Trivia / Dragon Tales

• Adored by the Network: PBS loved this show. They promoted it a lot and also gave it both a morning and afternoon timeslot when it first aired. Even after it was cancelled in 2005, it always held a prominent spot in their morning preschool lineup, only getting dropped in 2010 (due to their broadcasting rights to the series expiring).
• Acting for Two:
  • Kathleen Barr as Wheezie, Emmy and Max's mother, and Ord's mother.
  • Eli Gabay as Quetzal and Emmy and Max's father.
  • Chantal Strand as Cassie and her three siblings, Zuzu, Val, and Jamie, from the CD-ROM game Learn and Fly With Dragons.
  • Scott McNeil as Sid Sycamore and Captain Scallywag.
  • Stevie Vallance as Norm and Zak and Wheezie's mother.
  • Ellen Kennedy as Kiki, Finn, Cassie's mother, and Sophie.
• Children Voicing Children: The voice actors for Max, Emmy and Cassie were all children or teenagers when they were voicing their respective characters. By the final season, it became clear that Danny McKinnon was too old to be voicing four-year-old Max.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:
  • Often, people will call the show Dragon Tails, with this spelling being used on Ron Rodecker's obituary.
  • Amazon calls Emmy "Margarita". It also describes the show as a "musical fairytale" in which Max and Margarita (Emmy) are "drawn through a storybook to Dragon Land." The show is not really a musical as such and Max and Emmy use a dragon scale to get to Dragon Land, they aren't drawn through a storybook.
  • A Nickelodeon UK promo from 2002 calls Emmy "Ellie", Zak "Zacky", Wheezie "Lizzie" (which is somewhat hilarious when you know it's her actual name in the Polish dub) and Ord "Org".
• Crossdressing Voices: Unlike Max (voiced by Danny McKinnon), Enrique was voiced by female voice actress Aida Ortega. Lorca was also voiced by a woman (Lenore Zann).
• Died During Production: Executive producer Nina-Elias Bamberger passed away while season 3 was in production. The third season premiere was dedicated to her memory.
• He Also Did: Behind the scenes, Wesley Eure, who was famous for Land of the Lost in the 70s and Finders Keepers in the 80s, was a co-creator. However he was not credited initially when the series landed; this was eventually rectified by the time the first season ended after hiring a lawyer to ensure he received proper credit.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • While a number of official DVD releases are available, there was never a complete series release. This means that you'll still be missing quite a bit of the show if you try shelling out for every official DVD. January 2013 saw the show made available on Netflix, but when they went global in 2016 the show didn't follow. Not to mention, Netflix cut out all of the songs, leaving fans to purchase the DVDs and soundtracks as the only way to get the songs. And to add salt to the wound, the show was pulled from Netflix in March 2017.
  • In 2001, a special was aired on PBS entitled Parent Tales from Dragon Tales, in which counselors helped five families by using footage from the show. It hasn't been aired again, and no footage has surfaced on the internet. Also counts as a Lost Episode, or should we say Lost Special?
  • Of all the foreign dubs of the show, the Japanese one is the hardest to find. It only aired on cable channel Cartoon Network ^note  In Japan, cable is not as popular as it is in other Western countries, with most people getting their television over the air. and never got any home video releases in the country. The only information circulating around the Internet concerning this dub are some of the voice actors who worked on it and the fact that it premiered on Cartoon Network on November 25, 2001.
  • In 2001 and 2005, two music albums were released that contained every single song from the series. The catch? They're long out of print, and due to the snafu with Sony's licensing, will probably never go back into print ever again. Luckily, the first album is on Apple Music and Spotify, but good luck trying to find the second anywhere!
  • In early August 2022, two seasons of the program were unexpectedly made available for streaming on Amazon Prime. Some of the episodes even include Dragon Tunes segments and the second, despite being listed as "To Kingdom Come & Goodbye Little Caterpoozle," is actually a 70-minute copy of the DVD release Adventures in Dragon Land. Later in the month, the third season was added as well. However, as of late September 2023, the series is now unavailable, and it's unlikely it'll ever come back on the website due to PBS no longer having the rights to the show.
• Live on Stage!: There were three touring stage shows based on the series created by VEE Entertainment.
• Lost Episode: The pilot episode, titled "One Small Step for Cassie/A Circle of Friends". According to writer Jeffrey Scott, this episode was produced as a pitch to PBS. The first part, "One Small Step for Cassie", involved the main characters going to the moon, while the second part, "A Circle of Friends", involved Max trying to make perfect circles. "One Small Step for Cassie" ended up scrapped because it was too absurd for main characters to go to the moon, especially when little, if any, modern technology is seen in Dragon Land beyond telephones, steam trains, carnival rides, and tollbooths (the series also had some rather outlandish technology, such as mailboxes capable of sending letters back to the human world, a machine that rapidly dries clay, and even a frickin' weather-control device).
• One-Book Author: This was Aida Ortega's only known acting appearance.
• Playing Against Type:
  • You don't get to see the otherwise awesome Scott McNeil play a Pungeon Master tree anywhere else.
  • In the Japanese dub, Emmy is voiced by Noriko Shitaya, who is normally known for voicing either mysterious, creepy or angst-ridden girls, like Rydia or Sakura Matou. Emmy, on the other hand, is as normal as you can get from a girl from show starring talking magical dragons.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: There was once a rumor on this wiki that the creators made a Darker and Edgier video special for adults called "Too Hot For TV!" where one of the characters expresses disgust at the idea. No evidence of this special exists, and all the examples mentioning it were promptly deleted.
  • There was a rumor going around for a time that Liz Phair performed the theme song. Phair herself has confirmed this was never the case, however.
• Recycled Script: There are two episodes with very similar plots, "Max and the Magic Carpet" and "Three's a Crowd". Both plots feature a character who is feeling ignored by their best friend (the former has Ord feeling ignored by Max playing with Quetzal's magic carpet while Cassie feels ignored when she and Emmy make a new friend but feels left out). Both characters lament over losing said friend and talk it over with their friends who encourage the main character to express themselves. The conflict in both episodes is resolved when Ord and Cassie talk to Max and Emmy respectively and they make up.
  • To a lesser extent, "All Together Now" also follows a similar plot where Max feels left out when Emmy and Enrique spend a lot of time together due to being the same age and working on the same school project together. Max laments over being left out but it is subverted when Max eventually learns to have fun on his own and the episode ends with everybody joining in on the fun.
• The Resolution Will Not Be Identified: Aside from the Title Drop to the show's name at the end and in spite of what the episode is called, "A Storybook Ending" plays out exactly like any other episode in the series. This is somewhat common among PBS Kids shows though.
• Schedule Slip: This happened to "Just The Two of Us; Cowboy Max". It was originally supposed to air as part of the second season, but some PBS affiliates pulled it before airing. It wound up airing nationwide on April 1, 2005.
  • The gap between seasons 2 and 3 was two and a half years long, possibly due to the 9/11 attacks ^note Not that there was any content in the episodes that resembled 9/11, but PBS followed suit with many networks that chose to postpone programming and make scheduling changes due to the tragedy. Some PBS stations just aired news all day, while others aired children's programming all day, including several rarely-seen shows. They withheld the final five episodes of the second season until 2002, and season 3 wouldn't air until 3 years later and the death of executive producer Nina-Elias Bamberger. Adding salt to the wound, half of Season 3 had the format of a new episode airing with an older one.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The show is one of multiple Sesame Workshop series not to air on HBO ^note  others including Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat due to the rights now belonging to HG Distribution, The Upside Down Show due to ViacomCBS and Nickelodeon owning the rights, Cro due to the rights belonging to HBO competitor Starz, and Big Bag because it used cartoons from around the world in between the puppet segments and there would be a lot of legal red tape to cut to get HBO to rerun it. due to legal issues involving the rights to the songs in the Dragon Tunes segments (and most likely Sony's involvement ^note who in turn owns US distribution and worldwide Home Entertainment rights, according to this article: http://kidscreen.com/1999/10/01/26892-19991001/.). This problem was averted when Netflix had the show, as they split the stories into individual segments. (Fridge Logic suggests that Sesame Workshop could just easily re-record the Dragon Tunes with different musicians and singers to avoid having to shell out for the original version). As for the music CDs, yeah, long out of print. Certain of the episodes that were released on Amazon in August 2022 include Dragon Tunes segments, but it is very hodgepodge, as if something was slipped past the radar.
• Screwed by the Network:
  • The show was cancelled for unknown reasons in 2005.
  • On RTM1 in Malaysia, it was frequently pre-empted, and when they cut to commercials, they did not pause the master tape, causing scenes to go missing.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: The episode “Just The Two Of Us/Cowboy Max” is from season 2 (as evidenced by Enrique’s absence from both stories), but was aired during season 3.
• Unspecified Role Credit: The credits list only the voice actors' names and not the characters they voiced.
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to Wesley Eure's website, Zak and Wheezie were originally named Snarf and Bugger. It's likely the names were changed because "Snarf" was already used for a ThunderCats character and because "Bugger" is a British swear word.
  • According to Jeffrey Scott, who created the show's bible and did a lot of the story-editing, had the writers been forced to follow the original directives Dragon Tales would have been a dull show. They were given a manual to write from which was very heavy on enforced curriculum, but after delivering the first batch of scripts, all parties involved agreed that they were awful. After this, they were told to put entertainment first and just find ways to shoehorn the morals and lessons in. The result was some pretty fun episodes with plenty of laughs.
  • An ad appearing in the June 9-5, 1997 issue of Variety, over two years before the program's premiere, mentions the show along with several other Columbia TriStar programs that were in production at the time. However, it states "Join Blaze the Dragon and Max as they romp through an interactive musical adventure of sing-alongs and wordplay." There was never any character called "Blaze" on the show and while Max did end up being a major character on the show, he rode with the dragon Ord and no mention of him would be complete without also mentioning his older sister Emmy. Also, the show ultimately did not contain any interactive elements and songs were almost always limited to interstitial segments that didn't really have anything to do with the show's contents. The ad also depicts an image of a dragon that doesn't look like any seen on the show.
  • The show was originally announced to be in development for CBS' 1998-99 Saturday-morning lineup (along with another show, Problem # 13, which never made it air). CBS ultimately wound up striking a deal with Nelvana to program their entire Saturday schedule.