Nickelodeon's foray into anime-inspired programming during the mid-to-late 2000s was a fairly esoteric venture, all things considered, with only Avatar: The Last Airbender truly rising to the top. When that era's other offerings do come up, however, the show most tend to remember is Kappa Mikey. But we would be remiss to talk about this peculiar time in Nickelodeon's history and not bring up Kappa Mikey's even more obscure spiritual successor: Three Delivery.
Three Delivery was actually the third full-length, anime-inspired series created by Larry Schwarz and produced by Animation Collective for Nickelodeon's sister channel, Nicktoons Network. The first was the aforementioned Kappa Mikey, which premiered on Nicktoons in February of 2006 and ran until September of 2008. The second was Speed Racer: The Next Generation, a continuation of the classic Japanese Speed Racer franchise, which originally ran on Nicktoons from May of 2008 to July of 2009, with a second season arriving two years later in 2011 and concluding in 2013.
Schwarz and Animation Collective rounded off their trilogy of anime-esque Nicktoons shows with awesome theme songs in the summer of 2008 with Three Delivery. The show started production in 2007, beginning life as a series of two-minute shorts. The first three of these shorts aired on Nicktoons on May 2, 2008 during commercial breaks throughout the premiere of Speed Racer: The Next Generation. A series of full-length episodes premiered shortly thereafter, running for a single, 26-episode season from June 27, 2008 to June 28, 2009.
Three Delivery follows Sue Yee (Stephanie Sheh), her older brother Sid Yee (Johnny Yong Bosch) and their friend Tobey Li (Robby Duncan Sharpe), three teenage orphans who are adopted by Nana (Nancy Wu) and enlisted to make deliveries for Calvin Wu's (Michael Alston Baley) restaurant, Wu's Garden. However, there's a bit more to Sue, Sid and Tobey's responsibilities than just going to school and delivering food on their bicycles.
Trained in kung-fu, the three teenagers were tasked by Nana with protecting Chinatown from Kong Li (Lex Woutas), a martial-arts student turned wicked magician who -- years prior to the events of the show -- unleashed the power of a magic cookbook, but was thwarted by Nana. When Kong Li returns to find the various magical recipes scattered throughout Chinatown, Sue, Sid and Tobey must beat him to them and put an end to his evil campaign once and for all.
Like Kappa Mikey and Speed Racer: The Next Generation, Three Delivery was made using Flash animation, though Animation Collective partnered with the now-defunct Fatkat to ensure the show resembled traditional animation as closely as possible. Three Delivery's visual style, which clearly borrows certain elements from anime, was the work of art director Alan Foreman, who compared the show's overall aesthetic to that of a graphic novel. Meanwhile, in addition to his penchant for cross-cultural cartoons, series creator Schwarz cited his time growing up near Manhattan's real-life Chinatown as helping to inspire the show's premise.
As far as ratings go, Three Delivery actually performed rather well. In fact, it was Nicktoons' top show for a brief time, only surpassed by the massively-popular Wolverine and the X-Men and Nicktoons' reruns of Nickelodeon's Avatar. That being said, it's not exactly hard to see why the show has fallen into obscurity (both in comparison to its predecessors and in general) and is now mainly regarded as a cult classic.
For starters, any show that airs exclusively on Nicktoons isn't going to get the same mainstream exposure as a show airing on Nickelodeon proper, something that was especially true back in 2008. Three Delivery was also only on television for a short time; the main series' 26-episode run is half that of Kappa Mikey and Speed Racer: The Next Generation. Those shows each ran for 52 episodes across two seasons, with Kappa Mikey even getting a spinoff of animated shorts in the form of Dancing Sushi.
Plus, if you want to watch Thee Delivery these days, you mainly have to rely on low-quality bootleg episodes. Nicktoons hasn't aired reruns in ages, and while the show was available for purchase on iTunes at one point, that no longer appears to be the case. Its first episode is available for free on Animation Collective's YouTube channel alongside a number of Kappa Mikey episodes, but though some additional clips from Three Delivery are there as well, another full episode hasn't been uploaded in a year.
Finally, much like Kappa Mikey, Three Delivery was a bit ahead of its time. While things like Toonami had already made leaps and bounds in regard to introducing Western viewers to Eastern animation, and while anime-influenced shows like Avatar or Cartoon Network's Teen Titans managed to gain traction prior to its release, the market for anime and anime-esque shows in America was still nowhere near as big in 2008 as it is today. You have to wonder how different things may have been had Three Delivery premiered more recently. We'll never know, unfortunately. But on the bright side, we'll always have that sweet, sweet opening theme song.