The paranoid bunch

By IAN YEE

The semi-militant penguins from the Madagascar movies now have their own animated TV series.

They were the ultimate show-stealers in animated film history. Now, they’re getting a taste of their own medicine.

When the distinctly average Madagascar was released, Alex the lion, Marty the zebra, Melman the giraffe and Gloria the hippo were hardly the talk of the town. Bet you could barely remember all their names before this.

Instead, everyone was raving about the four paranoid semi-militant penguins and their incessant plotting against non-existent conspiracies. You can’t really go wrong with penguins, can you?

“Our Madagascar penguins were hugely popular on the big screen, so it seemed natural to give them their own television show,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, the producers of the Madagascar movies.

The hugely popular penguins.

But now that they’ve plotted their way to having their own TV series on Nickelodeon called The Penguins Of Madagascar (making its Malaysian debut tonight), penguins Skipper, Kowalski, Private and Rico have to deal with another scene-robbing inhabitant of the Central Park Zoo in New York – King Julien.

One of the show’s voice talents, actress Nicole Sullivan, admitted that though the penguins were a huge hit from the film, the nutty, party-loving lemur royalty was her favourite character from the TV series.

“There was just an overwhelming response to the movies, and everybody just loved those little penguins,” said Sullivan on how the show came about.

“But of all the characters, I like King Julien the most! He’s such a great character! He’s this arrogant, egotistical, self-centred guy, but I think everybody will still love him.

“In one of my favourite episodes, they discover that one of the characters has a foot fetish, but King Julien thinks it’s all about him, and that people just like his feet. It’s hilarious!” she added.

It seems audiences don’t just love King Julien, because the whole show has to be doing something right on the whole. It has become what Sullivan tells us the No. 2 show for kids in America.

“(The show) is right behind Spongebob Squarepants, but we’re gaining on it,” revealed Sullivan, who has also provided her voice for other popular cartoon series such as Family Guy, Kim Possible and Buzz Lightyear of Star Command in the eight years she’s been doing voice-acting.

Penguins of Madagascar is set after the second movie instalment to the franchise, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, where the penguins, two chimpanzees, King Julien and his right hand lemur Maurice fly off in the penguins’ “plane” at the end of the movie.

They all end up in the Central Park Zoo where the four main characters of Madagascar and the penguins all escaped from in the first place, and there they meet Marlene, a female otter, voiced by Sullivan.

The four penguins live under the illusion that they’re some elite military strike force, with Skipper acting as their commander. Kowalski’s the brains behind their crazy missions, Rico is the psychotic explosives expert while the sensitive Private simply speaks with a British accent.

Speaking about being paranoid, Sullivan herself has played other characters on TV who were pretty off-the-wall themselves.

Scrubs fans would recognise her as the annoyingly bubbly Sacred Heart Hospital patient Jill, the recurring character who became close friends with Dr Elliot Reid (and frustrated Dr Cox by not being affected by his rants) because they were both equally good at “sabotaging perfectly good relationships”.

She played a similar role in The King of Queens for five seasons as Holly, an incredibly kind yet bizarrely clueless character, especially when it came to her relationships with men.

And of course, you don’t get more off-the-wall than by being on MADtv.

“I come from a sketch comedy background. I was on MADtv (for six seasons!) so I didn’t really require any training to do voice-acting. You just need to get used to making yourself look dumb and not being too serious, which is really what voice-acting is about,” she added.

Apart from the penguins, Marlene and King Julien, the “supporting cast” of the show also have pretty good comic potential.

Mort, the annoying, big-eyed lemur with an unhealthy infatuation with King Julien, adds an element of slapstick humour with how he always gets hurt (without actually getting hurt); while the chimps add a bit of brains, just like how Skipper said in Escape 2 Africa that he’d keep them around to make use of their “frontal cortexes and opposable thumbs”.

According to Sullivan, even though the show is geared towards kids, she believes parents would enjoy it as well.

■ Tune in to Nickelodeon (Astro channel 612) at 7pm today to catch the first episode of The Penguins Of Madagascar.