Lost Media Archive

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Lost Media Archive
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The Foxbusters is a British animated TV series very loosely based on the Dick King-Smith book The Foxbusters. It was made by Cosgrove Hall and consists of two series of thirteen 11-minute episodes each, made between 1999 and 2000. The show was co-written by the animation partnership of David Max Freedman and Alan Gilbey, and occasionally with Joel Jessup as a third writer. It was directed by Jon Doyle. The show itself is laden with gags and action. This series was aired on CITV in 1999 to 2000.

The show is primarily set on Foxearth Farm, a fictional farm based in the English countryside in the West Midlands, which is dominated by a variety of animals, particularly the chickens. The Foxbusters are three female chickens, Ransome, voiced by Whoopi Goldberg, Sims, voiced by Joanna Lumley, and Jeffries, voiced by Jane Horrocks, who have the unlikely ability to fly. Each has a different personality; Ransome is the best flyer, Sims is the smartest and Jeffries is the comic relief. The Foxbusters also have the ability to spit grit like machine guns and drop hard-boiled eggs like they were bombs - and these are used to effect among other methods to keep the hungry pack of foxes in Foxearth Forest at bay.

A pilot to the show was made in 1997. The pilot was unseen to the public for couple years, until it was uploaded to YouTube in 2008. But after the video was deleted, it was then uploaded to Dailymotion by SignoreBoy in 2012 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxo2yi and the reuploaded to YouTube by SimpsonsClips24 in 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YuVEbXXkxc

On January 13, 2003, Cinema Club and Granada Media released 2 DVDs and videos of The Foxbusters worldwide, one with episodes 1–6 from Series 1 (Hen Night, Where Egos Dare, Winging It, Icky's Sticky Situation, A Fete Worse Than Death, Follow My Leader), and one with episodes 7-13 also from Series 1 (The Ring Cycle, The Trojan Chicken, Going Underground, See the Dog, See the Dog Run, The Long Walk Home, Three Hens and a Baby and Passing the Buck). The Series 2 episodes were not released on DVD or videos even after the series ended.

In 2008, YouTube user Jaff Fox uploaded two episodes (Eggs, Lies And Videotape and Peace) from Series 2 from CITV recordings. Seven more episodes were uploaded from 2010-2011 (Big Trouble, Day Of The Hunter, The Not So Great Escape, Love Bites, Of Mice And Hen, The PrisHener and In The Beak-ginning) and then three more in 2018 (Fear Of Flying, Some Like It Otter and One Paw In The Grave), all also from CITV and the Germany channel Super RTL (with the English dub) recordings. The only episode not to be released at moment is Series 2 episode 1, or episode 14, "Ackluckalypse Now". It is currently unknown if the episode will upload onto YouTube. However, some footage, possibly from the episode, was used for a promo when the show aired on Nickelodeon in Australia. https://archive.org/details/2000-promo-for-foxbusters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIE5hrYs9kM

Jaff Fox does have this episode along with the other Series 2 episodes. He has posted reasons why he has never posted this episode on his Twitter account. He has been fixing the video as it is not the best quality and hopes to get it uploaded in 2023.

In January 2023, the episode was uploaded onto YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1UoMSsPbO4

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