Penguins, penguins, and more penguins. 

Do you ever get so stressed about your job or your studies that you wish you could just be a penguin deep diving into the ocean with your friends? I sure have. But I never actually met a penguin; I’m not sure I know enough about them or what they usually do. Maybe they also go through stress over other things. Maybe they aren’t just the relaxed little animals that we all believe they are. Maybe they also get so overwhelmed by something or need a mental health day once in a while. Maybe they also go to sleep wishing the days had more hours, or that the holidays were closer. I don’t know much about them, but it is fun to imagine that their lives aren’t that different from ours. But most probably they are. 

One of the first encounters, to some, the only one, most people have with these little animals is through TV shows and movies. By this I don’t mean documentaries or science shows. I mean those animated media that we are exposed to since kids. Looking at these images of penguins made me think about all the famous penguin characters that grew up with us over the decades. The first one that comes to mind is the ones from the movie Madagascar. Those 4 witty penguins are most of our first encounter with the animal, and we end up loving them. They are funny with a bit of maleficence inside them, a perfect combination. They became so popular that they even got their own TV series, Penguins of Madagascar. Another example of a first encounter with these animals is definitely the characters from Happy Feet.

One TV show that is incredibly popular and also features a penguin as the star of it is Pingu. I never thought that the series was that popular and known by everyone. I always thought it was a bit niche. But no, it has an enormous fandom that is always creating new memes and reviving scenes from the show. For the ones that have not watched the show, it is about the adventures of a penguin called Pingu and his family, who live in an igloo in Antarctica. It’s a show animated in stop motion with six seasons that was on air from 1980 till 2006. 

Incredibly, a lot of us have never actually seen a penguin in real life, as we haven’t visited a place cold enough for them to live. But we do know about them and love them. And for that, we need to thank TV shows and movies. They were our introduction to these cute little animals and the reason we know about them. Yes, of course we learned about them in school, but we love them as much as we do thanks to the visibility they got from the media. Let’s hope we get even more shows and films so they become as popular for the new generations as they were for us.