV shows, we will start with the pilot. Well, we will in part 2 of this article.