Dennis the Obscure

The first attempt to bring Dennis the Menace, long-time cover star of the Beano, to the screen, is not one many people remember, mostly because DC Thomson seem to have done their best to erase it from existence. It aired in 1990 and 1991 under the slightly unwieldy title The Beano's Dennis the Menace and Gnasher Show, and rather than animation, it used puppets; many of the puppeteers involved have had quite distinguished careers, with most of them appearing in Jim Henson productions, and other credits including the Star Wars movies, Button Moon and Little Shop of Horrors.

Several episodes still survive, and you can see them here - that video identifies it as airing on the obscure and imaginatively titled cable channel The Children's Channel, which broadcast in the UK between 1984 and 1998, although according to Wikipedia (which does not have a source to back it up) those were repeats, and the show was originally broadcast on CITV (but it does seem worth noting that the operators of The Children's Channel were backed by DC Thomson). Something does seem a little strange about a CITV show having a parody of the BBC's Test Card F in its title sequence, though...

Moving forward, the first fully-animated production featuring Dennis and Gnasher were two straight-to-video productions featuring several other Beano characters: 1993's The Beano Video (which, like the puppet series, featured a Zzzap!-esque "comic brought to life" conceit), and 1994's The Beano Videostars (the latter was directed by Terry Ward, who also directed the 80s Bananaman series). Wikipedia claims that the former video at least got an airing on CITV, although in the same year it was released on video, which seems a curious way of reducing your sales.

Anyway, whatever the truth of the broadcast history of those first productions, the next and perhaps best-known Dennis series saw him move over to CBBC in 1996 for Dennis and Gnasher. This series was notable for including an impressive array of guest stars, including Willie Rushton, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Prunella Scales, Bernard Cribbins, Simon Callow, Derek Nimmo, Hugh Laurie, Billy Connolly, Leslie Phillips, Greg Proops and Brian Blessed. Several of the stories in these TV episodes were later adapted for the Beano Superstars, a spin-off comic consisting of one big, feature-length story per issue. Such was this series' popularity it was still being regularly repeated on CBBC up until 2009, when it was superseded by the next incarnation, Dennis the Menace and Gnasher, which ran until 2010 and featured Sophie Aldred as the voice of Dennis. In 2017 yet another series began, this time primarily using CGI rather than 2D animation, Dennis & Gnasher: Unleashed! The late-90's series continues to endure, however, being available to watch on the Beano's official YouTube channel and being released on DVD several times, including a release of the complete series in 2011.