Skippy the Bush Kangaroo is an Australian icon and a television series made for children, produced from 1966–1968, telling the adventures of a young boy and his intelligent pet kangaroo, in the (fictional) Waratah National Park in Duffys Forest, near Sydney, New South Wales.
The star of the show was Skippy, a wild female Eastern Grey Kangaroo, befriended by Sonny Hammond, the younger son of the Head Ranger of Waratah National Park. The stories revolved around events occurring in the park, including its animals, dangers arising from natural hazards in the Park's environment, and the actions of various visitors to the Park.
The clicking sounds made by Skippy during the show, are vocal sound effects, rather than the natural vocalisations of a kangaroo, with chocolate, chewing gum or grass (and in some cases, an elastic band around the lower jaw, used to make Skippy move her mouth. Between nine and fifteen kangaroos were actually used for each show. The apparent manual dexterity was often faked using separate arms in the hands of human operators.
The series was dubbed into Spanish in Mexico, where it is known as Skippy el canguro, and distributed to most Spanish-speaking countries, including Cuba and Spain, countries where the show became very popular. The series also crossed the Iron Curtain and was aired in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s and is currently still being broadcast in Iran. However, the show was forbidden to be shown in Sweden where psychologists believed that the show would mislead children into believing animals could do things that they could not.
