CAST

Matt Hammond Ed Devereaux
Sonny Hammond Gary Pankhurst
Mark Hammond Ken James
Clancy Liza Goddard
Jerry King Tony Bonner

PRODUCERS   John McCallum, Lee Robinson, Joy Cavill, Dennis Hill

PROGRAMMING HISTORY   91 Half-hour Episodes

Nine Network
February 1968-November 1968                          7:00-7:30
January 1969-November 1969                           7:00-7:30
February 1970-May 1970                                  7:00-7:30

 

See also Australian Programming

 

 

 

 

   

Before the international sales success of Australian soap operas such as Neighbours and Home and Away in the late 1980s and the 1990s, Skippy was the most successful series ever made in Australia. It has had sales in over 100 overseas markets and was syndicated on U.S. television. In addition, in a lucrative deal the series' central figure of Skippy the bush kangaroo was licensed to the U.S. breakfast food giant, Kellogg's.

Skippy was produced by Fauna Productions, a partnership between film producer/director Lee Robinson and former film actor John McCallum with a Sydney lawyer forming the third partner. Robinson had had an extensive background in Australian documentary film making and had formed the Australian and Pacific film correspondent for the High Adventure series on U.S. television hosted by newsman and explorer Lowell Thomas. Ever the internationalist, Robinson had, in the 1950s, in partnership with actor Chips Rafferty, produced a series of feature films in Australia which had combined familiar Hollywood narrative structures, drawn from such genres as the Western, with exotic locations, flora and fauna, based on different parts of the Pacific.

McCallum, although born in Australia, had spent most of his professional life in Britain where he had worked extensively on stage and in film. He returned to Australia to take a senior executive position with J. C. Williamson and Company, the largest theatrical group in Australia and New Zealand. In turn he became involved with the latter's involvement in the production of the comedy feature film, They're a Weird Mob. After this taste of film production McCallum and Robinson, who had been production manager on the film, briefly considered producing a spin-off television series. However, they took advice from the international distributor, Global, about what would sell well in the world market and decided on Skippy.

The genre that they settled on for Skippy was a family/children's series with a child and an animal at its centre, in a very familiar vein that stretched from Lassie to Flipper. The "difference" of the Australian series was the fact that it featured Australian flora and fauna. Skippy was a bush kangaroo (a universal symbol of Australia), and the series was set in a national park north of Sydney that featured bushland, waterways and ocean shores. The series concerned ranger Matt Hammond (Ed Devereaux), his son Sonny, (Garry Pankhurst), the latter's pet kangaroo, his brother (Ken James) and two other junior rangers played by Tony Bonner and Liza Goddard. Altogether three different kangaroos played Skippy.

Produced between 1967 and 1969, Skippy resulted in 91 half-hour episodes together with one feature film, Skippy and the Intruders. The series was produced on film and in colour even though Australian television had not yet moved to a colour transmission system, and was sold to the Packer-owned Nine Network where it first aired in February 1968. With high production values, the program was costly to produce and an initial financial risk for the packaging company Fauna. However, they soon achieved sufficient overseas sales to maintain their cash flow and the series would eventually achieve very high sales. In the meantime, Fauna had become bored producing Skippy and had embarked on a new series, Barrier Reef, which featured the reef off the north east coast of Australia, the largest coral formation in the world.

In the 1990s Skippy has had to share international recognition with other Australian series, most especially Neighbours, but there is still strength in the former's format. In 1991 the Nine Network licensed the format from Fauna and produced a spin-off series The Adventures of Skippy. This spin-off ran to 39 half-hour episodes and was again produced on film and in colour. It was set on an animal sanctuary near the Gold Coast and featured a different group of children and adults. However, this second series did preserve both the theme song and the kangaroo character from the original.

-Albert Moran