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ision Tom McGrath Eric Darnell Nick Filippi Bob Schooley
 * show_name         = The Penguins of Madagascar
 * image             =
 * bgcolour          = #FFF380
 * genre             = Animated comedy
 * creator           = Characters:
 * director          = Bret Haaland
 * executive_producer = Mark McCorkle
 * caption           = Titlecard image used since late 2009.
 * num_seasons       = 3
 * num_episodes      = 136 (aired), 6 (unaired)

Jeff Bennett James Patrick Stuart John DiMaggio Danny Jacobs Kevin Michael Richardson Andy Richter Nicole Sullivan Johnny Yong Bosch ,Conrad Vernon Mary Scheer Tara Strong 1080i (HDTV) The Madagascar Penguins in a Christmas Caper (2005) Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008) Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted (2012) }} The Penguins of Madagascar is an American CGI animated television series airing on Nickelodeon. It stars nine characters from the DreamWorks Animation animated film Madagascar: The penguins Skipper (Tom McGrath), Kowalski (Jeff Bennett), Private (James Patrick Stuart), and Rico (John DiMaggio); the lemurs King Julien (Danny Jacobs), Maurice (Kevin Michael Richardson), and Mort (Andy Richter); and Mason (Conrad Vernon) and Phil the chimpanzees. Characters new to the series include Marlene the otter (Nicole Sullivan), a zookeeper named Alice (Mary Scheer) and a cat named Tom (Johnny Yong Bosch)
 * list_episodes     = List of The Penguins of Madagascar episodes
 * runtime           = Approx. 11 minutes (11-minute episodes; 7 specials)
 * location          =
 * company           = DreamWorks Animation Nickelodeon Animation Studios
 * distributor       = DreamWorks Television
 * starring          = Tom McGrath
 * composer          = Adam Berry
 * country           = United States
 * network           = Nickelodeon
 * picture_format    = 480i (SDTV)
 * preceded_by       = Madagascar (2005)
 * followed_by       = Merry Madagascar (2009)
 * first_run         = United States
 * first_aired       = November 29, 2008
 * last_aired        = present
 * status            = returning series
 * website           = http://www.nick.com/shows/penguins-of-madagascar

A pilot episode, "Gone in a Flash", aired as part of "Superstuffed Nicktoons Weekend" on November 29, 2008, and The Penguins of Madagascar became a regular series on March 28, 2009. The series takes place after the events of Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted (with elements from the Penguins' Christmas Caper intact; noticeably, Rico's scar and Mohawk). This is the first Nicktoon produced with DreamWorks Animation. The series premiere drew 6.1 million viewers, setting a new record as the most-watched premiere. The show finished 2010 as the number two animated program on television among kids age 2–11 and in basic cable total viewers.

Plot
The Penguins of Madagascar is a spin-off of the Madagascar films. The series follows the adventures of the four penguin protagonists: Skipper, Kowalski, Rico, and Private, who perform various paramilitary-like missions to protect their home in the Central Park Zoo. The penguins often have to deal with problems caused, or made worse, by King Julien XIII (a ring-tailed lemur), Maurice (an aye-aye), and Mort (a mouse lemur).

It is not known how the penguins and lemurs arrived at the zoo after their adventures in the three Madagascar films.

Characters
The Penguins of Madagascar features the four penguin characters from the Madagascar franchise, the two chimpanzees, as well as the three lemur characters. Characters new to the franchise include Marlene the otter and Alice the zookeeper.

All four characters are designed differently in the cartoon than they are in the movie, to make them easier to tell apart (since in the movies they are very similar). Skipper's head is flatter, Kowalski is taller, Private is shorter and rounder, and Rico has an unexplained scar over his mouth, a double chin and a feathery mohawk. Also their personalities and abilities have been exaggerated.

Main characters

 * Skipper (Tom McGrath) is the leader of the penguins; he devises tactics and gives orders. Calculating and nearly unflappable, Skipper's raving paranoia and tendency to view everything as a military operation, combined with his experience in covert ops, has driven him to prepare for nearly any situation, no matter how bizarre or unlikely. It is revealed in the episode Needle Point that Skipper is afraid of needles.
 * Kowalski (Jeff Bennett) acts as the group strategist and gadgeteer. Kowalski is a brilliant inventor, but he cannot read (although he does carry around a clipboard which he records drawings of their plans on). He also tends to over-analyze situations and has created many amazing devices which have put the team in danger. He is revealed in the episode Needle Point that he is afraid of going to the dentist.
 * Private (James Patrick Stuart) is the emotionally sensitive rookie of the group. Though younger and less experienced than the other penguins, he is the most down to earth; Private tends to offer simpler, more commonsense solutions in response to Skipper and Kowalski's complex strategies (although he also shows an unusual interest in unicorns on occasion).
 * Rico (John DiMaggio) is the team's weapons and explosives specialist, who mainly communicates through grunts and squeals, but sometimes he can speak rather normally. Slightly unhinged, Rico swallows useful tools, such as dynamite, and regurgitates them when needed, to the point of regularly regurgitating objects that appear to be too large for him to have swallowed in the first place. He has been referred to as a psychopath in several episodes. He is shown in some episodes to be in a relationship with a beautiful, female doll.
 * King Julien XIII (Danny Jacobs), normally shortened to King Julien, is a fun loving, narcissistic ring-tailed lemur. The King of the Lemurs is a comically conceited character who has little regard for others, even his subjects. He has a tendency to use malapropisms and misinterpret figures of speech. He gets annoyed every time Skipper calls him "ring tail" due to stripes on his tail to make it look like rings.
 * Maurice (Kevin Michael Richardson), an aye-aye, is one of King Julien's subjects. Maurice accepts his life as a servant, but he often shows disdain towards King Julien and his inconsiderate attitude.
 * Mort (Andy Richter) is an excitable, dimwitted, accident-prone mouse lemur. Unlike Maurice, Mort is fiercely devoted to Julien, even displaying an obsession with the lemur king's feet. King Julien, however, treats him with contempt.
 * Marlene (Nicole Sullivan) is a female otter who was transferred to the Central Park Zoo from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. She is close friends with Skipper and sometimes tags along on his missions, but she is often a neutral character who does not take sides between the penguins and the lemurs. By being a levelheaded, feminine voice of reason, she is a counterpoint to Skipper's masculine, covert-ops character. Since she was born in captivity, once she sets out of the confines of the zoo, she goes berserk, as she cannot cope with the lack of boundaries. Later after Kowalski separated her wild side, she becomes afraid as her feral side roams over the city. The penguins later put the two Marlenes back together and Marlene is able to control her wild side.
 * Tom(Johnny Yong Bosch )is a male Russian Blue and Turkish Van mix who will appear in the unaired seeason.

Secondary characters

 * Mason (Conrad Vernon) and Phil are two intelligent chimpanzees. Mason can speak but cannot read; Phil is mute but is an avid reader, and communicates through sign language which is interpreted by Mason.
 * Alice (Mary Scheer) is a surly zookeeper, who regularly expresses disinterest in her job. Though another worker can sometimes be heard on her walkie-talkie, and seen working around the zoo, his face is never seen.
 * The Rat King (Diedrich Bader) is a genetically enhanced, muscular lab rat who resides in the sewers. He is a secondary antagonist to the penguins. He constantly torments the penguins and never learns his lesson when he is defeated each time, although his raw strength often requires them to resort to less direct measures to defeat him. He even tries to take over their home, but is beaten by King Julien in an ice hockey game.
 * Roger (Richard Kind) is the penguins' alligator friend who lives in the sewer. They meet him in the episode "Haunted Habitat" when Skipper and Marlene go to investigate in the sewer under Marlene's habitat because of a strange sound. Roger tells the penguins that he is from Florida. He appears again in "Roger Dodger" when the sewer rats terrorize him and in "Gator Watch" when he wants a new home, eventually being captured and sent to the zoo.
 * Max (Wayne Knight) is the penguins' stray cat friend. He first meets the four penguins in the episode "Launchtime" when the penguins end up on a rooftop across the street from the zoo instead of on the moon. At first, the penguins thought he was a "moon-cat" but at the end they figure out he was a stray cat. Max is skinny and hopes to catch a bird in his life. He at first wanted to eat the penguins, but was so touched that he was given a can of fish by them that he became their friend instead. He appeared again in "Cat's Cradle", in which he tried to hide from Officer X from Animal Control.
 * Joey (James Patrick Stuart) is an ill-tempered kangaroo with an Australian accent. He has fought other characters on the show.
 * Bada and Bing (John DiMaggio and Kevin Michael Richardson) are two gorillas who enjoy fighting. They once beat up Mort, which led to Mort growing after he was thrown into Kowalski's latest invention, and they then got beat up by Mort to get a mango. Julien once gave them lots of bananas but it is possible that they beat him up due to him giving too much to them.
 * Fred (Fred Stoller) is a squirrel that takes everything said literally and has a slow monotone speech pattern. Fred lives in a park near the zoo. He dated Marlene in "Otter Things Have Happened", but she broke up with him.
 * Officer X (Cedric Yarbrough) is an officer in animal control. He is obsessed with catching stray animals. He has a stronger grudge against the penguins than Alice. His first appearance is when he is searching for Max and the second appearance is when he was tracking down the penguins when they escaped the zoo. He is a very strong man and can take down even the strongest of animals, like Joey the Kangaroo. Officer X is very cocky and seems to have hunted many other animals before. In his second appearance he was arrested for going on a rampage after losing the penguins. He was an exterminator hired to remove cockroaches that Rico had befriended in "Stop Bugging Me" and a temporary zookeeper when Alice went on vacation in "The Officer X Factor".
 * Dr. Blowhole (Neil Patrick Harris) is Skipper's archenemy. He is a bottlenose dolphin who has red lobsters as servants. He was mentioned in the episodes "Eclipsed" and "Roomies", but he makes a full appearance in the special "Dr. Blowhole's Revenge", where he captures Julien and served as the primary antagonist of the episode (He was also referenced in "Invention Intervention", when Skipper believed that Kowalski's out-of-control invisible invisibility ray was Blowhole's creation, although Skipper also noted that disintegration was more Blowhole's style). He rides on a Segway-type vehicle as his means of transportation on land. Four running gags are that his skin is "surprisingly pleasant to the touch", that he constantly mispronounces "penguins" as "peng-u-ins", that he calls the penguins "flightless", and that he constantly rubs in the fact that he has far more superior technology than the penguins do.
 * Burt (John DiMaggio) is an elephant who was just one of the extra animals during the beginning of the series, but then he evolved into a character later on and even got a central episode in "An Elephant Never Forgets". He is shown to be obsessed with peanuts.
 * Manfredi and Johnson are two unseen recruits, referenced mainly by Skipper, who have suffered horrible, seemingly fatal ("You know, one up there and one down there!" –Skipper.) events in a number of previous penguin missions. Their "fates" have included having been attacked by "flying piranhas", their remains later ladled into their graves with a teaspoon; having been short one escape tunnel, their remains later sent back in a manila envelope, coincidentally from Manila; having mistook the "business end" of a beluga for an escape tunnel, resulting in them not being able to speak for months; having fallen for the "exploding elephant foot trick"; a Chinese lantern and six bottles of rocket fuel for a talent show; having lost their hearts, a lung, and 15 feet of intestine when they fell in love with two Chinstrap sisters; and being apparently literally smothered when a message informing the others to smother them with affection was misinterpreted. "Manfredi" and "Johnson" are also the names of the two American POWs killed while trying to escape the German prison camp in the 1953 movie Stalag 17.
 * Hans (John DiMaggio) is a puffin with a past history with Skipper that involves a mission in Denmark that somehow resulted in Skipper being declared Public Enemy Number One in the country in question. During "Huffin & Puffin", he appeared in New York, initially apparently wanting to make peace with Skipper, before his true agenda was revealed to be his attempt to take control of the Penguins' lair for revenge. With Skipper having infiltrated the lair and defeated Hans, he was then shipped to the Hoboken Zoo. He appeared in "The Return of the Revenge of Doctor Blowhole", working with Doctor Blowhole as part of a plan to take Skipper's memories.
 * Eggy (Tara Strong) is a duckling who the penguins once "egg-sitted" in "Paternal Egg-Stinct". In the episode "Hard Boiled Eggy", the penguins learn that because they influenced him while inside the egg, Eggy had all their commando strengths combined. At the end of the episode, Julien teaches Eggy how to dance and Eggy finds such better than trying to be a penguin.

Production
In mid 2006, Nickelodeon and DreamWorks Animation announced that they would collaborate to create a Nicktoon based on the Madagascar films. The new series would star the penguins from the film series. Nothing was confirmed on what the series would be about until November 2007.

At first, in November 2007, Nickelodeon advertised a sneak peek of three new Nicktoons coming to Nickelodeon, The Mighty B!, Making Fiends, and The Penguins of Madagascar all on November 25, 2007 part of Superstuffed Nicktoons Weekend. Then, in December 2007, Nickelodeon advertised many events that were going to premiere in 2008 (The Mighty B!, Fairly OddBaby, The Penguins of Madagascar, KCA 2008, Sidekicks, and "Pest of the West"). Since then, The Penguins of Madagascar was delayed at least twice in 2008, and saw a debut in March 2009, most likely due to Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa being delayed to November 7, 2008. On November 28, 2008, Nickelodeon aired an episode from the series as a sneak peek. The Double DVD Pack of Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa includes an early DVD of the show.

Casting
Some of the voice actors who voiced the characters in the films were unable to reprise their roles for the series. Chris Miller, who had voiced Kowalski, was replaced by Jeff Bennett, while Christopher Knights was replaced by James Patrick Stuart for the voice of Private. Danny Jacobs took over from Sacha Baron Cohen as the voice of King Julien, and Cedric the Entertainer's character, Maurice, is now voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson. Tom McGrath, John DiMaggio and Andy Richter reprised their roles of Skipper, Rico and Mort for the TV series, respectively. Other characters are voiced by the same actors who had voiced them in the films, while some characters, like Marlene and Alice the zookeeper, are new characters created especially for the series.

Nickelodeon debut
After some delays of the series to air, The Penguins of Madagascar debuted on Nickelodeon in 2009. The series is produced at the Nickelodeon Animation Studio in Burbank, California, with animation carried out in India, New Zealand and Taiwan. Both Nickelodeon and DreamWorks Animation were planning on a 26 episode season. The Penguins of Madagascar aired after the 2009 Kids' Choice Awards on March 28, 2009 at 9:30 p.m. ET/PT.

Critical reception
The Penguins of Madagascar has been given mixed to positive critical reviews. Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times gave the show a favorable review. She said that the show had strong comedic timing and action scenes, saying that it recalled both Wile E. Coyote cartoons and 1940s gangster movies. Tim Goodman's review in the San Francisco Chronicle is also favorable. He said that he considered the penguins and Julien as having the most comedic potential from the movies, with his review focusing on the voice actors' comedic timing, and said that the show also contained several jokes which would make it appealing to adults.

Brian Lowry of Variety described the show as "loud, exuberant and colorful" and praised its animation quality, but he did not think that it was funny and said that the show seemed more like a "merchandising bonanza".

Toys
DreamWorks has licensed to a number of manufacturers, including Hooga Loo Toys, who had a successful run creating a line of plush toys associated with the second Madagascar movie. Based on its success, Hooga Loo was granted a license to create an entirely new toy line for the new series. Hooga Loo recruited the creative development team, Pangea Corporation, the company who assisted Playmates Toys in the development of the phenomenally successful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to work systemically with DreamWorks and develop toys inspired by and for the series. The toy line included a full range of unique and funny feature plush characters, as well as clever collectible figures and wacky vehicles. Fast food restaurants courted DreamWorks to glean the rights for a QSR deal, which finally materialized in late 2009. McDonald's had produced a line of toys based on the second film. This relationship forged a new deal with McDonald's.

Licensed merchandise based on the show began debuting in January 2010. In February 2010, McDonald's began their "Mission: Play" Happy Meal toy campaign, which featured eight toys based on the penguins in the series.

Video games

 * The Penguins of Madagascar video game is a Nintendo DS action-adventure game based on the TV show of the same name. The game was released by THQ on November 2, 2010, and developed by Griptonite Games.
 * The Penguins of Madagascar: Dr. Blowhole Returns – Again! was released by THQ on September 6, 2011, for Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo DS.

Feature film
A direct-to-video film featuring the penguins had been in the works since 2005, when the Madagascar film had been released, with a release date planned for 2009. In March 2011, it was announced that the penguin characters would be given their own feature film, to be directed by Simon J. Smith, the co-director of Bee Movie, produced by Lara Breay, and written by Alan J. Schoolcraft and Brent Simons, the writers of DreamWorks' Megamind. Production on the film is expected to start in the middle of 2012 at India-based DreamWorks Dedicated Unit.

DVD releases

 * The Penguins of Madagascar, a 24-minute long "sneak peek" of the series, was released as part of the double DVD pack of Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. It included two episodes: "Popcorn Panic" and "Gone in a Flash".
 * The Penguins of Madagascar: Operation: DVD Premiere, a 130-minute-long, direct-to-DVD release which featured both all-new missions and TV-aired episodes, was released on February 9, 2010.
 * The Penguins of Madagascar: Happy King Julien Day!, an 88-minute-long, direct-to-DVD release which features both TV-aired episodes and some (as-of-yet) unaired episodes was released on August 10, 2010.
 * The Penguins of Madagascar: New to the Zoo, a direct-to-DVD release featuring seven TV-aired episodes, and one never-before-seen episode was released on August 10, 2010.
 * The Penguins of Madagascar: I Was a Penguin Zombie, an 88-minute DVD containing eight penguins missions, including one never-before-seen episode, was released on October 5, 2010.
 * The Penguins of Madagascar: All-Nighter Before Xmas, a 99-minute DVD was released on October 11, 2011, featuring six episodes of The Penguins.
 * The Penguins of Madagascar: Operation: Blowhole was released on January 10, 2012, and contains the specials "Dr. Blowhole's Revenge" and "The Return of the Revenge of Dr. Blowhole"
 * The Penguins of Madagascar: Operation: Get Ducky, a 92-minute DVD containing eight penguins missions, including one never-before-seen episode, was released on February 14, 2012