The penguins are back in their own Nick series, The Penguins of Madagascar: animated overseas at the DK Ent. and Paprikaas studios in India, but built and rigged at Nickelodeon's Burbank animation studio. All images © 2009 Nickelodeon.

Two veteran Disney Afternoon writer/producers are at the helm of DreamWorks Animation's first spin-off TV series, The Penguins of Madagascar (Nickelodeon, Saturday, 10: 00 a.m./9:00 C). The flightless avian quartet all but stole the original Madagascar movie out from under its stars, earning the black-and-white birds their own original short, A Christmas Caper on the movie's DVD release. The penguins had a high-profile role in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa even as their own TV series was in pre-production.

"We really lucked out," says Robert Schooley, half of the show's exec producer team. "Mark [McCorkle, Schooley's partner] and I weren't looking for another movie-based series, we'd done a fair amount of that at Disney," where they worked on the Aladdin, Hercules and Buzz Lightyear of Star Command series. "We were finishing up and heard DreamWorks was looking for someone to run Penguins. As soon as we heard 'penguins' we told our agent we loved the characters; if they're still looking when we're available we're interested. We ended Kim Possible on a Friday and started The Penguins of Madagascar Monday morning."

McCorkle and Schooley jumped on a train that was just beginning to pull out of the station. "A pilot animatic was already in the works," adds McCorkle. "We came in, rolled up our sleeves and took it in direction we thought it should go; so far, so good."

The first thing the pair did was simplify the pilot. "We did cut a few characters," McCorkle explains. "Very often the first pilot gets jammed with so many ideas -- not that they're bad ideas, but there's just so many it's hard for the audience to wrap their heads around following one story. We'd simplified it to how funny the penguins and lemurs are and how different their approach to life is -- that conflict informs a lot of the story."

Now that they are leading men, the penguins have been slightly redesigned to make them easier to render and to tell apart.

The Penguins of Madagascar lifts those two species out of the feature and into New York's Central Park Zoo (where Alex, Melman, Gloria and Marty are still absent, presumably on the road somewhere between Africa and New York). The conflict McCorkle mentions comes from clash between the penguins' self-styled commando zeal and King Julien and his cohorts' oblivious party-hardy lifestyle. Urbane chimps Mason and Phil are on hand as well, together with an assortment of brand new supporting characters who are being gradually introduced as the series progresses. One of the first to appear was Marlene, an otter who (as described by Nickelodeon's publicity material) "spent her formative years in Northern California's Monterey Bay Aquarium."

According to Schooley, "she can be sarcastic and funny, but she's a lot more clued into reality and not as deluded as either group of guys." If her description reminds you of SpongeBob SquarePants' undersea squirrel Sandy Cheeks, "that was no accident," McCorkle admits. "We were looking at [Sandy] as a great example of a character that can be funny in her own right but when you have a show with a bunch of crazies, you need someone who's a little more grounded."

Other critters have already started showing up, including Max, a mangy alley cat and Roger, a neurotic alligator who lives in the sewer beneath the zoo; Schooley promises kangaroos, koalas and rhinos, oh my, will be joining the cast as the series progresses. No matter how large the menagerie may grow, McCorkle and Schooley intend to keep the focus on the penguins and their battle of (half-) wits with Julien, his second-in-command Maurice and their uber-cute hanger-on Mort.

As popular as they were in the Madagascar movies and their first short, the penguins needed a few cosmetic and personality changes to make them, so to speak, leading men: "Part of the joke in the movie was they all kind of looked alike," Schooley says. "We've redesigned them slightly to make them easier to render and a little bit easier to tell them apart.

"Each guy has a different silhouette now. Kowalski is the tallest, Rico has a scar on his face and little bit of a feathery Mohawk. He's taller than Skipper who's short and barrel-chested. Private looks the most like he did in the movie because in the movie he was the most different looking to begin with."

McCorkle goes into further detail: "In the movie, Skipper got the lion's share of the laughs, Rico didn't speak at all and Kowalski was a very straight character who didn't have a lot of lines. It was easy to see what Skipper and Private were going to be like, but we went to movie's directors [Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, who voices Skipper] and asked how do we find more in the other two without violating their movie personalities?"