Courage the Cowardly Dog is an award-winning American animated television series, created by John R. Dilworth, who directed each episode, about a dog named Courage and his owners Muriel Bagge, a kindly old Scottish woman, and Eustace Bagge, a grumpy old farmer, living together in a farmhouse in the middle of the fictional town of Nowhere, Kansas (often described as The Middle of Nowhere).
Courage the Cowardly Dog revolves around the exploits of Courage, a small, fuchsia dog who, despite his name, is afraid of the most mundane things; his fears, however, are usually warranted: Eustace, Muriel, and Courage are constantly attacked by (or run into) various monsters, aliens, villains, curses, experiments, natural disasters, and other forms of peril that Courage must face.
Every opening of the show documents Courage's past: "Abandoned as a pup, he was found by Muriel, who lives in the middle of Nowhere with her husband Eustace Bagge. But creepy stuff happens in Nowhere; it's up to Courage to save his new home."
In the series, when Courage wants to save his family from the villain, instead of typical feats of strength, he sometimes faces off the villain in a game, usually something juvenile and simple such as dodgeball, table tennis or a staring contest, in which Courage always loses. The villain is then defeated in various ways: Courage tricks the villain, he flees from them, makes amends with the villain, somehow convinces the villain to change, Muriel saves the day, or in some cases, the villain is not defeated and is plotting another diabolical scheme.
n 1999, Cartoon Network gave Dilworth the okay to turn the short into a series. It was originally supposed to be created at Hanna-Barbara Studios, but Dilworth wanted it at his Stretch Films Studios. The show had ran successfully until its cancellation in 2002. It had 4 seasons, with 13 episodes in each. The show stopped airing on November 22, 2002; however, the following year in 2003, when it was said a fifth season for the show was up for consideration, a large number of fans compiled an online petition, aimed directly at Cartoon Network for said possible fifth season, however, the petition was never sent in to the network, and the network decided not to renew the four-year contract for the series, thus marking the end of the cowardly dog. That same year, however, there had been talks about two new "Courage" projects: one of which was a CD soundtrack, produced by the series' composer Jody Gray, consisting of the popular songs, and music scores from the series. The second new Courage project that had been proposed was a possible feature-length movie (whether it would have been a made-for-TV movie, or a theatrical movie hadn't been discussed); though, neither of the two projects saw the light of day.
