I was never a huge Kidd Video fan, but I was always struck by its powerful '80s vibe. It’s a perfect time capsule of the era, with music and an atmosphere that just scream 1980s, even if it wasn't the best cartoon out there.
My journey with the show started after I got a video upscaler and got addicted to restoring old home movies. I moved on to upscaling cartoons, and Kidd Video was a natural choice purely for the nostalgia.
When I started looking, I found that the only real hub for the show was an old fansite called Kidd Video Flipside (KVF), which had some incomplete episodes on YouTube. Every other source online was just a copy of their channel. I still today get copies of the show sent to me and they always end up being KVF's versions. I learned that due to the passing of one of its creators, the KVF YouTube channel and website were no longer active, leaving more archival work on it incompleted.
I was hooked by the fact that so much of the show was simply missing. We’re talking about 20 minutes of cartoon footage and more than half of the music videos just gone.
The episodes on the KVF channel weren't just missing scenes; they were mostly later versions of the show from 1986 and onward. The original 1984-85 run had different music videos that were later replaced or removed entirely. The KVF website had a list of songs, but it was incomplete, and many of the original music videos were unknown. Their site literally had a note asking, "if anyone remembers what music was played, please contact them."
So, I decided to restore the missing footage and upscale it. I'd seen other YouTubers start similar projects but give up without cleaning or upscaling the footage. As I began, I figured maybe I'd get lucky and find old tapes of the missing content on eBay or in some online forum.
I started by upscaling the first few episodes and posting them to YouTube. The response was incredibly positive. People offered help and resources, including two different foreign language versions of the show. One of these, the Spanish version, turned out to be the complete 1984-85 run with all the original music. Within a single day, I suddenly had all the missing footage I needed, just not in English.
At first, I used AI to generate the missing English dialogue, but I found it difficult and time-consuming, so I eventually relied more on subtitles. You can still find some of that AI-generated speech in my Kidd Video Restored versions.
As I worked, I wasn't thrilled with the fact that I was fundamentally changing the show by redubbing it and retooling the visuals. That’s why I decided to create a second version, Kidd Video Complete. This version has all the footage edited back together but features the original, unchanged dialogue and avoids aggressive HD upscaling. It’s meant to be a "true" version that's as "un-messed with" as possible. I waited until I was done with Kidd Video Restored first so I wouldn't lose focus.
The sound editing was a real challenge, especially restoring the original pop music. It’s a similar problem the show Daria had on its DVD release, where they replaced licensed music with generic tracks. Fans later restored the original soundtrack, and I was basically doing the same thing for a much older, more forgotten show. Using AI tools, I separated the English dialogue from its background music and laid in the original pop songs, using the Spanish version as a guide.
After a month of editing, I had finished every episode that was missing from the KVF collection. To give you an idea of the scope, 18 of the 26 episodes—nearly 70% of the series—needed to be re-edited. For the first time since the '80s, you can watch all of Kidd Video for free in English, uncut, and with its music restored.
Now that the edits are done, there's still more I'd like to do. With Kidd Video Complete existing as a "proper archive," I am free to treat Kidd Video Restored as playground to try to push the quality as high as I can make it. I still want to improve the visuals so they don't look so much like AI and remake the missing dialogue in a better way.
So anyway, if someone out there goes down the rabbit hole trying to figure out what happened to this show, my versions are now on YouTube and the Internet Archive. They fill in the blanks that have existed since the KVF site went down, which until now was the only real source of information we had.