YooHoo & Friends

YooHoo & Friends (유후와 친구들) is a Korean animated children's television series produced by Aurora World. The series is based on the toyline of the same name. The series focuses on a group of animals that accidentally get sent to Earth, and must find the missing magical seeds of the Tree of Life to get back to their home.

The series initially debuted on KBS2 on July 2, 2009 for one season. Two more seasons of the show would then air, starting from October 21, 2013 to April 9, 2015 on KBS1. The show was not renewed for a fourth season.

In 2019, a Netflix series based on the franchise, YooHoo to the Rescue, would be released.

2012 dub
Cow and Chicken creator David Feiss was contacted by Konnie Kwak, the president of Toonzone Studios, to make the original Korean YooHoo & Friends series into something he could sell to western television. He then approached it similarly to Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily?, where "a foreign language film is re-dubbed in English with an entirely different story, it could be funny." He rewrote dialogue and created 4 minutes of new animation per episode. Feiss has also said that he moved to a house across from Flavor Flav, the voice of Father Time and he agreed to be on the show.

Kwak once saw YooHoo & Friends stuffed toys and thought "they looked pretty cute. The toys had already inspired a 52-episode animated series for younger kids, which aired in South Korea and had received many prestigious awards in that country. But like many Korean properties, it doesn't translate well overseas. So [they planned] to repurpose the episodes to broaden the market." The team had prepared an adaptation of the Korean series for a six to 12-year-old demographic.

This re-dub/adaptation premiered on ABC Me in Australia on February 15, 2012, and on Pop in the United Kingdom in the same year. However, the series premired a month earlier, dubbed in Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese on Cartoon Network's Movimiento/Movimento Cartoon block in Latin America on January 8, 2012, and was later seen on Boomerang. It was produced by Toonzone Studios in the US, recorded in GGRP Sound in Canada, Vancouver, and written by Tom Krajewski (with Feiss helping with writing the first episode).

The dub in particular is a "gag dub", making a lot of fourth-wall breaks and adding its own jokes, as well as heavily rewriting the show to the point where it is considered a different show entirely. However, besides the new animation and Father Time segments, it is still a re-dub of the original. This dub was incredibly scarce at one point, as it was never officially released anywhere.

2014 dub
Eventually, the opportunity to fully develop another season for the 2012 gag "dub" was postponed, causing Toonzone Studios to take legal action against Aurora World over the contractual copyrights of the series, that caused Aurora World to end up breaking the deal with Toonzone and licensing its franchise to Lawless Entertainment in June 2014.

A new English dub that was more faithful to the original series was first released officially onto Aurora World's YouTube channel, with the first video uploaded being the episode "The Precious Water" from season 2 on December 24, 2014. The first episode of season 1 and three other episodes were released on April 1, 2015. The episode "The Best of the Best" from season 2 was released the next day, and then the channel would cease uploading anymore episodes.

The full dub was then released onto Netflix on September 1, 2017, and seasons 1 and 2 were dubbed. It was later removed from the service exactly two years later. The first two seasons are currently available on Prime Video, and Tubi TV, a free streaming service, would also host the dub. In all three services, four episodes are missing from season 2, which means it has 52 episodes as opposed to 56 segments. It is unknown if the missing four episodes were dubbed.

This dub is done by an unknown studio, and the actors are currently unknown too. Season 3 was never dubbed.

Cast
New characters created for the 2012 Gag Dub, such as Father Time, Mother Nature, and Santa Claus will not be added, as they were solely created for that dub and not present in the original.