The ‘80s and ‘90s were filled with strange animated programmes. Besides the half-hour toy commercials in the forms of He-Man and Rainbow Brite, there were Saturday morning cartoons for such bizarre properties as Rambo and The Toxic Avenger series, the source materials being completely inappropriate for the children watching their colourful counterparts on the weekends. Sure we had some great shows like Animaniacs and Goof Troop, but we also had the absurd adaptation of The Mighty Ducks featuring anthropomorphic ducks that played hockey and fought crime in hockey themed superhero personas. Who was smoking what at Disney to create that thing?
It was in this stew of some great, wholesome shows and many thirty-minute gonzo advertisements that I first encountered an animation that would come to perplex me for the next twenty-six years. It was typical for the time, apart from lacking excessive gross-out comedy (for you young whippersnappers reading this, the ‘90s loved gross humour in pretty much everything). What was most notable about this show was how sparsely it aired, and that it had a really catchy theme song. It was centred around sports of all kinds and I remember how there were at least one or two background trees that looked exactly like soccer balls with light and dark green pentagons to imitate that design. There were also a few buildings in establishing shots made to look like athletic shoes.
The main character was something that, in my memory at least, resembled an ant. The character design and animation style were distinctly Western; this was not an anime. The design of the characters was also out of style with Hanna-Barbera, even in this period, ruling out The Laugh Olympics and possibly any other show the studio had produced. This had to have aired a few years before A Bug’s Life and Antz (both 1998 titles) and it was not computer animated.
While I was able to describe the most basic aspects of this cartoon, I could not remember its name. It had come back to me maybe a year or two later after another phantom airing during the summer, and my sister and I both pledged that we would never forget it again, but that only lasted a few weeks or months before it was once more burned away in the Memory Hole. Even the Internet seemed incapable of solving this mystery once my household got online in the fall of 2001.
Every now and then I would try to hunt this animation down, only to be met with bottomless pits and completely wrong answers. It was not Sport Billy and I had simply misremembered the main character; this was clearly a show about a professional athlete who was also an ant or something along those lines, and the animation was much smoother. It was not Hurricanes, though in this case the series has a rocking earworm of a theme song, it is not the same. Also, the main characters were, again, ants. Maybe.
In the summer of 2011, Nickelodeon launched The ‘90s Are All That (renamed to The Splat and now exclusive to Paramount+) where gems from that era were aired at and after midnight on the TeenNick channel, and it quickly blew up on social media as all of us aging Millennials began crying in a cacophony of childhood nostalgia that probably blinded us to the horrifying return of authoritarianism around the world. Cool. I used this opportunity to talk with other ‘80s and ‘90s kids in the hopes of finding the name to the mystery sports cartoon, and was quite vehemently told that it could be nothing other than Captain Tsubasa, an anime of which I had never heard. This series did not match my description in the slightest, yet protesting this answer resulted in some pretty nasty comments. Oh social media, were you ever a mistake!
At least two or three times a year, I would scour the Web in a desperate attempt to find the name of this cartoon before the few details remaining in my memory dissipated. It was only in the last few years that I discovered the concept of lost media and the user base dedicated to finding everything from obscure animations to a song that has been baffling the Internet for over ten years. I guess the latter has too powerful an allure as even this subculture either showed no interest in my cartoon or were too dedicated to tracking down an evil farming game that, as it turns out, never existed.
Last year, I had a little free time in between projects and decided to browse the Lost Media Wiki’s animation section, going through titles in alphabetical order for anything that could possibly be related to sports or jog my memory in some way. I had barely even begun my quest when I felt a surge run through my limbs as I navigated the “B” titles. One had jumped out, and after opening the page I honestly shouted aloud in excitement. There it was, after twenty-six years, a partially found Swiss cartoon called Bill Body: Crazy World of Sports in its English release.
Before I go any further, I have to admit my one major mistake and the likely reason as to why this was so damn hard to find: that is not an ant. I guess Bill and the other residents of Body Island are supposed to be very stylized humanoids of some sort, but they look more like worms with limbs or sentient colons. Not having seen anything regarding this show apart from two or three airings nearly thirty years ago has obviously affected my memory.
While the original production dates of this series are from 1992 through 1993, that is likely for the original German language version when the cartoon first aired in Switzerland before moving around Western Europe a little bit. The American adaptation has a copyright year of 1996, meaning that this was imported a little later for a network in need of content, or that it was originally aired as a special to coincide with the Summer Olympics in Atlanta that same year. Just what network was carrying it that summer remains a mystery, but it is not important.
A near three decades long journey has come to an end, and this time I swear I will not forget the title. I mean, it is only stated multiple times in the opening theme song. If only I had been able to remember the lyrics this entire saga could have been avoided. Oh, well. Now, as a special treat, here is a full episode of Bill Body: Crazy World of Sports for your enjoyment!