The Octonauts

The Octonauts is a British children's television series, produced by Silvergate Media for the BBC channel CBeebies. The series is animated in Ireland by Brown Bag Films but uses British voice actors. The TV series is based on American-Canadian children's books written by Vicki Wong and Michael C. Murphy of Meomi Design Inc.

The Octonauts follows an underwater exploring crew made up of stylized anthropomorphic animals, a team of eight adventurers who live in an undersea base, the Octopod, from which they go on undersea adventures with the help of a fleet of aquatic vehicles.

Dubbing History
In 2010, The Octonauts was adapted into a 52 episode CGI animated television series co-produced by Chorion and Brown Bag Films. It first aired in the UK on 4 October 2010 on CBeebies, a BBC television channel for the under 7's. The first series ended in February 2011, but continued to be aired as repeats. A second series of 22 episodes commenced in November 2012.

The Octonauts had its US premiere on the Disney Channel in January 2012, however many of the characters' voices were redubbed to give them American accents (Hispanic in the case of Peso and Pinto), although Captain Barnacles, Kwazii and Prof. Inkling retained their original British voices. It has also been shown in Ireland (RTÉ Two), Canada (Treehouse TV), and Australia (ABC Television). The show has been translated and shown in French (TF1), Spanish and Portuguese (Discovery Kids Latin America), Finnish (YLE TV2), Welsh (S4C) and Slovakian (STV 2).

The series was made with the help of marine biologists Dr. Lara A. Ferry-Graham and Dr. Michael H. Graham, who had previously worked on Finding Nemo.

The TV show is episodic, with each 11 minute episode seeing them encountering an unusual but real sea creature as they explore strange underwater worlds. Often they must discover a vital biological or behavioral fact about that creature to rescue it or themselves from danger. The stories usually feature three main characters: Captain Barnacles, Kwazii and Peso, with the other five Octonauts acting in supporting roles.

In the TV series they use five sea-creature-inspired underwater vehicles called GUP-A to GUP-E, the pedal driven GUP-F, driven by Captain Barnacles and Kwazii, which appears in Episode 10 of Series 1 (The Speedy Sailfish), the narwhal-shaped submarine Gup-S that can split so one half goes over land, the train-shaped vegimal-driven Gup-V, and the powerful and sturdy tracked GUP-X, first appearing in Episode 52 of Series 1 (The Great Christmas Rescue).

The opening theme tune finishes with the chant "Explore! - Rescue! - Protect!", the Octonauts’ motto.