El Chavo del Ocho | |
---|---|
Also known as | El Chavo |
Genre | Sitcom |
Created by | Roberto Gómez Bolaños |
Written by | Roberto Gómez Bolaños |
Starring |
Roberto Gómez Bolaños Carlos Villagran Ramón Valdés Florinda Meza Rubén Aguirre Edgar Vivar Angelines Fernández Horacio Gómez Bolaños Raúl 'Chato' Padilla María Antonieta de las Nieves |
Opening theme | "The Elephant Never Forgets" by Jean-Jacques Perrey |
Country of origin | Mexico |
Original language(s) | Spanish |
No. of seasons | 8 |
No. of episodes | 290(list of episodes) |
Production | |
Camera setup | Multi-camera |
Running time | 21–26 minutes |
Release | |
Original release | 20 June 1971 – 6 January 1980 |
Chronology | |
Related shows |
El Chavo: The Animated Series 30 Anos de Chaves |
El Chavo del Ocho (often shortened to El Chavo) is a Mexican television sitcom that gained enormous popularity in Hispanic America as well as in Brazil, Spain, United States, and other countries. It centers on the adventures and tribulations of the title character—a poor orphan nicknamed "El Chavo" (which means "The Lad"), played by the show's creator, Roberto Gómez Bolaños "Chespirito"—and other inhabitants of a fictional low income housing complex, or, as called in Mexico, vecindad. Its theme song is "The Elephant Never Forgets" by Jean-Jacques Perrey, based on Beethoven's "Turkish March" Op. 113.
El Chavo first appeared in 1971 as a sketch in the Chespirito show which was produced by Televisión Independiente de México (TIM). In 1973, following the merger of TIM and Telesistema Mexicano, it was transmitted by Televisa and became a weekly half-hour series, which ran until 1980. After that year, shorts continued to be shown in Chespirito until 1992. At its peak of popularity during the mid-1970s, it was the most watched show in Mexican television and had a Latin American audience of 350 million viewers per episode.
The Portuguese dub, Chaves, has been broadcast inferredly by Brazilian TV Network SBT since 1984, and is also seen on the Brazilian versions of Cartoon Network and Boomerang. Since 2 May 2011, it has aired in the United States on the UniMás network. It previously aired on sister network Univision and its predecessor, the Spanish International Network. It spawned an animated series titled El Chavo Animado.