Malhação

Malhação (Brazilian Portuguese: [maʎa'sɐ̃w], Young Hearts in English)^[1] is a Brazilian soap-opera for the teenage audience. The series is being broadcast in several countries by Globo Internacional, including SIC (between 1995 and 2007, airing with the name "New Wave") in Portugal and by ABC Spark in Canada. The series has inspired the creation of other series, such as Portuguese channel TVI's Morangos com Açúcar, which is strongly based on the Malhação format, and Brazilian channel Rede Record's Alta Estação.

The soap started in 1995, and was set in a fictional Gym Club called Malhação on Barra da Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro. Through the years the location varied slightly. Although the name of the soap remained the same, it was set in the Múltipla Escolha (English: Multiple Choice) High School for nine seasons. In the twenty-second season, the location returned to be a gym, the Gael's Martial Arts Gym, placed within the art school Ribalta. The following season brought the school back. In the later the Academy setting back to "Academia Form".

By the end of the fourteenth season, each episode of Malhação began with a cold open technique, preceded by a retrospective of the previous episodes, continuing the narrative that follows. This technique was a brand of serial, used since the first season, but was abolished from the beginning of the fifteenth season.

Malhação reached its peak in the eleventh season, with Guilherme Berenguer, Juliana Didone and Marjorie Estiano, with the following season starring Fernanda Vasconcellos, Thiago Rodrigues and Joana Balaguer as the leads, and the ratings decreased from this season on reach an incredible 42 million viewers.

Plot

The plot of Malhação tells stories of the everyday life of teenagers, their daily conflicts, including school, friends, families, and especially their relationships, which occupy the central focus of all the seasons. Every season, a different couple of protagonists occupies the core of the whole story.

Cast

Similarly to the American soap operas and long-running TV Series, cast and characters change from year to year, but actors and characters who have stayed for long in the soap are, among others, Gustavo Goulart,^[2] whose characters Juninho and Bad Boy simply did transcend seasons with their lots of troubles throughout the Series in both 90's and 2000's, until the present moment. Alexandre Slaviero, whose character, Kiko, has experienced changes (he has gone from student, to bad boy, to steroid addict, to model). And Sérgio Hondjakoff, whose character, Cabeção, was in the story from the seventh to twelfth seasons.

Theme songs

Malhação has had 16 different theme songs:

References

External links

• (in Portuguese) Official Website
• Globo TV International
• Malhação on IMDb