What was The Bill & Hill Adventure Hour?
In 1997, the ratings for The Adventures of Bill & Hill and Friends were so high that the network pressured the studio (Any Nation Animation) into producing a full hour of animation for Saturday morning. Thus was created The Bill & Hill Adventure Hour. The hour consisted of one half-hour program as usual, followed by two 11-minute cartoons starring Socks the Flying Cat. Only rarely did any of the White House Elementary School characters make an appearance in the Socks cartoons. The 11-minute segments were designed and animated by a division of Any Nation Animation that was created specifically for the task and did not follow the style, look, or feel of the original series. While Socks remained a very popular character, these 11-minute shorts did not catch on and were dropped the following season. One of the 11-minute shorts (“Flying and Frying”) was shown in cinemas before Any Nation Animation’s first feature film, the animated version of the Hans Christian Andersen tale The Girl Who Tr
