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Dave the Barbarian

American animated television series

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 10, 2026
Entity authorityQ254241
Source-derived summary

Dave the Barbarian is an American animated television series created by Doug Langdale for Disney Channel. It follows a barbarian, and his friends and family, on surreal comedy medieval-themed adventures. The series premiered on January 23, 2004, and ended on January 22, 2005, with a total of one season with 21 episodes.

Premise

The series is set in the kingdom of Udrogoth during the Middle Ages. It centers on Dave (voiced by Danny Cooksey), a powerful, yet cowardly, barbarian who lives with his fashionable and self-centered older sister Candy (voiced by Erica Luttrell) and feisty younger sister Fang (voiced by Tress MacNeille). His parents, Throktar and Glimia, are the king and queen of Udrogoth but are away "fighting evil" across the world (though they sometimes communicate via a magic crystal ball or cauldron) and have left Candy in charge of the kingdom as princess regent, while Dave is supposed to defend the kingdom (since he is the biggest). Together the three siblings, along with their gluttonous and mildly incompetent "wizard" uncle Oswidge (voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson), are left to run and protect the kingdom from the comical, yet villainous and devious, Dark Lord Chuckles the Silly Piggy (voiced by Paul Rugg), as well as from other enemies and dangers.

There is a narrator, referred to either as "the Narrator" or "the Storyteller", voiced by Jeff Bennett. He is able to talk to the characters of the show, and vice versa, which breaks the fourth wall to the extent where he was once captured by Chuckles the Silly Piggy and was forced to tell the story according to his kidnapper's commands.

Dave the Barbarian stood out for its intense use of parody and meta-humor, specifically between the narrator and the characters.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Dave the Barbarian” is american animated television series. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Dave, Barbarian and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2004, 2005—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Dave, Barbarian and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american animated television series” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q254241. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2004 and 2005.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Dave the Barbarian”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Dave the Barbarian primary sources, Dave the Barbarian archive and Dave research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Dave the Barbarian”?
  2. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
  3. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Dave the Barbarian” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.