Pingu is a stop-motion children's series co-created by Otmar Gutmann and Erika Brueggemann. It was originally produced from 1990 to 2000 for Swiss television and was later revived from 2003 to 2006 for British television. The series focuses on a family of anthropomorphic emperor penguins who live in the South Pole; the main character is the family's son and title character, Pingu.
The series originally ran for a total of six series from 1990 to 2000 and then from 2003 to 2006 on. Pingu was so widely popular that the show was also nominated for a BAFTA award. Pingu was very popular due to its lack of a real spoken language, with nearly all dialogue being in an invented penguin language called 'Penguinese' that consists of babbling, muttering, and the titular character's characteristic sporadic loud honking noise, which can be popularly recognized as "Noot noot!" 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 who is no more. The voice actor recently passed away and tributes flooded social media on Sunday (August 7) following the news of his death who passed away at the age of 85 in his birth city of Milan. Alongside being the original voice of Pingu the Penguin, Mr. Bonomi was also known for his voiceover work as the voice of Mr. Linea in Osvaldo Cavandoli's animated series, La Linea. The voice actor has used the language of noises for Pingu that he had already developed for La Linea.
Bonomi was born in Milan in 1937 and started working with his voice in 1985. It was he who recorded the ads for passengers. He has lent his voice to numerous animated characters who populate this primordial form of commercial that has become a symbol of Italian television. He worked at Carosello for twenty years, from 1957 to 1977, that is to say for the whole epic of a program that marked a time.
