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Airing for a run of thirteen episodes during 1984, Manda Redt de Wereld (Manda Saves The World) was a peculiar Dutch cartoon about an otter named Manda, who lives in a small farming village in "a country a long way from here" (Scotland, judging by the scenery and culture depicted and the use of bagpipes in the themetune) who must travel on a dangerous voyage through The Thirteen Universes in order to defeat the fearsome and birdlike Kipetorg [in fact only twelve universes are seen as the thirteenth is their home; the final episode is set within the Kipetorg's castle]. She's joined on her quest by her friends: the impulsive and athletic Gretel, a wild hare; the shy and compassionate Limpe, a pigeon; and intellectual Birgitte, a dalmatian. Manda herself plays the part of the everywoman; whilst the others are fixed in their archetypes from episode one, she is the one who is as much on an internal quest for courage and enlightenment as on an external one to save the world. The heroic quartet are also assisted throughout by visitations from the prerequisite mentor in the form of wise Lu, a Chinese dragon who first sets them on their quest and who appears in their hour of need

Though praised in some quarters for its entirely female cast of heroes within a predominantly action-driven setting, Manda Redt de Wereld was a shoestring production beset with difficulties, rushed deadlines and production errors (not that this has prevented it gaining cult status). Beginning with the scripts (conceived and written by Poul Van de Welt, an associate of Jean-Jacques le Fervier who would later submit work for the Frenchman's similarly short-lived cult of Jakaru), production was pushed forward by several months that left no time to properly edit and refine them. Van de Welt later said, in a rare open panel interview given at ConToon 2010 in Stockholm, that had he been given those extra months to polish them he would have liked to have changed the awkward juxtaposition of Highland homeland and Chinese mythology as neither of these have any bearing on the direction of the plot anyway. Scotland was used in a passing note mostly because of happy memories of his honeymoon spent there. He would also have changed the name of the Kipetorg, merely a placeholder that, spelled backwards, is "grote pik" ("big cock")

With art direction often described as "grossly incompetent," the animation of Manda Redt de Wereld was split between twelve different studios; not on a per-episode basis but a per-scene basis. Ostensibly a timesaving measure, this required every scene to be graded by importance and the work divided accordingly amongst the animation studios, from worst to best quality. The net effect, aside from the animation quality fluctuating wildly from scene to scene, is a host of noticeable colouring errors mostly centred on the cast's outfits, fur and feathers, and varying from mere shades to abrupt changes in colour. With no official translation from the original Dutch some fans outside the Netherlands, some seriously and some in jest, subsequently concocted magical narrative explanations for these errors

The most prominent issue with the series, and the one that cannot be chalked up to any budget cut or executive interference, is the lingering, obsessive interest it has in rubber boots. All four heroines are seen to be wearing differently-coloured wellingtons (explained away as necessary for their countryside existence) as is the dragon Lu (in her case this is never satisfactorily explained), and in sending the girls on their mission she makes a special point of enchanting their wellies because "there will be much walking to be done." Every episode finds gratuitous reasons for the four of them to either walk through some kind of mess (ranging from mudpits and swamps to gigantic iced buns), or to stomp on things such as foodstuff, household objects and trash or dangerous beetles. Most of the series' supporting cast is also female and also prone to wearing tall and shiny flat-soled boots for flimsy reasons, and they too seem to find themselves walking through slime or trampling things. All of these things receive arguably excessive focus from the script and the animation, and many fans would wryly admit that Manda and her friends spend very little time actually saving the world and much more getting their boots dirty. Van de Welt has always denied any personal interest in rubber boots, though photos are alleged to circulate of the writer and his wife at private parties that would put paid to his assertions

Until seeing belated DVD release in 2004, Manda Redt de Wereld saw no home release and no repeats, obliging fans to trade pirate VHS for the intervening decades. This left a gap in the series' canon, as the final episode - the one in which Manda, Gretel, Limpe and Birgitte do in fact save the world - was mostly obliterated by a pirate broadcast that flooded the channel's frequency with interbleeding Japanese tokusatsu series, European numbers stations, scenes from Eraserhead and above it all a distorted voice reciting political manifestoes [this was assumed at the time to be a possible exercise in terrorism of some sort but later determined to be a performance art stunt by Rasten Katell, then living in exile from the UK on charges relating to the distribution of pornography]. And so it was never clear how the heroes saved the day or even if they did

With the launch of alt.fan.manda-redt-de-wereld in 1989 there came a proliferation of fanfiction, an incredible ratio of fiction to actual viewers of the show. Over time this body of writing would effectively overtake the series' canon despite having many conflicting views of the show. There are four broad categories, though they overlap often enough:

Two kinds of fanfiction address the question of how the series actually ended. Earlier on these were always positive outcomes, but after a while the darker versions began appearing; the ones in which Manda fails in her quest, or succeeds only to find she has brought about something worse. Script inconsistencies in the behaviour and dialogue of significant characters, particularly Lu, were often seized upon as the foundations of a terrible twist ending (Van de Welt would later dismiss all these inconsistencies as products of being unable to revise the script as he would have liked). The darker interpretations of the series gave prominence to the third fanfiction subset, which involves inventing new universes for Manda and friends to travel through (inventing universes in the more upbeat spirit of the series was in fact relatively unpopular until it emerged as a way to subvert the original grittier subversion, which was well on its way to becoming the new tradition)

The last kind of fiction, unsurprisingly, is entirely fetishistic and focused on wellington boots stomping or getting messy. Disparaged by non-erotic writers as "bootlick stories," this category was nonetheless not only the most prolific but would go on to include some of the most enduring fanbase material, both dark and light. At some point in these stories almost every cast member has been involved sexually with the others and their boots. As the dark and light authors quarrelled over whose version of the series got it "right," the erotic authors had their own share of infighting. The question of whether Birgitte's boots should be green or blue (they change repeatedly thanks to the poor instruction given to the animators) has been a major source of conflict. Writers who include male self-inserts have also frequently drawn ire, broadly accused of making themselves the new male hero and reducing the quartet to fawning after him (in fairness more than a few fanworks with new male characters suffer from this). Somewhere in these fictions emerged the idea that the Kipetorg wears a fisherman's raincoat and tall black waders (in fact the Kipetorg is always depicted as nude); that he repeatedly uses the saying: "Zelfs als het zonnig is, weet de wijze man waar zijn regenjas is" ("Even in sunny weather the wise man knows where his raincoat is"); and that he enjoys masochism

It would be mendacious to suggest the release of the 20th Anniversary DVD set perversely killed Manda's fanbase, but it certainly shook it. For a while it seemed likely that the fans would implode; many were having first-hand access to the series instead of third-generation fictions for the first time, and some didn't realise there was a cartoon series to begin with (one site, Modder Op Onze Laarzen, since gone, bizarrely argued that there had never been a 1984 cartoon and that the DVD was a modern forgery attempting to cash in on the fandom's shared mythology). Unsurprisingly, many were disappointed by the relatively pedestrian manner in which Manda defeats the Kipetorg after fans had spent years upping the stakes, not to mention Poul Van de Welt's audio commentary and lengthy notes showing that seemingly significant parts were just honest mistakes. The fanfiction community has somewhat settled since then into three groups: the purists who are offended by anything that can't be shown to be canon either in the cartoons or Van de Welt's clarifications; the people who grew up with the fans' mythos or who just generally prefer it; and inevitably the bootlickers. Many fans believe that the prolific erotic author ScottishMud is secretly Van de Welt writing porn of his own characters under a pseudonym, but Poul has vehemently denied it