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Tiny PlanetsTiny Planets is a UK television show aimed at pre-schoolers produced by Pepper's Ghost Productions, Ltd. The concept was initially created in 2000 by the late Nina Elias Bamberger at Sesame Workshop (who developed Dragon Tales and other children's shows for them as well) to be shown on PBS in the United States, but it was never aired in America and was turned into a joint production with Pepper's Ghost to be shown in the United Kingdom. Both the show and its interactive website won a BAFTA award in 2001. The episodes are quick 5-minute snippets designed to cater to pre-schoolers' short attention span. Tiny Planets follows Bing and Bong on their adventures in the Tiny Universe. Bing and Bong are two white furry creatures (Bing is big in size, Bong his smaller sidekick) who live on a planet with an apparently icy climate. Their fluffy white sofa catapults them across their solar system to explore the mysteries of light and colour, animation, sound and the water cycle. Their solar system has 6 other planets, each with a speciality to it (i.e. nature, sound, light and colour, etc.). Tiny Planets' surreal and captivating universe was created with CGI animation which gives the series a spectacular depth of scale and unique vibrant colour that captures young children's attention. This animation is also evident on their website and was the basis for their BAFTA award. Tiny Planets encourages its pre-school age viewers to make their own discoveries as they solve preschool science problems. The program helps children examine how things work, strengthen their observation skills, consider underlying relationships and identify/test new ideas. The programme eventually did make it back to the U.S. on Sesame Workshop's former joint venture with Nickelodeon, the Noggin cable channel, in 2003. The 5 minute episodes would be shown in between 30-minute shows on the channel. However, the show proved so popular that Noggin now shows it in its own 30-minute block each day, showing 5 episodes in the time span. As evidence of its growing popularity in the United States, the Tiny Planets merchandise site (http://www.bingandbong.com) now splits after entry into separate UK and U.S. versions; a Spanish language version of the Tiny Planets website has also been introduced. The Tiny Planets website also now has a section imagining a NASA space mission to photograph the Tiny Planets universe that introduces young children to the U.S. space agency's work in space exploration. Unlike some other transplants of British children's shows to North America, such as Bob the Builder, the original British-accented voiceover remains in the episodes shown on Noggin and slang terms not common in the U.S. are not edited out. External Links http://www.tinyplanets.com http://www.noggin.com/shows/tiny_planets.php
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