How could we forget the iconic Pingu? The much-beloved, stop-motion tv show gave us five minutes of family-friendly fun whenever we go home from school and dove into our Le Snak’s.
The Switzerland-born show exploded onto the scene and won fans all around the world before being sold to a UK production company in 2001.
Speaking of iconic children’s tv shows, we spoke to Murray from The Wiggles about his potential Lil Nas X collaboration on this episode of It’s Been A Big Day For…
And yes, while we knew that none of the characters spoke English, did you know that all the characters spoke in their own language and were voiced by one man? No, we’re not joking.
Carlo Bonomi is the name of a voice actor from Italy that voiced every, single character for the first four seasons of Pingu, including Pinga, Pingi, Pingo, Pingg, Pongi, Pengy, Pongj and Punki. If you don’t believe me, you just have to watch the footage for yourself.
Bonomi was a famous Italian clown and children’s entertainer who had achieved major success with his show La Linea, which is why he was asked to be a voice on this show. He developed a fictional language for the show, which later became known as Penguinese. It’s essentially gibberish according to David Sant, the voiceover artist who took over the vocals in the early ‘00s.
In an interview with The Guardian, Sant said, “Recording was exhausting. The animators would script each episode in English, then film it with the puppets. Afterwards, we had to translate the scripts into Penguinese, recording each part while watching the characters talking on screen.”
Honesty, we need to see these English scripts, the show has some explaining to do. Like this scene for example.
While we’re in the Pingu mindset, which side character were you?
Next week marks 30 full years since the first-ever episode of the tv show, and we can’t help but reminisce on all the good times.
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