They're pengiuns. Penguin commandos.

I admit it. I've been watching a lot of television lately. But it's been too hot to do anything, and the teaching schedule is just so packed that I'm usually worn out on the weekends and don't want to do much.

But I do want to mention a show that I really love, that makes me laugh. It's a kid's show, it's on Nickelodeon, and it's a movie spin-off. So I think it doesn't quite get the credit it deserves.

It's called "The Penguins of Madagascar." I've never actually seen either of the Madagascar movies, but I happened to run across this one day and started watching. And it's really very funny and clever.

Part of the reason is the simple incongruity: there are four penguins, see. They live in the Central Park Zoo. They think they're commandos and they pull "raids" and do other things to fix problems...in the zoo.

Sometimes they screw up - a lot of times they misinterpret the situations. But like a lot of good comic heroes, sometimes their screw ups actually lead to success of their "mission."

That's part of the reason I like the show. But I also like the characters. It's a team of four: Skipper, who sounds a little bit like William-Shatner-as-Captain-Kirk is the leader. He's the one most likely to overreact or misinterpret a situation. Kowalski is the ideas guy, maybe a little bit like Spock to Skipper's Kirk. He also invents stuff. Some of it is kind of dumb stuff, some of it is dangerous (his living jelly cube that eats other animals). He's also the brainiac, and supposedly doesn't understand "feelings" and "emotions."

Then there's Rico. Rico is nuts, he's the demolitions guy. He's also their traveling materiel source: he can apparently regurgitate whatever is needed (a chain saw, a bomb) on Skipper's request. Rico speaks mainly in grunts and garbled monosyllables, which adds to The Crazy. (But Rico also has a soft spot: he has a fashion doll, kind of like a Malibu Barbie, of which he is very fond, and he is often seen combing its hair).

And then finally, there's Private. Private is there in part for Skipper and Kowalski to have someone to boss around. Private is very kind and sweet and probably understands animal nature better than the others. He also speaks with a British (vaguely Liverpudlian, maybe?) accent (none of the other penguins do; Skipper sounds like Kirk, Kowalski sounds like the stereotypical stern manly engineer, and Rico grunts).

So it's kind of like an action-adventure-buddy-movie thing. You can't quite map any of the existing ones on it - I tried to figure out "If this was the A-Team, who would be whom?" and couldn't get past the fact that Skipper would be Hannibal, and maybe Rico would be Maddog, but the others don't quite fit. (There is no Mr. T analogue, for example).

There are other characters. Marlene, the otter, is the token female (I'm guessing thrown in there as a sop to all the people who say "but cartoons have to have BALANCE.") But Marlene is often the voice of reason, she's often more understanding and aware of the situation.

On the other hand, there's a lemur - a self-styled King Julien of the Zoo. Like many tinpot despots, he's vain, shallow, self-absorbed, and really rather stupid. He often messes things up that the penguins have to fix. He has two minions: Maurice, who is bright enough but somewhat cynical and apathetic, and Mort, who is either stupid or crazy and has a strange love of Julien's feet. (I guess in the movie the guy who played Borat did the voice for Julien, and the voice-talent in the television show seems to capture the loopiness, strange accent, and pure self-serving blindsidedness well)

There are other, minor characters: a pugilistic kangaroo, an elephant who sounds like someone doing a bad Harry Carey impression. Most of them serve to move the plots along, to provide something for the penguins to do.

Part of my love of the show are the silly schemes - the stuff Kowalski has to build that's cobbled together out of bits and pieces and looks, really, rather LIKE something a penguin would build. (sort of like the infamous Cow Tools comic). And stuff doesn't always work. One of my favorite episodes is the one where the penguins overhear the zookeeper claiming that they have "three males and a female" and so, he builds a DNA analyzer (which uses loogies as the source of DNA). But it breaks midway through, leaving everyone to believe for most of the episode that Skipper is actually a girl. (And it's kind of a funny play on stereotypes, really.)

But I also love the "backstory" element of it. Not everything is explained. Skipper regularly refers to "Manfredi and Johnson" - two past members of the team. No one seems to quite know what happens to them. But he references them regularly: "They were cute and naive." or "They fell in love, too" (And apparently it's a Stalag 17 reference! I didn't get that until I did a Google check on the spelling of Manfredi. Awesome.)

There are also a lot of odd funny little throwaway lines. At one point, we "come in on" a conversation, and Skipper says something like "...and that's why I can never set foot in Denmark." It's those things - the ideas that these characters have fully developed backstories we're not entirely privy to - is one of the things I enjoy about the show.

The other thing I like - and the Manfredi and Johnson reference is an example of this - is that there are periodically little things tossed in to reward people who are paying attention (or adults who may be watching the show, who have more developed cultural knowledge). One that made me laugh recently involved Kowalski making a machine to make things smarter. Private gets zapped by it and he immediately spouts out: "The sum of the square root of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side." Which is very close to - if not exactly - what the Scarecrow says upon being given his "diploma" (signifying brains) in The Wizard of Oz.

And part of it is, it's just a cute and funny show - you can laugh at the penguins and their antics. And you can forget all the crazy crap going on in the world for a little while.