Sunday, January 11, 2009
Codename: Kids Next Door
Codename: Kids Next Door, also known as Kids Next Door or by its acronym KND, was an American animated television series created by Tom Warburton and produced by Curious Pictures. The series debuted on Cartoon Network on December 6, 2002 and aired its final episode on January 21, 2008. The series came about as the result of a viewer's poll by Cartoon Network.
The main characters of the series are five kids who operate from their high-tech treehouse against the tyranny of adults and teenagers. They make up what is known as Sector V of a worldwide organization called the Kids Next Door.
Mr. Warburton created a pilot episode for another show, Kenny and the Chimp. Originally, there was a group of children who called themselves "The Kids Who Lived Next Door" among the recurring characters. The Kids Next Door would get Kenny into trouble. The plotline was then changed to focus on the group of kids alone, and later, the kids battling adulthood. In 2001, the show's pilot episode, "No P in the OOL", won a Cartoon Network viewer's poll. As a result, Codename: Kids Next Door was greenlit to become a series
The episodes are titled as the Kids Next Door's missions, denoted as "Operation:" followed by an acronym which often gives viewers clues as to what the story is about. Every mission may or may not be chronologically ordered in relation to the previous or the next, but it's accepted that most of the time they occur in the order that the episodes are shown. Sometimes missions make a references to a certain situations, or lead to consequences in another mission. Mostly in the earlier episodes, the stories were often about typical childhood problems, but magnified and exaggerated. As the series progressed, a bigger, more complex storyline was developed.
The Kids Next Door Organization is a worldwide group comprising thousands of kids joined in mutual struggle against adult tyranny. They fight villains that embody specific menaces to children overall; such as Knightbrace (going to the dentist), Count Spankulot (spanking), the Common Cold (self-explanatory), Windsor and the Queen Tie (wearing ties), Mrs. Dirt (taking a bath), and Father/Benedict Uno, (the ultimate figure of authority). For every member of Kids Next Door, upon following a period of training, the kids are then assigned a number or alphanumerical code (pronounced "numbuh") and sent to a "sector", that is, a treehouse of gigantic proportions. The main headquarters of the Kids Next Door, the Moon Base, is located on the moon. Kids follow their oath of protecting other kids as well as battling adulthood until the age of 13, when they are "decommissioned": their brains are washed-clean of memories of any past KND activity, upon which they are thence considered teenagers, and a threat to KND as well. The practice of strict decommissioning at age 13 was later on revealed to be subject to some exceptions: kids who have proved to be exceptional agents are offered the chance to carry on in KND as spies infiltrating the teen organization (see Maurice for a prime example). This practice is kept secret. Decommissioning has also proved reversible due to errors and thus brainwashing is not necessarily permanent.(Wikipedia)