Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (found animated TV series based on comedy film starring Jim Carrey; 1995-2000)

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Ace Venture Cartoon Title.jpg

Title screen from the animated series.

Status: Found

Date found: Unknown

Found by: Unknown

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is an animated television series based on the 1994 film of the same name. The series was produced by Morgan Creek Productions and Nelvana for Warner Bros. Television. It aired for two seasons from 1995 to 1997 on CBS. A third season and reruns of the previous episodes aired on Nickelodeon from 1999 to 2000.

Design

Following the two original Ace Ventura movies, the titular character, voiced by Canadian actor Michael Daingerfield (credited as Michael Hall), is a goofy private investigator with a predilection for animals of all species.

Many of the characters from the original movie were retained, though not voiced by their original actors. While the original movies already had a strongly cartoonish comedic aesthetic, they were eclipsed by the slapstick and garish humor of the cartoon. Seth MacFarlane was among the writers over the course of the show's run.

The show was rife with toilet humor and anachronisms (one episode centered around the Egyptian Mau, claiming it to be an extinct breed of cat, when, in fact, they are not), displaying similar humor to his later series.

Original Airing

The show ran on CBS for two seasons, with the third season airing on Nickelodeon when that channel acquired the show to broadcast reruns.

Despite running in a time slot after The Mask (another popular cartoon based on a Jim Carrey film) and a crossover with that show (in that series' finale, "The Aceman Cometh"), the series failed to gain a large audience.

Ultimately, both The Mask and Ace Ventura were canceled And a new and completely different season of the series ran on Nickelodeon.

Availability

A three-episode DVD of the animated series was bundled with the two original Ace Ventura movies. This was also the only DVD release of this show. It is currently unknown if all of the episodes will ever be released.

Every episode of this show can be found online (all recorded on VHS/TV), with the exception of just one episode.

Missing Episodes Recovered

Season 2's 10th episode Robo West" has been found on Getty images from a BBC recording from 1997. [1]

Season 1's 11th episode "The Big Stink" was also lost until April 16th, 2016. It was found by Reddit user Newclearfallout on the file-sharing site Myspleen. An LMW contributor by the name of "THGhost" has uploaded it to YouTube.[2]

On May 24th, 2018, a man called Dan Vzare emailed The Lost Cartoons Archive with 2 additional episodes from season 3 that he'd found on his hard drive. "Circus Ace" and "The Cat Who Paints" are the names of the episodes. Much like "Robo West", there is zero trace of these episodes online. Not even on Wikipedia's list of episodes for the show until Dan added them himself. He found the episodes years ago from a now-defunct torrent site. The two episodes can also be watched on The Lost Cartoons Archive's YouTube channel.[3][4]

It turns out that a copy of "Robo West" has apparently been available online for an unknown amount of time, as discovered by a user called "Book333" who reports finding the episode on the 16th page of random Google search (posted on this very page on April 9th 2019). On May 7th 2019, a Snahp.it user by the name of "StarkSkywalker" shared some German downloads of the entire series from Amazon, including "Robo West", which appears to be the same copy that Book333 found. StarkSkywalker soon contacted an associate of The Lost Cartoons Archive and it has been uploaded HERE.

References