YMMV / Pingu

• Accidental Aesop: "Pingu Runs Away" could be taken as having an anti-spanking message, as doing so only hurts both parent and child, and only makes things worse.
• Accidental Innuendo: Pinga's name is a slang for "dick" while in Brazil, it is the name of an alcoholic drink.
• Awesome Art: The Pingu In The City seasons are CGI animated, though do a commendable job trying to replicate the claymation style as much as possible, while still using the media change to get in extra details like more elaborate scenery and busier shots with more characters animated at once.
• Awesome Music:
  • The iconic theme tune, composed by none other than David Hasselhoff himself.
  • This 8-bit version of "Woodpeckers from Space".
• Broken Aesop: In the episode "Pingu Steals", Pingu steals a jam biscuit from a baker's stall. When his mother finds out, she marches him back and she and the baker decide Pingu should make up for it by cleaning out the baker's chimney. When Pingu has done the job, the baker rewards him with another jam biscuit. Pingu comes home and leaves the biscuit on the table, but when he comes back into the room, Pinga has stolen it and is now eating it. Their mother decides not to help Pingu or make Pinga give it back. So basically, it's okay for Pinga to steal someone else's belongings but not when her brother does it.
• Creepy Awesome: The seal/walrus thingy has his fair share of fans, despite being aggressive towards Pingu and attempting to hurt him on top of just being plain creepy-looking due to his more realistic face and human teeth,
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Despite his overall creepy and unsettling appearance and monstrous behaviour, the seal/walrus from "Pingu's Dream" is quite loved by several fans, mostly because of him being a genuinely frightening antagonist in a dream episode, and some of the fans view him as Ugly Cute at his best.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Google "Pingu Leopard Seal" and "Pingu Walrus" and see which gets more correct results. A four year old watching the episode for the first time probably wouldn't know what a leopard seal was, but would associate the mustache with a walrus. There are even pages on Facebook about the evil walrus, not leopard seal. The most telling feature of the Seal's design to show that he is not a walrus is the lack of tusks.
  • The made-up language spoken by the characters is commonly referred as Penguinese by a majority of fans. Even the revival series acknowledges it.
• First Installment Wins: Though the UK and Japanese continuations are praised for their fidelity, the original Swiss made seasons (especially the first two) are often considered the best.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: To the point of saving the show twice over:
  • The show is fairly popular in the United Kingdom, enough that it ended up Uncancelled for another two seasons when HIT Entertainment bought the rights to the series.
  • The series is very popular in Japan, seeing as the Licensed Games that have been released were country-exclusives, and the show itself getting Uncancelled again with a CGI animated reboot in October 2017 entitled Pingu In The City.
  • It's fairly popular in North America, especially Canada. Even today in the United States, the show still is fairly well known and has a cult fanbase, despite it not really taking off in comparison to the United Kingdom and Japan.
  • Latin America has quite a strong love for the series, Mexico in particular, thanks to Pingu being a regular part of the classic "Once Niños" programming block.
  • Most Malaysian millenials have fond memories of the show airing on weekday mornings on TV3 in the 2000s. This is especially since the show apparently vanished off Malaysian TV completely by the time The New '10s rolled around. The Pingu's English program is one of the few remaining artifact that shows that the penguin was quite beloved in Malaysia at one point in time.
  • David Hasselhoff himself loves Pingu, going so far as to record a tie-in song for it in 1993, an instrumental version of which became the show's new theme song.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Pingu can be a real brat sometimes, but you want to see him learn a lesson.
  • In any instance Pingu's not acting up, one of the other kids will often be this. Most instances where Robby heckles Pingu end with them reconciling after Robby hurts himself and is left in tears for example.
• Memetic Molester: The walrus in "Pingu Dreams".
• Memetic Mutation: The series' modern day audience is most likely due to how meme worthy the show is.
  • "NOOT NOOT!"
    • Notably, an animation of Pingu where he says this, followed by a dramatic closeup of his face, has been doing the rounds in 2022.
  • "Pingu's Lavatory Story"^note Also known as "Little Accidents" has become possibly the most memetic episode of this show, for more reasons than one. Specifically, people find it funny for the Toilet Humour, but it's also controversial because it was banned for showing the kids drinking at a bar-like juice stand.
  • Pinga's name, due to not just being sexual slang in Spanish, but there are plenty of YTPs associated her name with a certain line well-known amongst YouTube Poopers.^note An episode of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog has a memetic scene where Dr. Robotnik says "Snooping as usual, I see", where "-ping as" is strangely emphasised to sound like he is yelling "PENIS!"
  • Adding to its status of being Big in Japan, the series is considered in Japan to be a treasure trove of mishearings due to the use of "Penguinese". Even "Noot noot!" is best known as a mishearing ("Maaag-nuuum"!).
  • "Pingu is my favorite anime."^ExplanationAs explained above, Pingu getting his own anime has caused people to jokingly call Pingu in the City their favorite anime, with the show at one point reaching the number one spot on MyAnimeList's top rated anime.
  • well now I am not doing it◊ ^ExplanationAn image macro of the phrase laid over Pingu sitting in a chair and pouting. This scene originates from "Pingu Runs Away" after Pingu is scolded by his father for flinging food at his mother. It's used to express anger over someone telling the poster to do something that they were already going to do, or something refusing to work immediately after it just did, like a computer going through a high FPS bump and then crashing.
  • A certain shot taken from the music video for Eskimo Disco's "7-11" became memetic for having Pingu donning emo hair and a miserable look for no apparent reason.
  • "I will make Stalin look like a fucking anarchist!"/"Is that a challenge?"^ExplanationFor some odd reason, there are memes about Pingu being a hardcore Communist who aims to be even more authoritarian and have a higher body count than Stalin himself. Has a lot of overlap with "Election Memes for Pingu Teens" below.
  • Election Memes for Pingu Teens^ExplanationAround September 2020, the Twitter meme page "Europe Elects Memes for Psephological Teens" rebranded itself as "Europe Elects Memes for Pingu Teens". A year later, they dropped the Europe Elects branding outright.
• Misaimed Merchandising: Whoever thought the (ironic) ''Pingu's English'' program was a good idea probably never even watched the series proper to begin with.
• Moe: Pinga and the other penguin chicks are the cutest characters in the show, especially since they are modeled after emperor penguin chicks.
• Narm: The Korean English dub is full of this. The dub of "Pingu Runs Away" makes the otherwise tearjerking scene unintentionally hilarious. The script sounds like it came out of a bad soap opera, especially with how it treats Pingu breaking the dishes as an unforgivable sin. Some choice quotes are:
  "Pingu! You are such a bad boy! Boy like you must pay for this!"
  "Pingu, do you want me to give you a bad time?"
  "I can not forgive you. Never."
  "Forgive me father."
• Never Live It Down: Pingu's mother to some extent, thanks to her harsh out of character behavior in "Pingu Quarrels With His Mother". Nevertheless, she's still a good mother overall.
• Nightmare Retardant: Despite being the highlight for the infamy surrounding Pingu's Dream, the walrus' laughter isn't that hard to remind of Dr. Hibbert.
• One-Scene Wonder: The aforementioned Seal nightmare episode.
• Periphery Demographic: The show has a rather large fanbase, and there are teenage and adult fans in there as well most likely due to the animation and the humour.
• So Bad, It's Good: In South Korea, the series was given a dub that features full English voice acting to help Koreans learn the language better. The dub is widely considered awful, with the voice acting and grammar errors making it nothing short of hilarious to a lot of people.
• Squick: In "The New Arrival," the penguin nurse cleans Pinga's poop with a tissue and then uses the same tissue to wipe Pinga's butt.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel:
  • Any time Pingu's mother is holding him.
  • The theme song.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • In 2005, the cartoon was partially Screwed by the Network in Britain by reusing The Pingu Show, which had originally been aired on the Canadian channel APTN, and then dubbing over it. This was disliked by many, and stuck with the episodes on their own.
  • The redubbed episodes in general which replace the classic Pingu theme with an excerpt of the Pingu Rap, changes all the music and overdubs much of the original audio. Those are the only versions found on DVD too, so you better hope you have your old British BBC VHS tapes to hand. Unless you decide to search YouTube for original episodes.
  • To some degree, the Pingu In The City reboot. While many like it since it stays true to the original series in spirit and designs and adds new gags and details like more variety in penguin species, the character switch-ups, along with the transition to CGI and more Animesque gimmicks is still apparent, with it not considered quite the same. The HiT Entertainment produced episodes also get this to a lesser degree, though they faithfully replicate the original far better.
  • Many fans dislike the later series due to the absence of Man of a Thousand Voices Carlo Bonomi, who voiced all the characters in the show's original incarnation and spoke in a distinct language that he'd created himself. The 2006 revival and In The City uses actors who sound completely different and converse in what essentially sounds like complete gibberish rather than anything resembling an actual language.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley:
  • Pingu smiling with teeth visible, mainly because penguins don't have humanlike teeth.
  • The infamous seal/walrus from "Pingu's Dream" looks far more realistic than the simplistic animals seen elsewhere, and has odd human-like teeth.
• Values Dissonance:
  • "Pingu and the Doll" features Pingu pretending to be an "Indian", something that was, and to some extent still is, more tolerated in Europe than it is in the US and Canada. Because of this, it was banned in North America for a while before being made available on Amazon Prime.
  • Pingu's mom spanking and slapping him in "Pingu Runs Away" and "Pingu Quarrels With His Mother" respectively. In many parts of the world today (particularly in the West), corporal punishment is frowned upon at best and an actual crime at worst.
• Viewer Species Confusion:
  • There's a lot of debate whether the giant monster pinniped from "Pingu Dreams" is a walrus or a leopard seal, which doesn't help that he looks nothing like either of them.
  • Pingu is said to be an emperor penguin on the official Japanese page, but the Pingu documentary says Pingu is a king penguin. Adult king and emperor penguins look alike, but Pinga is clearly an emperor penguin chick and Pingu has yellow markings like an emperor penguin (king penguins have orange markings). Pingu actually looks more like an Adelie penguin.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: There were many scenes which feel questionable for a preschool's show (particularly in the older episodes), including one where Pingu was slapped by his mother, and another where blood dripped out from Pingu's beak from an injury. Not to mention a couple of episodes were banned from airing due to literally invoking Nightmare Fuel ("Pingu's Dream").
• Woolseyism: In spite of the flak towards the remastered series' soundtrack changes, "Pingu Helps With Incubating" has a rather cool example, replacing the copyrighted "Woodpeckers From Space" with the extended version of The Pingu Dance.

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