The New Adventures of Black Beauty

The New Adventures of Black Beauty was a television drama series produced in the early 1990s. The show was produced first in New Zealand, then in Australia. The two different productions had different characters and plotlines, un-related except through the horse, Black Beauty. The first season of the show was produced 1990-1991 by Isambard (Black Beauty) Productions Ltd in association with The Fremantle Corporation, and Beta Taurus produced the series primarily in New Zealand as a continuation of the 1972-1974 television drama series, The Adventures of Black Beauty. Set 20 years after the events of the earlier series, it featured two of the original characters, Dr James Gordon (played by William Lucas) and Jenny Gordon Denning (played by Stacy Dorning). The series was originally aired on ITV in the United Kingdom, and Isambard Productions Ltd produced 26 episodes in total. This production was subsequently aired in the US, where it was split into two seasons, aired in a different order, and with two episodes ("Horsepower" and "Horse Sense") possibly omitted in some markets. In 1992, The Fremantle Corporation moved production to Australia with what was for all practical purposes an entirely new series with new characters and a plotline unrelated to the previous episodes. The only connection to earlier works is the use of material from the final episode of the 1990-1991 production, reworked and with a voice-over explaining that Beauty had been released into the Australian wild. This was shown at the beginning of the first episode of the new production. Though video of the first production has been marketed on its own, the two productions are now being marketed on DVD and in syndication as a single television series, with the 1990-91 production billed as "Season 1" and the 1992 production billed as "Season 2". In July 2009, Retro Television Network picked up all 104 episodes of The Adventures of Black Beauty (produced in England) and The New Adventures of Black Beauty (both the New Zealand and Australian seasons), and affiliates began airing them in sequence, listing all 104 episodes as simply Black Beauty. In the United Kingdom and some other countries, both seasons of the New Adventures were shown on Horse & Country TV (Sky Channel 253) between 2014 and 2016.