- published: 05 Jul 2013
- views: 27052494
Pingu is a Swiss stop-motion claymated television series created by Otmar Gutmann. The series was produced by The Pygos Group and Trickfilmstudio for Swiss television, and centres on a family of anthropomorphic penguins living at the South Pole. The main character is the family's son and title character, Pingu.
The show originally ran for four seasons from 1986 to 1998 on SF DRS. Two episodes, produced in 1998, did not air during the original run. The episodes were run later, in 1999, as part of a Pingu marathon. However, HiT Entertainment's request for more episodes convinced Pygos to bring back the show in 2004, with two more series.
The program is set in Antarctica and centres around penguin families who live and work in igloos. The main character, Pingu, belongs to one such family. He frequently goes on adventures with his little sister, Pinga, and often gets into mischief with his best friend, Robby the Seal.
One reason for Pingu's international success is the fact that no real language was spoken in it: all dialogue is in an invented "penguin language", consisting of loud honking noises. This was initially retroscripted by Carlo Bonomi, who created all the sound effects for the series. This feature allows people of different linguistic backgrounds to still be able to follow the story.
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos.
Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although media corporations including CBS, the BBC, VEVO, Hulu, and other organizations offer some of their material via the site, as part of the YouTube partnership program. Unregistered users can watch videos, while registered users can upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos considered to contain offensive content are available only to registered users at least 18 years old. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion, and now operates as a subsidiary of Google.
YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.