Pingu

Pingu is a stop-motion animated children's television series co-created by Otmar Gutmann and Erika Brueggemann that originally aired in Switzerland. It was originally produced from 1990 to 2000 by Swiss company The Pygos Group (originally called Editoy AG, then later Pingu BV) for SF DRS in Switzerland. It was later revived from 2003 to 2006 for CBeebies by British companies HIT Entertainment and HOT Animation. The series focuses on a family of anthropomorphic emperor penguins who live in the South Pole; the main character is the family's son and title character, Pingu.

The series originally aired for four seasons from March 7, 1990 to April 9, 2000 on SF DRS. It was then renewed for two more seasons, airing from August 1, 2003 to March 3, 2006 on CBeebies. Pingu was also nominated for a BAFTA award in 2005. The pilot episode was made on May 28, 1986.

Pingu became 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", consisting of babbling, muttering, and the titular character's characteristic sporadic loud honking noise, which can be popularly recognized as "Noot noot!" or other variants, stated to be "Noo, Noo!" by the defunct Pingu website's trivia page, 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 noises that he had already developed and used earlier for Osvaldo Cavandoli's La Linea. In seasons 5 and 6, the cast was jointly voiced by David Sant and Marcello Magni.

A Japanese revival of the series, called ピングー　ｉｎ　ザ・シティ (Pingu in the City), began airing on NHK-E on October 7, 2017 and ended on March 30, 2019. It later aired in the United Kingdom on ITVBe's children's block LittleBe.

Cast

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International versions

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