A Town Called Panic: Back to School Panic!

A Town Called Panic (French: Panique au village, lit. 'Panic at the Village') is a French-language Belgian stop-motion animated sitcom created by Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar for La Parti and Pic Pic André. It follows the everyday events of the characters Cowboy, Indian and Horse who live together in a small rural town as they go about their lives. The animation is designed to appear crude, as if done by a child (the characters evoke the look of cheap toy figurines) and the events of the characters' daily lives are extremely surreal and slapstick. The first A Town Called Panic was a four-minute short film premiered in 1991. Its concept was developed into a television series, which was first broadcast from 2002 to 2003 and consists of 20 episodes each of roughly five minutes long (though some stations have broadcast them in 15- or 30-minute blocks). An English-language dub of the television series episodes was created and sold internationally by Aardman Animations. A spin-off feature film, again titled A Town Called Panic, was completed in spring 2009 and debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May of the same year. In 2013, the half-hour Christmas special "The Christmas Log" was made, which received an English dub that aired on CBBC in 2014 under the title "A Christmas Panic". The English dub for this special used different voice actors than the dub for the original series. In 2016 a new 3-minute short "The Noise of Grey" and later a half-hour special "Back to School!" were premiered, and a package film of "The Christmas Log" and "Back to School!" was released to cinemas worldwide under the name A Town Called Panic: Double Fun. A short called "The County Fair" was released in 2019 and a short called "The Summer Holidays" was released in 2021. A Town Called Panic has been broadcast worldwide on channels such as ABC Rollercoaster in Australia, Nicktoons Network in the United States, EBS in South Korea, and Teletoon in Canada, and it was available for online viewing on Atom.com. In the United Kingdom, A Town Called Panic aired on Nickelodeon. Much of the characters and scenery were later recycled for a series of adverts for Cravendale Milk that aired from 2007 to 2010, using a pirate, a cow and a bicyclist as the characters.