Underplayed Gems

Pingu (1990)

Pingu poster
Genre
children's television series, comedy television series
Country
United Kingdom, Switzerland
Length
6 seasons, 157 episodes
Rated
TV-Y
Rating
7.0 of 10 from 160 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this series is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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How it feels

Pingu is a stop motion show about a young emperor penguin living with his family in the South Pole. The characters communicate through nonsense sounds and honks. Each short episode follows Pingu's everyday adventures, mishaps, and interactions with his parents and little sister.

playfulwhimsicallightheartedsimplegentlequirkyinnocentcozy

What happens

Pingu is a stop motion animated children's television series originally produced in Switzerland. It was co-created by Otmar Gutmann and Erika Brueggemann. It centres on the titular anthropomorphic emperor penguin and his family, who live in the South Pole. The series aired on SF DRS for four series from 7 March 1990 to 9 April 2000, and was produced by the Swiss animation studio Pingu Filmstudio; with Swiss toy company Editoy AG, and later on, Pingu BV handling IP ownership of the series. The series has been popular outside of Switzerland, particularly in the United Kingdom and Japan, in part due to its lack of a real spoken language. Nearly all dialogue is in an invented grammelot "penguin language" referred to as 'Penguinese' or 'Pinguish', consisting of babbling, muttering, and the titular character's characteristic sporadic honking sound, which can be popularly recognized as "Noot noot!" or other variants, accompanied by turning his beak into a megaphone-like shape. In the first four series, all the characters were performed by Italian voice actor Carlo Bonomi, using a language of sounds he had already developed and used earlier for Osvaldo Cavandoli's La Linea. After English children's company HIT Entertainment purchased Pingu BV in 2001, they produced a revival run of Pingu for two additional series in the United Kingdom through their in-house studio Hot Animation, which aired on CBeebies from 1 August 2003 to 3 March 2006. It was nominated for a BAFTA award in 2005. The characters were jointly voiced by David Sant and Marcello Magni. A computer-animated spin-off series with two seasons produced in Japan for NHK, entitled Pingu in the City, aired from 7 October 2017 to 30 March 2019. A second revival series, being animated in stop-motion like the original, is currently under development at Mattel Studios and Aardman Animations. The IP rights to Pingu are currently held by an entity owned by HIT/Mattel named Joker, Inc., which is usually called through its trade name "The Pygos Group" on copyright and trademark notices related to the Pingu property. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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