Underplayed Gems

The New Adventures of Black Beauty (1990)

The New Adventures of Black Beauty poster
Genre
drama television series
Country
United Kingdom
Length
2 seasons, 52 episodes
Rating
8.3 of 10 from 6 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this series is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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How it feels

This series follows adventures centered around the famous horse Black Beauty. It is set 20 years after an earlier show and features two returning characters. The show was produced in two separate runs in New Zealand and Australia with different human characters and stories.

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What happens

The New Adventures of Black Beauty is a television drama series produced in the early 1990s. The programme, was produced first in New Zealand, then in Australia. The two different productions had different characters and plotlines, unrelated except through the horse, Black Beauty. The first series of the programme was produced 1990–1991 by Isambard (Black Beauty) Productions Ltd in association with The Fremantle Corporation, and Beta Taurus produced the series primarily in New Zealand as a continuation of the 1972–1974 television drama series, The Adventures of Black Beauty. Set 20 years after the events of the earlier series, it featured two of the original characters, Dr James Gordon (played by William Lucas) and Jenny Gordon Denning (played by Stacy Dorning). The series was originally aired on ITV in the United Kingdom, and Isambard Productions Ltd produced 26 episodes in total. This production was subsequently aired in the US, where it was split into two series, aired in a different order, and with two episodes ("Horsepower" and "Horse Sense") possibly omitted in some markets. In 1992, The Fremantle Corporation moved production to Australia with what was for all practical purposes an entirely new series with new characters and a plotline unrelated to the previous episodes. The only connection to earlier works is the use of material from the final episode of the 1990–1991 production, reworked and with a voice-over explaining that Beauty had been released into the Australian wild. This was shown at the beginning of the first episode of the new production. Though video of the first production has been marketed on its own, the two productions are now being marketed on DVD and in syndication as a single television series, with the 1990–91 production billed as "Series 1" and the 1992 production billed as "Series 2". In July 2009, Retro Television Network picked up all 104 episodes of The Adventures of Black Beauty (produced in England) and The New Adventures of Black Beauty (both the New Zealand and Australian series), and affiliates began airing them in sequence, listing all 104 episodes as simply Black Beauty. In the United Kingdom and some other countries, both series of the New Adventures were shown on Horse & Country TV (Sky Channel 253) between 2014 and 2016. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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