Picture this: you’re a child suffering through another boring day at school. The teacher has decided to just take things easy for the day, and she thus grabs her little stick to pull down the classroom’s projector curtain. Within a moment, you, already busy doodling in your notebook as usual, hear that iconic rendition of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor. You lift your head and see the formation of the Earth, the evolution of life from single-celled organisms to your own species, the evolution of technology and civilization, all culminating in a shot of countless people racing to get in the last rocket to outer space before our planet Earth returns to molten rock — all animated in a beautiful 1970s style.

That’s right, baby, you’re watching Once Upon a Time… series for the umpteenth time! No matter how many times this series gets shown in class, you never get tired of the adventures of Maestro and friends as they explore world history, the human body, outer space, climate change, what-have-ye.

This series is very nostalgic for myself and certainly many others, and I just so happen to also be looking for more stuff we can watch together for the 11 PM CET timeslot, now that Carcharodonna’s started organizing Columbo nights on Fridays and I’ve already been doing MLP:FiM on Saturdays for a month now. So I figured, why not Once Upon a Time…? Just like with MLP:FiM, I’m expecting this old French cartoon to have more than a fair share of problematic elements in hindsight, so we can use this as an opportunity to comb through whatever brainworms we may have acquired from this series as children.

Once Upon a Time… series consists of the following shows, each with 26 half-hour episodes:

Once Upon a Time… Man — 1978 / world history in general

Once Upon a Time… Space — 1982 / science fiction, showing humanity’s future

Once Upon a Time… Life — 1987 / human body (cf. Cells at Work)

Once Upon a Time… The Americas — 1992 / history of Abya Yala

Once Upon a Time… The Discoverers — 1994 / famous scientists, inventors, etc

Once Upon a Time… The Explorers — 1996 / famous explorers, probably the most dubious of the shows but I don’t remember watching it anyways

Once Upon a Time… Planet Earth — 2008 / climate change, nature conservation, other current issues

There is also a new show which began in 2023 of at present 78 shorts, each 7 minutes in length, called Once Upon a Time… The Objects — which explains the histories of everyday objects. However, given The Objects’ radical departure from the formula and style of the other shows; the lack of involvement from Barillé, who died in 2009; and the fact that “Israel” is listed as one of the countries of origin; I’m not particularly interested in watching it.