Trivia / Little Cherry

• Blooper:
  • In season 1 episode 20, at one point there is a small sprite of Yingnan behind Cherry while the actual Yingnan is nearby.
  • In the beginning of that season's finale, the animation is frozen for 2-3 seconds in spite of the sound effects.
  • Wang Shuai's hidden sprite outlines become visible during a transition effect in season 2 episode 23.
• Bonus Material: The 2002 Happy Elf Little Cherry comic volumes end with art and drawing tutorials. They were compiled and reprinted in color in Little Cherry volume 9 (2004).
• Creator Couple: Yang Shangjun is married to fellow cartoonist Zhang Guoxiao, who has produced the Little Cherry comics and TV series and is the chairman and owner of the company the couple founded.
• Directed by Cast Member: Deng Yuting, the voice of the titular character in the three main seasons, is also the voice director for seasons one and two.
• Hey, It's That Sound!: The iPhone "Marimba" ringtone is heard during a recurring scene transition in the TV series.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Not every issue of the Childhood Comics magazine is readily available at online bookstores, especially from its first few years.
  • Some earlier comics have never made it to the manhua volumes, including a 2003 story about a Teacher/Parent Romance between Xiao Yang and Cherry's dad.
  • Only one episode of the Where Are We Going, Dad? miniseries is viewable online.
• Long-Runners: The comic strip has been running for at least 25 years. The franchise, nevertheless, has been in a low profile since the last TV series was pulled from air around the mid 2010s and the comic strip's distribution was virtually shrunk to its magazine.
• Recursive Adaptation: A comic version of the TV series (using screenshots) had been published in books and the Childhood Comics magazine. This also occurred with at least one of the flash shorts in a third-party comics magazine.
• Release Date Change: The TV series was going to premiere in August 2008 to coincide with the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics but ended up arriving two months later for the comics' tenth anniversary. Incidentally, its comic Recursive Adaptation started appearing in the summer of 2008 in the brand new Childhood Comics magazine.
• They Also Did:
  • Creator Yang Shangjun and her company had been involved with the comic book tie-ins of the popular live action children's TV show Happy Star in the mid-2000s. Being a fellow Henan product, Happy Star was promoted inside Little Cherry comic books.
  • In 2002, Yang authored the short-lived adult comic strip Humorous Men & Women, which had a very similar art style to the Cherry comics at the time.
  • Deng Yuting, the first TV series voice of Cherry, also played Maruko-chan in a heavy dose of irony.
  • Shi Jiu Fan (aka 19Van/十九番), the artist for the Little Cherry House Elf story arc and other 2008 era illustrations, is behind the serial comic Rabbit Gang (兔子帮), which also has an Animated Adaptation.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Efforts were underway to produce a 208-episode series titled Happy Elf Little Cherry by Shanghai Animation Film Studio back in 2002. It shares its name with a comic volume series from that period and an unreleased 2019 revival of the actual TV animated series.
  • A Korean animation company once made a deal in 2002 to produce 160 shorts that would have aired in China and South Korea the following year.
  • An animated musical project, "Grandpa Chinese New Year", which would have posited Cherry's grandfather as a Santa Claus-like figure for the Chinese holiday, had been announced in 2007. It was in working progress for at least two years, as there was a 2009 interview mentioning it. Since the project ended up being shelved or cancelled, it presumably lived on in an ironic sense in the second season's Christmas Episode, which has Cherry asking her grandfather to be her Santa Claus.
  • A possibly unannounced animated adaptation of the 2008 Little Cherry House Elf story arc was also in development, as previewed in the voiced storyboards here. The kids' body proportions were going to be a stone's throw from the TV series' and Dapan was to be swapped for Erdou.

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