Beetlejuice [Animated TV Series] on AllMovie

Based on the 1988 live-action film directed by Tim Burton, the half hour animated TV series Beetlejuice featured one of the butt-ugliest title characters ever seen in any medium. Played in the original film by Michael Keaton, Beetlejuice was a yellow-haired, snaggle-toothed, profane, lecherous bug-eating con artist from the Realm of the Dead--known in the TV version as the Neitherworld. Cleaned up considerably for TV consumption, the cartoon Beetlejuice was an incorrigible but lovable prankster, the best friend of solemn-faced preteen Lydia Deetz, a mortal girl from what he called the Outerworld. Together, Beetlejuice (or "BJ" as he was known) and Lydia made regular journeys into the Daliesque Neitherworld to confront a variety of bizarre and grotesque good and bad guys. And whenever BJ decided to venture in the Outerworld, he adopted the human guise of Betty Juice and helped Lydia contend with such antagonists as schoolteacher Miss Shannon and the insufferable Claire. The series contained an abundance of pop-culture gags, some of them offered in the form of mixed-media commercial parodies created by Calibre Digital Designs. In later episodes, certain popular films, TV shows and literary works were mercilessly ragged with the help of BJ's "Magic juicing finger" (You don't want to know)! When it originally debuted on September 9, 1989, Beetlejuice was seen on ABC's Saturday morning schedule. Even while the show was still in first-run on ABC, a new batch of 65 episodes were broadcast by the Fox network on a weekday basis. The Emmy-winning ABC version of Beetlejuice ended its run in September of 1991, while the Fox version closed up show exactly two years later.