The boy lived at number 8 because the series was created and shown by the Mexican broadcaster Televisa, which was broadcast on channel 8. In the same way that Globo is associated with channel 5 in São Paulo and 4 in Rio de Janeiro, for example.
For those who aren’t fans of the show, it’s good to say that Chaves doesn’t live in the barrel: he supposedly resides at door number 8 in the village – but it’s impossible to know if that’s true, as the house is never shown.
Thus, the program could be baptized as El Chavo del Ocho (in Portuguese, “the boy of eight”, in reference to both his house and the channel).
key is Mexican slang meaning «kid» or «kid», and that’s what he’s called by all the other characters in the original Spanish version. The real name of the protagonist played by Roberto Bolaños is never revealed.
Brazilian dubbing transformed the word key in the name Chaves, and ended up spoiling a recurring joke on the program: in Spanish, the boy was always interrupted when he was about to say his name.
Originally, Bolanõs planned that Keys died after being hit by a car. the actor’s daughter O advised not to carry out the tragedy. O orphan, who spends his days in a barrel, appeared for the first time on Mexican TV on the 20th in June in 1971, and arrived in Brazil only in the following decade, in 1984.
The house number of Dona Clotilde, played by Angelines Fernández, is also not random: it corresponds to the year in which the program’s recordings began. The “witch of 71” lives with her dog, Satan, and loves her per Seu Madruga, for whom he cooks cakes and roast chickens.
In real life, the actress had a very hardcore side: she was a guerrilla what fought against the implantation of fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco during The Spanish Civil War.
Correction: we now inform the numbers of the analogue channel corresponding to Globo in two Brazilian states.