Pingu

Pingu is a stop motion animated children's television series originally produced in Switzerland. It was co-created by Otmar Gutmann and Erika Brueggemann. It centres 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 Swiss toy company Editoy AG, and later on, Pingu BV handling IP ownership of the series.

The series has been 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' or 'Pinguish', consisting of babbling, muttering, and the titular character's characteristic sporadic honking sound, which can be popularly recognized as "Noot noot!" or other variants, 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 sounds he had already developed and used earlier for Osvaldo Cavandoli's La Linea.

After British children's company HIT Entertainment purchased Pingu BV in 2001, they produced a revival run of Pingu for 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. The characters were jointly voiced by David Sant and Marcello Magni. A computer-animated revival series with two seasons produced in Japan for NHK, entitled Pingu in the City, aired from 7 October 2017 to 30 March 2019. A third revival series, being animated in stop-motion like the original, is currently under development at Mattel Television and Aardman Animations.

The IP rights to Pingu are currently held by an entity owned by HIT/Mattel named Joker, Inc., which is usually called through its trade name "The Pygos Group" on copyright and trademark notices related to the Pingu property.