stylistic:tone
El Chavo; — also known as El Chavo del Ocho during its earliest episodes – is a Mexican television sitcom series created by Roberto Gómez Bolaños (Chespirito) and produced by Televisa. It premiered on February 26, 1973 and ended on January 7, 1980, after 8 seasons and 290 episodes, and aired across Latin America and Spain. The series theme song is a rendition of Ludwig van Beethoven's Turkish March, rearranged by Jean-Jacques Perrey and retitled “The Elephant Never Forgets”. A poor orphan known as "El Chavo", played by the show's creator, Roberto Gómez Bolaños (Chespirito), is the main character of the series. It chronicles his adventures and tribulations, and those of his friends, frequently leading to comedic confrontations among the other residents of a fictional low-income housing complex, or "neighborhood," as it is known in Mexico. Chespirito, produced by Televisión Independiente de México (TIM), debuted El Chavo as a skit in 1971. Produced by Televisa, it began as a weekly half-hour series in 1973 after Telesistema Mexicano and TIM merged. The show continued until 1980 when it became a segment of Chespirito. Up until 1992, Chespirito exhibited shorts after that year. In the mid 1970s, the show was averaging 350 million Latin American viewers per episode, leading the cast to global tours and public performances. Chaves, a Brazilian Portuguese dub, has been broadcast by Brazilian TV Network SBT since 1984, and has been featured on Brazilian versions of Cartoon Network, Boomerang and Multishow, and in the United States it has aired on UniMás since May 2, 2011, following its previous airing on Univision and Spanish International Network. The series spawned an animated version titled El Chavo Animado, which aired from October 21, 2006 to June 6, 2014, just a few months before Bolaños' death. El Chavo continues to be popular with syndicated episodes averaging 91 million daily viewers in all of the markets where it is distributed in the Americas. Since it ceased production in 1992, it has earned an estimated US$1.7 billion in syndication fees alone for Televisa. El Chavo was also available on Netflix in the United States, but was removed on December 31, 2019.