Little Shop is a 1991 kids cartoon adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors (legally, the original 60s movie which was public domain by that point, but referencing the musical and 80s movie whenever they could get away with it) that was aired on Fox Kids and La Cinq (a now defunct French television network) and co-produced by Marvel Productions and Saban Entertainment. It ran for a single season of 13 episodes, each 30 minutes long, and until fairly recently, was almost entirely lost media. The full show was only found and uploaded to Youtube in 2017, with the exception of one episode, which had not been found with its original English audio and had only been found dubbed into German. It wasn't until 2023 that the English episode was found and released.

The show couldn't by any means be described as *good* by any sort of technical standard (low budget animation, cliche plots, strange writing), but I find the show absolutely fascinating and really enjoy it because the worldbuilding is truly bizarre. I consider it an entirely separate universe and story to any of the other adaptations in the franchise, because the changes to the characters made in order to adapt them to a kids cartoon are fairly drastic. It compels me.

My favorite aspect of this show is that the broad scope worldbuilding is absolutely batshit insane. Junior is a reanimated prehistoric plant, and the show invents an entire period of the fossil record called the "Vegezoic Era" that took place right before the Mesozoic Era, during which the dominant life on Earth was ambulatory, thinking, predatory plants, and the early ancestors of the dinosaurs were often prey items for them. This is presented in a natural history museum that Seymour goes to as an incontrovertible fact about the world of this show that is common scientific knowledge. The show brings up the fact that Junior is the last of his kind, thrust into a future that is confusing and frightening to him, and cannot return to his home that no longer exists and he is intensely homesick for. He also legitimately does not understand that plants are no longer sentient other than him and reacts very strongly to perceived mistreatment and injustices against plants as if they are thinking beings. He has a capacity for romance and in one episode falls in love with a regular Venus flytrap. At one point he makes a passing comment to Seymour implying that he considers being a man and being a plant to be mutually exclusive. The fact that the show is so consistent about his primary character motivation being homesickness for a world long gone is something I find extremely compelling. The relationship between him and Seymour is also something I really like. Although Junior can be aloof, bossy, and abrasive, he shows when it counts that he really does care for Seymour, and acts like a kind of big brother or mentor figure. The one time in the show where Junior is implied to eat a person is when a man tries to kill Seymour by dropping a piano on him. Junior, deep down, is kindhearted.

The last two episodes of the show have surprisingly emotional plotlines; one of them is about deforestation and environmentalism and the other is about Mr. Mushnik remarrying and Audrey struggling with feeling like she's being replaced as her dad's most important person. I understand why the show was cancelled (it just wasn't good or popular), but these episodes in particular make me long for what could have been if they had gotten more time to write the show and found a groove with it.

The show was initially pitched to the network in April 1991, with a pitch bible credited to Mark Edward Edens. The pitch bible has a few notable differences from the version of the show that actually ended up being produced. Seymour is described as having a father who is a mortician, who never appears in the final version, a side character named DeeDee who is an annoying 6 year old Seymour is forced to babysit is described who never appears, and Junior is depicted as somewhat more sinister in motivation (he wants plants to take the world back over, and eats more people). The concluding page of the pitch bible had this to say:



Well, I'll give it to them, the show is definitely unique, funny, and odd. Probably not in the ways they were intending, but true nonetheless.

Roger Corman, the director of the original 60s movie, was brought onto the show as a creative consultant. The show references the movie with some regularity (Junior's full name, the background character guy who eats flowers, Junior's ability to suggest people with "seeds of ideas", etc). Mel Welles, who played Mr. Mushnik in the movie, expressed in an interview published in "Welcome To The Little Shop Of Horrors" issue 3 (1995) by Cosmic Comics that he was disappointed that he was unable to reprise the role in the show, because he had voiced characters in other Saban productions, but all the voice acting for the show was outsourced to Canada.



There is really not a lot of information readily available about this show's production, because none of its IP holders have ever actually claimed it or acknowledged its existence past its initial airing. Some of the voice actors credited for the show have seemingly no other voice acting roles and no information about them online. For instance, Junior's singing and rapping is credited to Terry "Proffet" McGee, who has absolutely zero information about him online except in the credits of this show. There is, however, someone in the comments of a few of the Youtube uploads claiming that he's their uncle. I have no idea if this is true or how to contact that commenter to verify. Here's what they said, though:



I've also found an art dealer that is selling production cels from the show. If anyone wants a cel of Junior making a weird face for ~$60, you can get one here.

I was very obsessed with and emotionally attached to Little Shop when I was like 15-16. I had on my Carrd that I kinned this show's version of Seymour. I made the hat he wears in the show and wore it in public. Me and my best friend developed this elaborate headcanon world/future timeline for the world of the show where we decided that Junior had lived during the very tail end of the fossil era he was from and had gone into hibernation as a result of the extinction event that ended it, and had had a partner and kid who he thought were gone forever but it actually turned out his kid also went into hibernation and they were reunited. It was very dramatic and angsty. The kid was named JJ which was short for Junior Junior. I started writing a fanfiction about this but lost focus and never finished it. Here's some of my old art from roughly this time period.

Here are a couple of video edits of the show I made. The YTP was posted multiple years after I made it because it has Swearing! in it and I thought my mom would get mad.