Raggs (2005 - current)

Children's series
130 episodes x 30 minutes

Series synopsis:

Raggs is a live-action preschool show based around five giant-sized dog characters that perform as the 'Raggs Kids Club Band’, a rock-n-roll band for preschool kids. The TV show is a mix of drama, music and dancing, concert performances, animation, documentary segments and interviews with children. With a strong thematic narrative thread through each episode, Raggs features the five dogs – Raggs, Trilby, Pido, B Max and Razzles, and their pet cat Dumpster. This droll blue cat interviews children on the main topic of each episode.

Curator’s Notes:

In an interesting development in Australian children’s television production, this series is a co-production between Southern Star Entertainment and the USA company Raggs LLC Production. The characters and creative concept were originally created by American advertising executive Toni Steedman as part of a successful US mall-based marketing campaign. The success of these characters with preschoolers and their parents in US malls led to the 'Raggs Kids Club Band’ performing live concerts around the US, and associated sales of CDs and DVDs. In partnership with Steedman’s company, Raggs LLC Production, Southern Star Entertainment took on the concept and developed it as a television series for the Seven Network Australia, who first screened it in 2006. Steedman’s company owns all underlying intellectual property, trademarks and copyrights, including music publishing and copyright to the original songs.

All the core live-action ‘Raggs’ storylines and the Dumpster interview segments for the current TV series so far have been produced in Australia, while the 3D animation was done by Southern Star Singapore. However with the marketing focus on international sales, segments of the program, such as the music videos and the Dumpster interviews, are designed to be re-shot with local children to suit different international markets. This allows the series to be fairly cheaply adapted to meet an oft-required local content component in a preschool television show. For the show’s US launch in June 2007, the original Australian episodes were adapted with new US Dumpster interview segments and music videos replacing the Australian segments.

Annemaree O'Brien

Titles in this series