I went and skimmed through some episodes from a few different seasons of the French version and he was referred to as Gilbert (pronounced ʒil.bɛʁ). Unless perhaps there's an alternate French version too?
I was watching the French version on that day and they referred to the cat as "Charlie" That's what I thought it was in the English version too, but maybe I'm wrong? I don't know if there's a Québécois version and a Parisian French version or what.
I'm guessing it was the Quebec dub that called him Gilbert (unless the original books also referred to him as Charlie).
I have another theory. If the Charlie version was made around the time the show was ending in 2010, maybe they were trying to redub/remake the show for a new batch of kids. It could have been given to different areas to try out in certain markets. They changed Caillou's name because of all the negative opinions about the show. (Caillou was and still is considered to be one of the worst cartoons ever) It might have done well so PBS decided to keep airing Caillou for 11 more years. IDK that's just my theory but I think the other ones are believable too.
No idea but maybe it was changed name Charley because agreeing with Lsupersonicq here to avoid illegal action. Or they just wanted to test a better version of Calliou and see how people would react to it. Probably a change in formatting and stuff.
I do agree with the theory that it could have been a test to market the show to American audiences. Caillou is a hard word, especially when you're a 5 year old watching the show, so it makes a lot of sense they would try to change the name, But I have a add-on theory. What if it's something we weren't supposed to see? What if it was a test for the crew who worked on the show only to see if a dub would be worth it but it accidentally got mixed up in production as a regular episode so they aired it unknowingly. That would explain why it was the only "Charlie" dubbed episode because the crew decided that changing the name wouldn't be worth it
I do agree with the theory that it could have been a test to market the show to American audiences. Caillou is a hard word, especially when you're a 5 year old watching the show, so it makes a lot of sense they would try to change the name, But I have a add-on theory. What if it's something we weren't supposed to see? What if it was a test for the crew who worked on the show only to see if a dub would be worth it but it accidentally got mixed up in production as a regular episode so they aired it unknowingly. That would explain why it was the only "Charlie" dubbed episode because the crew decided that changing the name wouldn't be worth it
I don't think I personally believe the theory that it was accidentally placed on the service and removed before anyone could document it, however if that was the case I wouldn't be surprised. The biggest problem we had with this search were the lack of leads and not having any idea where to even begin looking for people to contact.
This is probably one of my favorite topics on the forum so I'm interested in picking it back up, I kinda forgot it existed over the past few months. It's one of those topics that gets pushed down the thread list because of how scarce information is which leads to a very drawn out search. Kinda reminds me of The Big Comfy Couch Xbox game and how that search took forever to get through before On The Hunt simply because we didn't have much to work with.
I was watching the French version on that day and they referred to the cat as "Charlie" That's what I thought it was in the English version too, but maybe I'm wrong? I don't know if there's a Québécois version and a Parisian French version or what.
I'm guessing it was the Quebec dub that called him Gilbert (unless the original books also referred to him as Charlie).
I distinctly remember the cat's name being Gilbert, and the Caillou Fandom Wiki and Wikipedia can back me up on that.