Club Dorothée was the greatest kids show on earth. Not only was it the vehicle for the love towards manga in the Benelux and France, it's production house also co-created/financed some of the most iconic ones.
It was on the ear 7 days a week and on it's highest point had over 26 hours of the weekly airtime (over 40 hours during school holidays) and reached up to 86% of general audience in France. Those are still world records.
They were not scared of serious items and catered for all young audiences from 8 to 18, boys and girls. They treated kids like young adults and remain loved to this day. When they did a 30th aniversary show no one realised just how big their show still meant for so many people after that many decades. When Ariane and Jacky died the world stopped in France and Belgium for a few hours.
AB productions were so crazy with this show that the entire studio and sets were built around this show with interior and exterior sets and they even added a real house on the roof that was used to shoot the first french teen sitcom Héléne et le garçons. Even the biggest US tv producers didn't go this far for one show and if they wouldn't have started their own TV channels the show would have continued a good few years more. This is one of the few shows on earth that has memories for young GenX and older Millenials alike. And each sunday it was PPPC (Pas de Pietié pour les Croisants or No Mercy For the Croisants) in which they did scetches around a theme but also improv as most was broadcast live. For 10 years they were on tv every single day, their holidays were broadcast from wherever they were, even China allowed them to do live daily broadcasts, which was no mean feature in the 80's and 90's. On many levels this show still holds the highest bar of childrens entertainment and it will probably never be surpassed, neither in reach nor production value or airtime. It's the Riverdance of children's television!
There is also a link between Club Dorothée and the original Final Destination movie. Final Destination is inspired by flight TWA800 and the group of students that was lost. But as Club Dorothée finished their special summer holiday shows from the USA they were scheduled on flight TWA800 but at the last minute the producer insisted to change flights as TWA800 was a non smoking flight. So at the 11th hour the whole team and crew were put on a flight that allowed smoking and as such escaped the disaster. (A few claim that the delay of flight TWA800 was due to this incident as the lugage was already checked in and had to be redirected, though no real proof has ever been brought forward to this claim.) Yet it was part of the inspiration for Final Destination as the team "escaped" the disaster.
