Western Animation / Bob Morane

Bob Morane is a 1998 animated series by Ellipse Animation based off the popular eponymous book series created by Belgian writer Henri Vernes in 1953.

The tone and genre of any given segment can shift dramatically - the adventurer protagonist may take part in a James Bond-like espionage story, then go on an Indiana Jones-esque adventure, then on to a modern Western fighting corrupt tycoons in the American Southwest, and then on a Doctor Who-style time-travelling sci-fi trip.

---

Bob Morane provides examples of:

• Adaptation Personality Change: The comics version of the Yellow Shadow is quite fond of this, as for a time at least it was part of his signature style to let off one of these at least once peralbum. This is is contrast with his much more stoic portrayal in the cartoon series.

• Alternative Foreign Theme Song: The original French opening features an instrumental based on Indochine's song "L'Aventurier", which is a homage to the book series. Possibly because of copyrights, foreign broadcasts used a different track.
• Antagonist Title: Solar System Sentinels (an organization rather than a person), The Mysterious Dr. Xhatan, Xhatan, Master of Light, The Yellow Shadow. Interestingly, those referring Xhatan and Ming aren't the starting episode of their respective arc.

• Artistic License – Biology: The ending of The Towers of Crystal. The last Mu survivors settle in New Zealand thanks to the Time Patrol, making them the direct ancestors of the Maori people (which has been foreshadowed earlied when the protagonists notice the Muvians' tattoos look like Maori's). When they are loaded onboard of the Time Patrol's ship, there's at most a dozen of Muvian passengers, which wouldn't provide enough genetic diversity. Based on real life genetics, the "Maoris" would have quickly gone extinct due to inbreeding.
• Artistic License – Geography: Terror at the Manicouagan is entirely set in Quebec. At one point a "Parking" panel can be seen, which is how parking lots are called in France but not in Quebec due to their ban of anglicisms. It should have been "parc de stationnement" instead, a literal translation of "parking lot". Interestingly, the series is a French-Canadian coproduction.
• Badass Normal: In The Angels of Ananke, the eponymous characters are a civilisation of flying humans. A hand-to-hand fight between Bob and one of them ends in Bob's victory, which results in Bob being hired to teach them martial arts.
• Bait-and-Switch: Secret of the Antarctic's opens with Professeur Clairembart finding ruins of a Muvian city in Antarctica, implying the episode plot would be about an archeological discovery. Turns out the story is actually about the (western) terrorist organization who uses the place as headquarters.

• Beard of Sorrow: Bill's character design is usually clean shaved. Revenge of the Yellow Shadow ends with Bill witnessing Bob's (apparent) death. The sequel, Judgement of the Yellow Shadow, has Bill (who is investigating to find Ming and avenge Bob) sporting a stubble.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: A friendly and relatively intelligent yeti (he's able to understand human language and to talk) appears in Teeth of the Tiger. Being living since two hundred years, he's one of the target of Staggart plan, who wants to take his long life gene for his future army of supermen.
• The Big Guy: Bill Ballantine. He stands at least half a head taller than Bob Morane (himself rather tall), has the build of a rugby player and regularly accomplishes feats of strength bordering on Charles Atlas Superpower - once, during a medieval caper in the comic books, to show how strong he was, he straightened by himself an iron bar that had required four stout men to bend in half in the first place.
• Bloodless Carnage: The show features a lot of violence, but usually no blood. In the first episode alone, Ming's hand gets chopped off at the wrist without him spilling a single drop of blood, an oddity made all the more apparent when Bob applies a makeshift tourniquet to the bloodless stump.
• The Brute: Les Hénaurmes, a trio of tall, large, and strong henchmen in Xhatan's service.
• Body Backup Drive: One of the major villains (Ming/the Yellow Shadow) dies over and over and returns every time. Return of the Yellow Shadow reveals he has a machine which duplicates him, destroyed by Tania during the ending. The next episode, Puppets of the Yellow Shadow, reveals he has at least another one and a duplication error spawned two Ming clones (a normal one and an insane one — the latter being the episode's actual villain).

• Chekhov's News: Early in Teeth of the Tiger, Bob, Bill, Sophia, and Clairembart are watching the news and learn it's the fourth time a famous athlete has disappeared. They have been captured by Staggart, who intend to mix there genes (and some of other genius or physically fit persons) to create a race of supermen.
• Code Name: In Operation Wolf code names Eagle and Bear are used for Bob and Bill.
• Continuity Nod: In Sword of the Paladin, the antagonists are the identical ancestors of Les Hénaurmes.^note The show doesn't have much continuity outside of its story arcs, this being a notable exception (this isn't a Doctor Xhatan but a Time Patrol episode).
• Cool Car: Bob's Jaguar E-Type convertible seen in several episodes.
• Demoted to Extra: While Bill is usually the Deuteragonist and Sophia is relatively prominent in the episodes featuring her, The Perils of Ananke (the second Ananke episode) has them having a very peripheral role while the core of the adventure is solely focused on Bob. Bob is separated from the rest of the party early in the episode after accidentally activating a hidden Ananke teleporter, after which Bill and Sophia scenes only features them progressing through the mountain in order to catch up with Bob, which eventually happens in the episode's ending.
• Don't Call Me "Sir": A Running Gag: Bob often asks his friend Bill to stop calling him "commander" but Bill keeps doing it anyway.
• Dragon Lady: Miss Ylang-Ylang, a suave Asian woman leading the Smog terrorist organization.
• Enemy Mine: The climax of Puppets of the Yellow Shadow has Bob and Ming teaming up against an insane clone of Ming.
• Evil Duo: Smog's top agents, cool-headed Miss Ylang-Ylang and bloodthirsty Orgonetz.

• Extremely Short Timespan: Sort of. According to Bill and Sophia's perspective when they catch up with him at the end of The Perils of Ananke, Bob has been separated from them for at most a dozen minutes (which is close to the real time lenght of the events out-of-universe). Considering it happened in the Ananke dimension, nothing says time passed at the same speed during Bob's own lone adventure.

• Good Guns, Bad Guns: Mooks of the various villains often wield MP40, a World War II-era SMG emblematic of Nazi Germany.

• Identical Grand Son: Les Hénaurmes, of all people, have aristocratic ancestors who lived during The Middle Ages.
• Intrepid Reporter: Sophia Paramount searches for stories. And finds them.

• Large and in Charge: Ming. Also Orgonetz, despite his short stature.
• Leeroy Jenkins: When Bob is around, Orgonetz tends to forget about anything else.
• Light Is Not Good: Doctor Joseph-Athanase Xhatan is a genocidal madman attempting to conquer the world (sometimes with weaponized light), who referred himself as "son of Ra" and "Master of Light".
• Living Statue: The Crown of Golconda has stone soldiers fron Gengis Khan's tomb attacking the team.

• Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: Well actually, Tania Orloff is Ming's niece.
• Master of Disguise: The terrorist leader Staggart always wear Latex Perfection masks (sometimes several different ones in the same episode) and has several public identities (a CIA agent, a businessman...). The audience can instantly recognize him thanks to his metallic ring finger and his mismatched eyes, however.
• Mistaken for Aliens: In Solar System Sentinels, the eponymous organisation is a UFO-worshipping malevolent cult who mistakes the Time Patrol for actual aliens due to their time travelling vehicle looking exactly like a flying saucer.
• Monkey Morality Pose: The MacGuffin of Three Little Monkeys is the chemical formula for a cancer miracle cure, which the characters find hidden in a tiny statue of three monkeys set in a familar pose.

• Nebulous Evil Organisation: In several episodes (including the episode it appears in the show), Smog is trying to perform terror acts of terrorism with weapons of mass destruction for unspecified reasons.
• No Antagonist: The Dinosaur Hunters has Bob, Bill, and Sophia trapped in the Mesozoic Era and is the only episode lacking a sapient villain (the problems the cast run into are encounters with dinosaurs). The faceless man ominously watching them from afar in several shots turns out to be Louis Graigh of the Time Patrol, a friendly time traveller and scholar who brings them back to their original era.
• No Ending: The Yellow Shadow arc ends with Ming still having a functional body duplication machine somewhere (the remaining one shown in the end of Return of the Yellow Shadow — the arc's penultimate episode — isn't destroyed in the finale). The last shot of the arc's final episode (Puppets of the Yellow Shadow) explicitly shows Ming is still alive.
• Obviously Evil: Smog operative Orgonetz is short ugly man with a long pointy nose, disheveled hair, golden teeth, eyebags, and a jerkass behaviour.
• Our Presidents Are Different: The unammed US President featured in Vapours from the Past is a combination of President Target (the episode climax has Smog attacking one of his meeting with a hallucinogenic gas) and President Personable (he is very nice during his interaction with Bob and Bill once the threat is terminated). The character looks more or less like Bill Clinton (the real life president at the time the series was made) recreated in the series' artstyle.
• Palette Swap: Excluding their leaders, the Angels of Ananke all share the same facial features with various hair color, which is obvious in crowd scenes.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: The animated series is based on Henry Vernes' novels but the stories are often streamlined or altered in order to fit 20 minutes. Sofia and Clairembart appear in adventures where they are originally absent to keep a consistent main cast.
• Previously on…: Mostly averted (there's no much continuity in the show), with a couple of exceptions:
  • The Ananke episodes (minus the first one) all open on a summary of the previous one's events.
  • Revenge of the Yellow Shadow opens with such a montage too (the only non-Ananke episode to do so), due to the previous episode ending with Ming (seemingly) killing Bob.

• Red Herring: In Operation Wolf, Xhatan gets information on the superweapon he intends to steal thanks to a mole. The obvious suspects are the people who knew the leaked information, meaning either the unpleasant and obstructive head of security, or the lead scientist's sister (who disappears at a suspicious time) beside the head scientist himeslf. In the end, the "mole" is revealed to be the head scientist's pet dog, who has a camera in her eyes. In the summation scene in the ending, Bob (who found out by himself who the mole really was) seemingly pointed at the scientist's sister... except the dog was sitting on her lap.

• Red Right Hand: Staggart has mismatched eyes and a metallic prosthetic replacing his right ring finger's upper phalanx.
• Side Kick: Morane is quite often in company of William "Bill" Ballantine, a former airplane mechanic and companion from World War II.
• Skyward Scream: Orgonetz tends to do this when Bob outsmarts him.
• The Starscream: Orgonetz clearly doesn't enjoy taking orders from Miss Ylang-Ylang.
• Story Arc:
  • The four Ananke episodes are the straightest example of the show, with a clear beginning (Bob and Bill end up trapped in Ananke while investigating Sophia's disappearance — itself caused by her investigating her uncle's) and end (Bob, Bill, Sophia, and her uncle eventually manage to get back to their original dimension). The show's episodes had two distinct broadcast orders depending on the run, both had broadcasted the Ananke's arc as consecutive episodes.^note In the first run, the series ended with the Ananke arc.
  • The six Yellow Shadow episodes also have a clear beginning (The Crown of Golconda being the first encounter between Bob and Ming) and a clear plot progression. The episode aren't broadcasted consecutively in the various runs. There's no real ending, as Ming is revealed to be still alive in the finale episode's final shot.^note The series second run starts and ends with Yellow Shadow's episodes.
  • Downplayed with the rest of the series. The remaining episodes can be sorted in four loose arcs determined by the organisation the heroes interact with: either villains (Smog, Staggart, Doctor Xhatan) or allies (the Time Patrol). Each of those arcs have a clear beginning (the organisation's first encounter with the heroes) but no much continuity beside this, and the arcs' latter episodes can be watched in any order.^note The series first run starts with Terror at Manicouagan, the first episode of the Smog "arc".
• Terrible Trio: Les Hénaurmes, three identical recurring goons employed by Xhatan.
• The Professor: Professor Aristide Clairembart is just that.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Morane tries not to kill his villains.
• Trapped in Another World: In the Ananke arc, Bob, Bob and Sophia ends up in the fantastic world of Ananke and must rescue Sophia's uncle and find their way home.
• Villainous Gold Tooth: Orgonetz, the bloodthirsty half of Smog's top agent Evil Duo, has a whole mouthful of gold teeth.
• Weaponized Car: In the first episode, Ming tries to escape Bob Morane with a car full of weapons.

• You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious: Bill utters Bob's name only once in the series. At the end of "Revenge of the Yellow Shadow" when he believes Ming killed Bob and swears revenge.

---