Pingu (Mattel)

Pingu is a stop-motion children's series co-created by Otmar Gutmann and Erika Brueggemann. It was originally produced from 1990 to 2000 for Swiss television by Trickfilmstudio (later renamed Pingu BV and The Pygos Group) for the SF DRS channel in Switzerland. It was later revived from 2003 to 2006 for British television channel CBeebies by 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 ran for four series from 7 March 1990 to 9 April 2000 on SF DRS. It was then renewed for two more series from 1 August 2003 to 3 March 2006 on CBeebies. Pingu was also nominated for a BAFTA award. The pilot episode was made on 28 May 1986.

Pingu was very popular, 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 for the earlier Osvaldo Cavandoli's La Linea. In series 5 and 6, the Pingu cast was jointly voiced by David Sant and Marcello Magni.

A Japanese revival of the series, called Pingu in the City, began airing on NHK on 7 October 2017, and ran until 30 March 2019. Later, Pingu in the City aired in the United Kingdom on ITVBe's kids’ block (known as LittleBe).