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Trivia / The Noddy Shop

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  • Acting for Two:
    • James Rankin voiced Johnny Crawfish, Slim, Sherman and Planet Pup, the latter two whom often talked to each other on the show due to their friendship.
    • Frank Meschkuleit played Warloworth, Shorty and Gaylord.
    • Matt Ficner was Rusty, Lichtenstein and one of the Crybabies.
  • Actor-Shared Background: Harry Anderson, who was a magician in real life, played Jack Fable, who shared his profession, in the episode "The Magic Show".
  • Adored by the Network:
    • CBC and TVOntario were obsessed with this show. The show would usually air twice a day on different channels, giving you four chances to catch it in a single day, and five if you received PBS. This lasted until late 2004.
    • It was also adored by CBBC in the United Kingdom, where it aired twice a day, and every few days, "To The Rescue" or "The Trouble With Truman" would be one of the two episodes airing.
    • CPTV (the PBS station in Connecticut) aired the show twice a day: once in the morning and again in the afternoon.
    • For some reason, the PBS Kids channel was so obsessed with the two episodes featuring Disrupto ("Big Bullies" and "The Human Touch") that they'd randomly air even if the channel wasn't up to the second season of the show, where these episodes came from.
  • Colbert Bump:
    • More people who watched the various channels on which this aired began to remember this show after a page for it was created on Lost Media Wiki in January of 2017.
    • This also happened when Harry Anderson died, as some articles listed his work on The Noddy Shop as one of his roles, despite the episode he starred in not being able to be watched anywhere until the year after his death.
  • Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:
    • Because of the show not seeing any official US release and falling into obscurity after PBS pulled it, many people tend to mix up the show with Make Way For Noddy, a mistake that's perhaps the most prominent on Amazon's DVD listings for that show, which list The Noddy Shop's actors rather than the ones for Make Way for Noddy, with the two most common being Lauren Collins and Goldy Noltay, who are listed on every single release.
    • People tend to call Johnny Crawfish a crawfish, shrimp or crab when he's actually a lobster. Other people claim that he is a toy too, when he's the pet of the shopkeeper.
    • BBC's description of "Telling The Whole Truth" calls Charlene Von Pickings "Mrs Pickles". They also claimed that the episode "The Fish Story" mainly focuses on Johnny getting a new tankmate, when the episode's main plot is about Kate losing a ring while playing a fishing game with her brother and friend and Aunt Agatha dressing up as a cat to find the "rodents" note  that stole the ring.
    • The official website had quite a few mistakes.
      • The song section contained most of the errors on the site:
      • This section's URLS did not know which songs came from which episodes at time. note  "A Whole Lot Of Helping" was said to be from "Stop, Listen and Learn" rather than "Mixed-Up Magic", and "Country Mouse, City Mouse" was said to be from "Noah's Leaving" rather than "Sing Yourself to Sleep".
      • The lyrics for the songs appear to have been taken directly from the scripts, with some pieces of the script that signified the people to do various actions (example: "Bonita ad-libs throughout") appearing occasionally. In at least two songs, the prototype names for some characters were used instead of their final names.
      • In "The Burrito Song", the word "careful" in Johnny's "Remember if you can a few of these cooking rules" solo was spelled with two L's.
      • Some plot summaries on the website left out the subplots involving the puppet characters, like the Johnny Crawfish plot of "The Fish Story" and the Sherman and Rusty plot of "The Trouble With Truman". On a similar note, the summaries for "Telling The Whole Truth" and "Let's Go Fly A Kite" don't summarize the Noddy's Toyland Adventures segments.
    • An official British DVD of the series misspells Kate's name as "Katy" on the back cover. The guide that came with the DVD also kept calling Noah "Granddad".
    • Another British piece of merchandise, the 1999 annual, spelled Warloworth's name as "Wal-O-Worth Q. Weasel" and Gertie's name as "Gerty".
    • Happened on this very site for the longest time. Any time the final episode "Closing Up Shop" was mentioned on it, it would be mentioned that it ended the series on a downer note, with the shop being closed forever and the toys being sold off. However, after the episode was released on YouTube, it became clear that while that DOES come close to happening in the episode, at the end, Agatha sells all her hats to the customers who bought the toys in exchange for returning them to the shop, and the host of a presumed local kid's show promises to give the shop free publicity on his show.
    • Several sites, including TV.com and Amazon, both list Jack Fable as a major character in every episode when he only appeared in one, "The Magic Show".
    • Episodate's description of the show contains several errors:
      • The description lists Theodore Tugboat and Jay Jay the Jet Plane as examples of Importation Expansion. Theodore originally aired in its' home country of Canada with the Harbourmaster segments, and Jay Jay The Jet Plane never utilizes a Framing Device and was made in the USA. The person writing the summary may have been confusing the live-action interstitials with the character Brenda Blue for being an actual framing device, when they just exist to fill time in between stories and ignorned the fact that she is also a character in the actual Jay Jay stories as well.
      • Granny Duck is called a goose when she is a duck and one character is called a bust statue. However, none of the toys that come to life are bust statues, so the writer could have been confusing said character with either the shiphead figure Island Princess or the beer mug Lichtenstein.
      • The shop is said to be part of a townhouse, which isn't mentioned in the show at all. It also says that Kate and Truman live in this townhouse, when they actually come to visit NODDY's and don't live there.
      • Noddy's design having eyelashes is said to be inspired by SpongeBob SquarePants, which came out seven years after the show that The Noddy Shop is a Framing Device for.
      • It says that Noddy is often annoyed by Bumpy Dog, when he is shown to have a good relationship with him.
    • Family Wonder's review claims that only the episode "Let's Go Fly A Kite" used a song. All of the episodes of the show had at least one musical number in them. "Big Bullies", the other episode mentioned, contained two, one of which was an "I Want" Song sung by a Character of the Day.
    • This page about James Rankin calls Sherman "Superman the Turtle Tank".
    • Some pages about Michael Cera claim that his role as Butch in the episode "Big Bullies" was a voice role, as the show has mostly puppet and animated characters in its' cast. Butch is actually a human character who is a Character of the Day.
    • One of the categories IMDB puts the show under is "Crime".
    • This article from The Guardian called Warloworth Q Weasel a "wisecracking teacher-like figure". While the "wisecracking" part is right, he has not been seen acting like a teacher or mentor in the show.
  • Creator's Favorite Episode:
  • Cross-Dressing Voices: Noddy, Master Tubby Bear and Sly are voiced by Catherine Disher, and Bonita Flamingo is played by Frank Meschkuleit.
  • The Danza: Kate Tomten shares the same first name as her actress, Katie Boland.
  • Descended Creator:
    • Most of the puppets have their puppeteer as their voice actor, but there are some exceptions.
    • An amusing example of this trope concerns Alyson Court as Island Princess: in Canada, one of the two places this show aired in Canada was on CBC's Get Set For Life block, where Court was one of the hosts. Even stranger, the scenes in the attic feature toys of the various shows that aired on the block, and one of them was a Noddy plush.
  • Dueling Dubs: Two versions of the show exist with regards to the Noddy segmentsnote - One with the Canadian voice cast, and another with the original UK audio. They also have different title sequences where the logo differs: the Canadian versions have the "Noddy" logo during the intro, while the British version has the "Noddy in Toyland" logo.
  • Dueling Shows:
    • Was this with Charlie Horse Music Pizza, another PBS musical about an elderly person running a shop with talking animals that lived there. However, because Music Pizza was overshadowed by Teletubbies (not helping matters was Shari Lewis' death nine months after her show's debut), The Noddy Shop came out on top.
    • It was also this with the similarly-formatted Salty's Lighthouse on Ready, Set, Learn!, a duel which The Noddy Shop also won due to said block having the lowest ratings of any preschool block.
  • Edited for Syndication: Ultimately, it's a re-edited version of Noddy's Toyland Adventures with additional human actors and puppets (much like Shining Time Station was for Thomas & Friends) so they could stretch a normally 10-minutes long Noddy's Toyland Adventures episode up to the 30 minute mark.
  • Genre-Killer: This show's poor merchandise sales due to the characters in the Framing Device not getting any merchandise (save for a set of stickers), along with the poor reception of the framing segments in fellow PBS Kids show Caillou, ended the trend of shows solely being created to frame a show from another country.
  • In Memoriam: This was how the program break music video for "Thank You For Being You" surfaced. Upon hearing about Sean McCann's death, two fans of the show worked together to restore the video and post it to YouTube in honor of him.
  • Inspiration for the Work: According to Matt Ficner, Aunt Agatha's personality was inspired by Miss Piggy from The Muppets.
  • Keep Circulating the Tapes: Several episodes were released on two VHS tapes and one DVD in the United Kingdom, and the Internet Archive has "Skunked" up as part of its 9/11 archivenote  as well as archived pages of the PBS site with song lyrics and episode descriptions and clips from "The Big Race", "Jack Frost Is Coming To Town", "Anything Can Happen At Christmas", "Lights, Cameras, Chaos" and "How Rude" posted on Dennis Scott's official YouTube, but the rest of the episodes are hard to find. Nine American-dubbed Noddy segments were also released to three VHS tapes, but the third, Noddy and the Magic Night, is rarer than the others.
    • Fortunately, it seemed that due to having connections with creator Rick Siggelkow, YouTuber Joseph Marshall got permission to post all episodes of the show on his channel. After “Anything Can Happen at Christmas” premiered on the channel on Christmas Eve 2020, the entire series became available to view once again. Unfortunately, the channel was later terminated. Luckily, the channel Johnson and Noddy has reuploaded all the episodes]].
    • Even rarer are the program break music videos featuring songs from the show. These are mentioned on a few episode summaries on TV.com to have aired on WNYE, but only seemed to be of select songs from the second season. There was no evidence of these videos online until June 2019 when "Thank You For Being You" surfaced, meaning that the Season 1 songs also had these music videos. There's also the Johnny Crawfish song "Special" which was posted three years prior by someone who worked on the video, but it's unknown if this was one of the music videos in rotation. note  The best bet to finding these is old VHS recordings of other PBS Kids shows from 1999-2002.
  • Milestone Celebration: The reason this show was imported back into the UK was to celebrate the Noddy character's 50th birthday.
  • No Export for You: The show only aired in the United States, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom (as Noddy in Toyland), Latin America, Israel and Poland. Networks in other countries probably didn't see this as worth their time due to the show being perceived as an Edited for Syndication version of Noddy's Toyland Adventures- where they took the series and stuffed in human characters, puppets and chroma-keyed "goblins", especially when they still have the repeat rights of the original show.
    • No English-speaking territories outside of North America got the second season of the show despite it being dubbed for several other countries.
  • Out of Holiday Episode: Of the five holiday episodes of the show that were produced, four of them aired before the holidays they were about.
    • "We All Say Boo!", a Halloween Episode, aired on September 23rd, 1998. It's not bad compared to most of these examples, as this aired a month before the holiday in question.
    • "Secret Valentines" aired on October 12th, 1998, four months before Valentine's Day.
    • "April Fool", which had an April Fools' Plot, aired on September 16th, 1999.
    • "Part Of The Family", a Very Special Episode that took place on Mother's Day, aired on November 8th, 1999.
    • The lone aversion for the show is "Anything Can Happen At Christmas", a Christmas special which aired on December 6th, 1998.
  • Only So Many Canadian Actors: Jayne Eastwood, Lauren Collins, James Rankin, Matt Ficner, Alyson Court and Michael Cera, actors and puppeteers who were frequent in many Canadian kids' shows and kidcoms in the 90s, appeared on this show. This show also is where a few Canadian actors begun their careers, most notably Michael Cera.
  • Permanent Placeholder:
    • Matt Ficner, the creator of the show's puppets, voiced three of the ones he created for the show: Rusty, Stein and one of the Crybabies.
    • Likewise, Noreen Young played a puppet she created herself, Granny Duck.
  • The Production Curse: Beginning in 2014 (with the exceptions of 2016, 2020 and 2023), at least one person who worked on the show has died every year:
    • 2014 saw two people who worked on the show die: Peter Callandar, who worked on the music video "Special" and Gerard Parkes, who played Wally the Wanderer and died of natural causes in a retirement home.
    • In 2015, Susan Sheridan, who voiced Noddy in the show's British version as a result of playing him in the show that the series was a Framing Device for, passed away after fighting breast cancer.
    • Gregory Cross, who played Ed Caruso, died in November 2017.
    • In April 2018, Harry Anderson, who played Jack Fable, suffered a stroke as a complication of the flu that he was suffering.
    • June 13, 2019 was the day when Sean McCann, who played Noah Tomten, died of complications from heart disease.
    • Two people with ties to the show died in 2021, both on the 31st day of the month. In August, Theresa Plummer-Andrews, the producer of the Noddy's Toyland Adventures segments, died of natural causes, while in December, Betty White, who played Mrs. Claus in the Christmas Special, died in her sleep on New Year's Eve as a result of complications from a stroke she suffered on Christmas, 17 days before her 100th birthday.
    • Gilbert Gottfried, who played Jack Frost, died of complications of muscular dystrophy on April 12, 2022.
    • Brian McConnachie, the show's head writer, died of Parkinson's disease on January 5, 2024.
  • Production Posse: Quite likely due to the show's cast being comprised mostly of Canadian actors, this show has many examples of this:
    • Rick Siggelkow (the show's creator), Jayne Eastwood (Aunt Agatha) and Stacey Hersch (the composer of the background music) worked on Shining Time Station.
    • Sean McCann (Noah Tomten) and Gil Filar (Boobull) appeared together in the movie Tommy Boy.
    • Lauren Collins (Roxanne), Mark Donato (Dewey Lester) and Jayne Eastwood all starred in Degrassi: The Next Generation.
    • Gerard Parkes (Wally The Wanderer) and Frank Meschkuliet (Warloworth, Bonita, Gaylord and Shorty) both starred in Fraggle Rock.
    • Frank Meschkuliet and Matt Ficner (Rusty, Stein and Whiny) both worked on Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium and The Thing.
    • Matt Ficner and Noreen Young (Granny Duck) both worked on Under the Umbrella Tree, with the show being Ficner's first puppeteering role.
    • Katie Boland (Kate), Kyle Kass (DJ), Michael Cera (Butch in Big Bullies), Michael Seater (a bully in the same episode as Michael Cera), Daniel Magder (Truman's friend Sam) and Gil Filar starred on Real Kids, Real Adventures.
    • Alyson Court (Island Princess) and Max Morrow (Truman) both had voice roles in Timothy Goes to School.
    • Alyson Court and Rick Siggelkow both worked on the American dub of Tweenies.
    • Harry Anderson (Jack Fable) and Gilbert Gottfried (Jack Frost) appeared together on a few episodes of Night Court, as well as in I Love The 80's 3-D.
    • Rick Siggelkow, Shadia Simmons, writers Jeff Biederman, Sean Kelly and Steve Wright, composer Stacey Hersch, camera director Gail Harvery, and Matt Ficner all worked together on Ace Lightning.
  • Recursive Import: Unlike most British shows that got new material surrounding them, this was one of only two shows with that format note  actually made it into the UK. Not only that, but they got a book with the characters from the shop in it, as well as a toy of Noddy's car that came with a backdrop of the shop, while the US got nothing with the framing device characters.
  • Recycled Script: Being the Spiritual Successor to Shining Time Station, this tended to happen quite a bit. For example, both shows' premiere episodes have a brown-haired girl showing a young boy around the titular location of the show, "Is This Farewell?" and "Noah's Leaving" both have the characters thinking the shop will close, and "Becky Makes A Wish" and "Let's Go Fly A Kite" had the characters acting the opposites of their normal personalities as a result of something magic-related going wrong. Aside from this, the show tended to recycle its own plots often:
    • "Lost and Found" and "Something's Lost, Something's Found": The characters loose something that belongs to Noah, and one of the toy characters goes missing. note 
    • "Growing Lies" and "Telling The Whole Truth": One of the child characters tells a lie to try to hide a mistake they made.
    • "A Dog's Best Friend" and "The Fish Story": One of the toy characters has to deal with an animal species that is similar to them getting more attention. note 
      • "A Dog's Best Friend" itself is recycled from another episode of a PBS Kids program produced in Canada, in this case the Charlie Horse Music Pizza episode "My Dog Has Fleas", in which the characters find a stray dog that they keep before later learning it belongs to someone else. The Magic Adventures of Mumfie episode "Regining Cats And Dogs" and the Love Live! Sunshine!! episode "Taking In A Dog!" also use the same plot.
    • "Treasure Hunt" and "Noah's Treasure": The children discover something old belonging to Noah.
    • "Mixed Up Magic", "Following Directions" and "The Big Mess": An incident involving an animal causes a mess to be created in the shop. note 
    • "Noah's Leaving" and "Closing Up Shop": Noah wants to close NODDY'S. note 
    • In a case that isn't recycled from Shining Time Station or from an earlier episode, the season 2 episode "Thunder and Lightning" has a similar plot to the Bear in the Big Blue House episode "Afraid Not", which aired ten months prior: both involved characters overcoming their fear of a thunderstorm-induced Big Blackout, and also had the characters tell a story to pass the time (however, two were told in The Noddy Shop's version).
  • Release Date Change: The show was supposed to be aired in June 1998 on PBS, but due to PBS thinking that Teletubbies would be more popular due to its success in the UK (and moving its release two months before Noddy was supposed to be released), it was moved to September 1998.
  • Remade for the Export: This show was basically Noddy's Toyland Adventures but with a live action show surrounding it.
  • Role Reprise: Betty White, who plays Mrs. Claus in the Anything Can Happen At Christmas special, had previously played the same character in The Story of Santa Claus, an animated special that premiered two years before The Noddy Shop.
  • Screwed by the Lawyers: If this show was ever to be re-released again, royalties would have to be paid for the use of the Noddy's Toyland Adventures segments, seeing as they played a crucial role in the show's plot.
  • Screwed by the Merchandise: Many companies promised to put out products based off the Noddy Shop characters in North America. However, they only made merchandise based off the Noddy's Toyland Adventures segments (save for a calendar featuring a few characters on the last page), which were not as popular as the puppet segments and led to poor sales of the products. This was the reason the show wound up being cancelled after four seasons.
  • Screwed by the Network: While most affiliates treated the show fairly, some affiliates didn't treat it the same way. The most common example, at least for this show, was to air the show's first season in a good timeslot on weekends, and then either put it on in an early morning timeslot or drop it from the schedule altogether. However, some stations that aired the show did things differently:
    • The most notable offender was KQED in San Francisco, which not only shoved the show in a Saturday morning time slot at 6:30AM note , but skipped some episodes that were key points in the series, including "The Magic Key" note , "The Fish Story"note , "A Promise Is A Promise" note , and "Anything Can Happen At Christmas"note . If new episodes of the show did air, they would often air later than they did in other parts of the country. note  The channel stopped airing the show in March 2001 and replaced it with repeats of Zoboomafoo.
    • NJN note  only aired the first 40 episodes and "Anything Can Happen At Christmas" during their three-year-run.
    • WNED possibly treated this show worse than any other PBS station. Not only did the show premiere late (February 6th, 1999, compared to other stations premiering it in the fall of 1998), but after "The Big Mess" aired, the show was shoved into a 5:30AM timeslot.
    • Outside the US, TV3 Malaysia only aired the first season of the show in 1999.
  • Sleeper Hit: The show was a surprise hit in the United States when it first aired on PBS, despite Americans' unfamiliarity with the Noddy character at the time. It even outperformed Sesame Street in the ratings. Sadly, the show was screwed over in later years and was lost media for a long time, but it's fondly remembered by those who watched it.
  • So My Kids Can Watch: This article published after the death of Sean McCann says that he played the role of Noah Tomten not just because he was similar in personality to the character, but also due to him just becoming a grandfather himself. This is a justified example, being that intergenerational relationships are a major theme of the show itself.
  • Technology Marches On: "The Human Touch" not only came out when computers were new technology, but also came out during a time when game software that let you plug in toys via USB to interact with the game were popular, which the episodes spoofs in the form of the robot Disrupto. note 
  • Tyop on the Cover: The episode "The Sandman Cometh" has the episode's title displayed as "THE SANDMAN" COMETH". It's unknown if this was fixed for future airings of the episode.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • The Do-Wop Penguins were originally supposed to be a group of singing nutcrackers called The Nutcracker Chorus.
    • The entire series was supposed to be released to home video in North America, but instead, just the Noddy segments, with music videos played in between the stories in a similar fashion to Strand's releases of Thomas & Friends, were released. This decision wound up playing a role in the series' cancellation because the segments in the shop were the most popular amongst children and not the Toyland segments, which hurt sales of the videos.
    • The show was also going to re-run on PBS Kids Sprout according to a press release, but Make Way For Noddy was shown at the last minute.
    • According to an interview with Rick Siggelkow, the show's working title was Noddy and Friends, which ironically enough was used for one of the BBC video releases of the show. Several other sites, as well as an Australian TV guide, also use this working title.
    • Quality Family Entertainmentnote  was the original producer of the show.
  • You Might Remember Me from...:
    • Carol Kane, after years of languishing in obscurity after being a popular 70's movie actor, appeared on this show as the Tooth Fairy.
    • Taborah Johnson, who played Gertie, was the backing vocalist for Rick James, most notably in his hit song "Super Freak".

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