Thank you!!

I decided to check the blog's hits this morning. And I got a nice surprise: the episode guide page has 25,892 pageviews as of right now!! It's one of the top results on Google for 'oobi episodes' too! It makes me pretty proud. Thank you so much to everyone who follows this silly little blog, and to all of the families out there who love Oobi as much as we do.

Q&A: What's up with the 'Oobi Shorts'?

Almost every TV show, whether it be for adults or little kids, starts out with a pilot episode: a first episode that the show's creators pitch to a TV network, in hopes of getting it turned into a full show. Oobi doesn't exactly have a pilot episode -- it has a bunch of short, 2-to-5-minute pilot episodes.

Well, not exactly. If you've been following Oobi for a long time like me, or if you just happen to watch the Noggin Network a lot, you might notice that the first episodes of Oobi were just shorts. The shorts are wonky and weird, and they just have this loose, energetic quality to them. Thanks to this interview with Josh Selig (creator of Oobi), now we know why Oobi started out with these shorts and not just a regular pilot!

The story: Noggin was looking for new shows, and Josh Selig pitched them the idea of Oobi in 1999. He was a good friend and longtime employee of Sesame Workshop, which co-owned Noggin. As a proof of concept, Noggin asked his studio to make a series of interstitial shorts with the Oobi characters. They wanted to have some content to play during commercial breaks, and the Oobi shorts fit the bill perfectly. If the shorts were popular with kids, Noggin told Selig, they would greenlight it for a half-hour series. And that's exactly what happened a few years later in 2003. And the rest is history!