Overview
Animated preschool series encouraging children, through imaginary adventures, to challenge the workings of the world. Who says the world works the way grown-ups think it should?
Seasons
- Status
- Returning Series
- Seasons
- 3 seasons
- Episodes
- 94 episodes
- First aired
- Jun 20, 2016
Reviews
2 min readThe world according to Monty
Preschool TV usually trains kids to sit still. Kazoops! would rather they ask why.
The show follows Monty Kazoops, six years old, wild mop of hair, imagination to match. latestnetflix.com's read is that in each episode he and his pet pig, Jimmy Jones, take a small observation and blow it open.Why do we have to eat vegetables?
Why do grown-ups say "because I said so"? Why can't bedtime be whenever we want? Those are not cute asides for Monty.
They are doors. One minute he is at the table, pushing peas. The next, he and Jimmy are insect-small in a jungle of broccoli trees and carrot rivers, where grown-up rules look silly.
The series trusts the kids watching. No baby talk. No stamped moral.
It assumes children can handle a big idea if it arrives as play. The drawings agree. Bright, simple, bold outlines, faces you can read from the couch.
I thought of Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls, without the smirk. Kazoops! is warm. A classroom, a backyard, a kitchen can flip if you tilt your head.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThe pig had songs before anyone ordered a series.
Scott Langley wrote tracks about a boy and a pig on imaginary trips. Mighty Nice later said Darren Price drew the first sketches from those songs. Patrick Egerton and David Webster of Sydney's Cheeky Little Media built a preschool show around them with Langley and sound producer Anthony Aston. Kidscreen's 2013 Asian Animation Summit gave the pitch Best in Show. latestnetflix.com's read is that By July 2015 cameras, or the CGI version of cameras, were rolling on 78 seven-minute episodes for ages three to five.ABC Kids, CBeebies, and Netflix were already attached. Netflix's first buy was 13 episodes. 
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The labor split is the quiet scandal of kids' TV. Mighty Nice kept global design in Australia. Giggle Garage in Cyberjaya handled modelling, rigging, and rendering. Nexus in the UK did episodic design. Scripts and voices were recorded in Britain. British child-development consultant Jacqueline Harding signed off on the lessons. Reece Pockney voiced six-year-old Monty. Langley voiced the family pig, Jimmy Jones. Steve Moltzen directed every short. The characters look like plasticine, thumbprints in the skin and hair. Monty's daydreams mix CG with 2D craft shapes a kid could copy at the table. Egerton told The West Australian that sock-matching gags were really about whether conforming matters. Each episode carries its own two-minute song, ukuleles and retro synths included, because parents sit in earshot. Cheeky Little also hired Dubit for touch-screen games and Fusion for merch before a single episode aired. , ,
Deadline's 2015 preschool dump listed Word Party, Kazoops!, and True and the Rainbow Kingdom, and said Kazoops! would hit Netflix in late 2016, then the UK and Australia "at a later date." The pubcasters went first. CBeebies launched 20 June 2016. ABC Kids followed on 1 August. In its second UK week the show took 24.2 percent of the CBeebies audience. Netflix North America arrived 2 September in bumper 19-minute blocks, three seven-minute stories glued together, seven of those blocks up front and 19 more promised for early 2017. Wikipedia later counted three series of 26, 78 in total, plus a 21-minute three-part finale, "Middle of Somewhere." Same clay boy. Different clocks. , , ,
Cheeky Little's trailer still opens on Monty asking whether socks have to match and whether every monster is scary. Netflix sliced the same material for a binge. CBeebies kept the shorts. The pig kept the songs.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.