Anyone remember Seabert the Seal (old French cartoon from the 80s?)

For reasons that are beyond me, when I was a little kid my parents used to give me videotapes of the show Seabert, which was a French (dubbed into English) kid’s cartoon with a very political, pro-environmentalist bent. It was about a little baby seal who accompanies two kids, Tommy and Aura (who was an Eskimo) on various adventures to stop poachers and polluters around the world. It was in the vein of Captain Planet but for a slightly younger audience.

The main things I remember about it were, 1. the very quirky, very 80s, very Moog-heavy soundtrack, and 2. the fact that Aura (a cute little Asian-looking girl who kind of resembled a thinner and older Dora the Explorer) was always getting into situations where she would be tied up by the bad guys. Seriously, like 1 out of every 3 episodes featured Aura being tied up, and I have no doubt whatsoever that this (along with Karate Kid Part II, which I watched all the time) contributed to my excitement at exotic-looking girls. (I was probably too young to appreciate the bondage angle, though I was quite amused by its prevalence when I re-watched some old tapes I’d found, two years ago.)

I have no idea what happened to those tapes; like many things, they were simply lost. I desire to have Seabert tapes again, so I will probably purchase them on Amazon (there are some available) and have a Seabert marathon. But mainly I’m wondering, did anyone else watch this damn show? Because every time I mention it to people my age, they have no idea what I’m talking about.

I remember, and watched the show a lot (although in my case the dubbing was in dutch) can still sing the dutch version of the opening tune too. I would say that most people my age know about it (but haven’t asked any). I just remember that in elementary school we talked about it a lot and made up alternative lyrics to the opening tune … the way kids do with replacing the normal words with anything ‘inappropriate’ we could think of.

After googling around a bit it seems the serie was especially popular in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Go to youtube and you’ll see they have the dutch version of the intro but I couldn’t find an english one. The wiki page in dutch is also bigger than the english wiki; trust me this very rarely happens and only with stuff that is very dutch.