If this show looks familiar to you, it's probably not because you've actually watched it before, but because it was made by Stephen Holman and Josephine T. Huang at (W)Holesome Products Inc., the same folks who created the "Life With Loopy" segments for Nickelodeon's KaBlam!. I can't be the only one who recalls finding those segments a little creepy, can I?
Well, creepy or not, you have to give Stephen and Josephine credit for the unique way they brought these shows to life: stop-motion animation, with cardboard heads, and even some live actors. Phantom Investigators focused on four thirteen-year-olds who lived in San Francisco: the telekinetic Jerico (voiced by Alecsander Kocev), the telepathic Kira (Amber Ross), the shapeshifting Casey (Andrew Decker), and the only one who DOESN'T have some supernatural power, Daemona Prune (Courtney Vineys). When they're not attending Lugosi Junior High School, they act as the Phantom Investigators, solving supernatural mysteries that occur all over town.
Thirteen episodes of the show were produced. Why only thirteen? Stephen Holman explained why in a podcast: the show was doing very well in its timeslot, but Kids' WB, the channel that it aired on, noticed that more girls were watching it than boys. They did not like this, thinking it was a threat to their status as the number one network for young boys, so they gave it the axe after six episodes (the remaining seven only aired overseas). Then Sony cut the show's funding, torpedoing the chance of it being picked up by another network.
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| The four lead characters. |
And here's another fun fact for you: some of the animators who worked on this show went on to animate for other productions like Coraline, Elf, The BoxTrolls, Robot Chicken, Jojo's Circus, and Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio.
If you want to watch the show for yourself, good luck. Apparently, episodes of the show were featured at SOME point on Sony's kid-oriented channel Indoor Recess, but now they're listed as unavaliable. Somebody did upload all thirteen episodes in a compilation video on YouTube, for those of you who want to binge the show in one day. There aren't any episodes on the Internet Archive, the show never had a home media release, and I doubt it's on any streaming services. You can also find two episodes via (W)Holesome Products Inc.'s Vimeo channel. We're going to watch the sixth episode of the show, "Omega Pizza Pi" (which, incidentally, was apparently written by the same person who wrote The Hunger Games - try to wrap your head around THAT one). This is Phantom Investigators.
