"Betty Toons"
 | | "Yo soy Betty, la fea" inspired this cartoon series, which was animated by a Bogotá company called Conexión Creativa. The series featured juvenile versions of many characters from the telenovela, and it primarily focused on the situations that little Betty and her best friend Nicolás had gotten themselves into with their peers at school, who were all younger counterparts of Betty's EcoModa co-workers. Even though YSBLF viewers all know that the telenovela characters hadn't all known each other since childhood, the cartoon series took poetic license with the characters' personal histories. In the animated version they were all schoolmates together and, apparently, they were all exactly the same age. |
| Armando, Marcela, Patricia, the cuartel, and many other characters were represented. Other than Betty's parents, the only characters from YSBLF to be portrayed as adults were Gutiérrez, who was now a short-tempered teacher, and Inesita, who was now the bus driver. The only big absence from the list of YSBLF characters was that of designer Hugo Lombardi, because producers of the animated stories didn't know how to address (or not to address) the character's homosexuality, even though, presumably, sexuality wouldn't be an issue among pre-pubescent characters. "Betty Toons" followed a tendency among popular American cartoon franchises to launch infantalized versions of their characters (e.g. "Tiny Toon Adventures," "Muppet Babies," etc.). | |  |
The idea for telling stories about Betty's childhood came to creator Fernando Gaitán in 2000 when a young girl showed up at the RCN studio one day dressed as little Betty. The girl was Alejandra Botero, the niece of Mary Cecilia Botero, widow of Argentine director David Stivel. As December 2000 approached, RCN executives were looking for a program to fill YSBLF's time slot during the Christmas holiday hiatus. Gaitán decided to create five episodes that would feature children portraying the YSBLF characters, with Alejandro Botero playing Betty, and her sister, Juliana Botero, playing Patricia.
This concept later led to the creation of the cartoon, which utilized the same young actors and actresses from the five special episodes, who would now provide the vocal performances for their characters' animated counterparts.
In the United States, the Cartoon Network premiere of "Betty Toons" was on November 7, 2004, but the program had originally aired on RCN in Colombia.
Liliana Guzman and Hector Alejandro Moncada wrote the scripts for the cartoon series, with Sandra Rita Paba and Marina Guerra as script supervisors. Animation was supervised at Conexión Creativa by Hernán Zajec and Maribel Echeverry.
Cast:
Alejandra Botero
Juliana Botero
Denise M. Gimenez
Juan Alberto Gaviria
Heide Arizala
Paula Andrea Martinez | ...
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... | Betty
Patricia
Marcela
Armando
Mariana
Bertha |
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