Camp Candy is a 1989-1992 American-Canadian animated television series produced by DIC Animation City, Saban Entertainment and Worldvision Enterprises, in association with Frostbacks Productions, with comedian John Candy providing the voice for an animated version of himself. The show is set in a fictional summer camp run by John Candy. Twenty-seven episodes of the series aired during the 1989 and 1990 television seasons on the NBC television network. Thirteen new episodes ran in syndication in the 1992 season, distributed by Worldvision Enterprises, along with repeats of the previous episodes. The series was later rerun on the Fox Family cable channel from 1998 to 2001. In the third season, Candy also appeared in live action segments, talking about nature and ecology. Harry Nilsson wrote the series' theme song, which Candy sang. In both versions, the closing credits featured songs about Camp Candy that were sung to the tune of various traditional camp songs such as “Bingo”, “Miss Lucy’s Steamboat,” “On top of old smoky,” “Yankee doodle boy”, “She’ll Be Comin’ Around the Mountain” and “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze”. The animated series spawned a brief comic book series based on the show; also entitled Camp Candy, it was published by Marvel Comics'Star Comics imprint.
Episode formula
Almost all episodes would begin where John Candy would be trying to show an outdoor skill to some kids, to which he would then say it reminded him of a story, where he would tell of the episode in narration. John was a dedicated leader of Camp Candy, a summer camp that is presumably built by him, and he tries to get various kids to get along. The children included:
Theodore - A chubby blonde kid who usually appears in the series.
Adult characters included Nurse Molly, a nurse who had a crush on John, but he never seemed to take notice, as he was interested in an attractive redheaded receptionist called Miss Sweetingham. Another adult added during the second season was a man from an unnamed Eastern European country named Botch, who worked as the camp cook and was a basketball junkie, being seen shooting hoops or in some sports-related activity when not working. John's main antagonists were Xavier "Rex" DeForest III — a man who seeks to demolish Camp Candy in order to make way for a condominium, and Chester — a dimwitted greaser employed by DeForest. Another antagonist included Hob Nayles, a strict disciplinarian who headed the rival Camp Kickboot and sought to humiliate John, but was really a coward at heart.
