Pingu is a Swiss-German animated children's television series co-created by Otmar Gutmann and Erika Brueggemann that centers 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 sister company The Pygos Group (originally called Editoy AG, then later Pingu BV) handling global distribution. After British children's company HIT Entertainment purchased The Pygos Group in 2001, they produced a revival run of 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.
Background[]
It may come as a surprise to know an English dub of Pingu exists, as the series is well known for not using any real world language. Instead, it utilized a made up language called "penguinese" that consisted exclusively of gibberish and a few other sounds made by the characters, with the stories largely being told through the animation instead. This choice ultimately negated the need for dubbing, so in almost all territories that Pingu was exported to, the series was left undubbed and untranslated.
Despite this, a dub of the series does exist. The first season of the show was dubbed in South Korea by DongSung Productions and Elite Production, and released on VHS between 2000 and 2002. This dub was created as a means to teach Korean children English, and not only had English subtitles in addition to the dub, but also had "Listen and Repeat" segments at the end of each episode for some of the dialogue spoken in the episodes. The voice cast is unknown, but its very likely that the dub was done with English speaking actors based in South Korea.
The dub of the series would fall into obscurity until almost all the VHS volumes save for the third one were uploaded to YouTube and caught the attention of the Pingu fanbase. Since then, the dub has been heavily ridiculed online, not just for the concept of dubbing Pingu of all shows into English, but also for its poor voice acting, questionable dialogue, and its overabundance of grammatical errors in the subtitles despite being meant as a teaching tool. Currently, all six volumes are available for viewing on the Internet Archive.[1]
Cast[]
| Character | Original Actor | Dub Actor |
|---|---|---|
| Main Characters | ||
| Pingu | Carlo Bonomi | ¿? |
| Pinga | ¿? | |
| Pingu's Father | ¿? | |
| Pingu's Mother | ¿? | |
| Robby | ¿? | |
| Secondary Characters | ||
| Pingu's Grandfather | Carlo Bonomi | ¿? |
| Pingo | ¿? | |
| Pingg | ¿? | |
| Pongi | ¿? | |
| Mr. Peng-Chips | ¿? | |
| Mr. Peng-Hoven | ¿? | |
| Punki | ¿? | |
Episodic Characters[]
| Character | Original Actor | Dub Actor | Episode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mrs. Peng-Sniff | Carlo Bonomi | ¿? | 5, 24 |
| The Post Master | ¿? | 5 | |
| Mrs. McGreedy | ¿? | ||
| Hockey Players | ¿? | 11 | |
| Pingu's Maternal Grandfather | ¿? | 21 | |
| The Giant Walrus | ¿? | 26 |
Video Releases[]
| Distributor | Year | Format | Contents | Region | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Elite Production | 2000-2002 | 
|
Season One | NTSC | South Korea | 
|
| 6 Volumes | ||||||
Notes[]
- There are several moments in the dub where Carlo Bonomi's voices for the characters can still be heard, most notably one scene in Grandpa is Ill where Pingu's trademark "Noot noot!" is undubbed and when the students mention each type of fish in School Time.
- The dubs of the episodes are based off the redubbed version of season one, which featured large portions of Carlo Bonomi rerecording his dialogue and a different music score in order to maintain consistency with the third and fourth seasons.
- Robby is referred to in the dub as "Fur Seal".
References[]
External Links[]
- Pingu at the Internet Movie Database
- Pingu Wiki page for the English dub