It ran for one season of 50 episodes from June 3, 1996 to August 9, 1996, with reruns airing until June 9, 2000.
It was followed by an unofficial spin-off for preschoolers called Zoboomafoo in 1999, and an animated series called Wild Kratts in 2011.
Tropes:
- Amusing Injuries: Usually happens to the brothers.
- The most notable episode to involve this trope is "The Great Defenders". Martin gets stung by bees, skunked, bitten by an alligator snapping turtle, and hit by a porcupine. Then Alison and Chris walk into poison ivy, are stung by bees and skunked in turn.
- And then there was the one where Allison is trying to fix her computer system, gets it working, and bangs her head on the underside of the desk.
- An Aesop:
- The baby sea turtle episode has one: you have to understand nature before you can try to help it. Alison gets it in her head, as do Chris and Martin, that they need to save the hatching baby turtles from the natural predators. They do so by picking them up and getting them to the water, against Ttark's protests. In the end, Ttark reveals that thirty percent of the eggs survive without human interference, enough to keep the sea turtles from being endangered; the Kratt brothers admit they got carried away. What really helps is when they cleaned litter off the beach like plastic bags and netting, which can trap the turtles before they get a fair chance at life. They also note that humans love turtle eggs, so education is another way to make sure sea turtles don't become endangered.
- In “Weird Creatures”, Ttark hammers it home that just because an animal may be considered “weird” according to human categorization and prejudice, that doesn’t mean it’s any way “unnatural”.
- Big Word Shout: "FOOOTNOOOOTES!"
- Catchphrase: "Abso-tively" from Ttark.
- "FOOTNOTES!" (complete with an animated cutaway of an elephant's stomping foot.)
- Didn't Think This Through: The boys spend the cheetah episode trying to reach the sprint speed of a cheetah. Martin manages to get to about 40 mph riding a bicycle downhill before crashing in a thicket, but they decide they can't do it with person power so Chris outfits an off-road vehicle. They get up to 70 mph (Maximum Cheetah Velocity!) on a dirt road... and then run out of gas and are stuck pushing their 4x4 back home. Oh, and Chris messed up the alignment when he was working on it, too.
- Final Exam Finale: "Around Africa in Eighty Hours", which involves the Kratts going around Africa to get their facts back (which are all from previous episodes).
- Insistent Terminology: The Kratts usually refer to any and all members of the animal kingdom as “creatures” rather than “animals”.
- Mad Libs Catchphrase: Ttark's "[Verb]ing [animal]s!", with Added Alliterative Appeal included.
- Magical Computer: Allison owns a computer that she can use to look for animal facts.
- Medium Blending: Ttark, who appears via TV to Allison and the Kratts.
- Also, episodes have certain cutaway shots that are made using cutout animation.
- Pantomime Animal: Both parodied and deconstructed in "Wild Ponies!". The brothers dress up as a zebra stallion in order to go and meet the horses, but it gets worse when a real one neighs at them ferociously making them run away and destroy their horse costume.
- Poor Communication Kills: Played for laughs. Chris and Martin are in Canada investigating beavers and agree to “meet back at the lodge”, then start snorkeling. Cut to Martin shivering inside the beaver lodge they built earlier in the episode and wondering where Chris is. Cut to Chris kicking back in front of a fire in a hunting lodge-styled inn and wondering where Martin got to.
- Running Gag: One of the Kratts, Allison or Ttark would often say "Wait a minute" or "Hold on" whenever something comes to inspiration or goes too far.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: Martin and Chris try to recreate their ancestors' journey of finding the Tasmanian Tiger. Alison helps by reading the journals their ancestors left. She finds out the Tasmanian Tiger went extinct one hundred years ago due to humans hunting them out of fear, and the last one died ill in a zoo. Alison does find video footage that showed the Kratt ancestors found the zoo before that Tiger died.
- Shout-Out:
- Some episode titles are these to movie titles, for example, "Around Australia in Eight Days" and "Around Africa in Eighty Hours".
- At one point, in "Weird Creatures", Chris imitates Scotty from Star Trek.
- Stock Footage: Most of the cutout animated cutaway shots, not to mention the more exotic animal footage in general. This is a PBS show, after all.
- Tastes Like Purple: Martin tries eating some marsh grass in "Marshmania" and describes the taste as "very green".
- That Came Out Wrong: Happens at one point in "In Search of the Tasmanian Tiger".Allison: It says here it took them a number of dogs...a number of dogs? Sorry, I read that wrong. It took them a number of days to even get near the Tasmanian tiger. That makes more sense, because dogs like dingos have absolutely nothing to do with Tasmania.
- Unusual Euphemism / "Eureka!" Moment: Ttark's exclamations of "Colliding Camels!", "Grazing Gazelles!", "Hopping Hadrosaurus!", etc.
- Voice Changeling: Ttark, again. For example:"This time, I'm not as angry. This time, (deeper voice) IT'S PERSONAL!"
- Voice with an Internet Connection: Basically the purpose of Allison, except she had an Omniscient Database rather than the Internet. And she could somehow follow the brothers' adventures on a monitor even though they were explicitly not being followed by a camera crew in-universe. And the footage was edited in spite of it supposedly being live.
- Wham Line: The Tasmanian Tiger episode has one for viewers that don't know Australian history. Alison finds the journals she was using of Kratt Australian explorers ended mid-sentence. After searching through the Kratts books, she finds another journal...which makes her go Oh, Crap!. She types something into the computer and announces the Tasmanian Tiger went extinct one hundred years ago. Cue Mass "Oh, Crap!" from Ttark and the Kratt brothers.
