The creators went back to Madagascar feature directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath to find out more about the characters without violating their personalities.

Fortunately, Darnell and McGrath had a solution in hand. "Even before the Christmas short Eric and I wrote a screenplay for a penguin movie that explored their characters in more depth," reveals McGrath. "Even though you don't see it in the movie, you have to have it on paper to know how to write the character; we used those characterizations in the series."

With Darnell and McGrath's help, McCorkle says "Kowalski became our science guy, our Mr. Spock -- and Rico turned psychopathic." "Rico's the most insane of them all," Schooley agrees. "We've had a lot of fun with him, he can pretty much hock up any prop the penguins need," including dynamite, crowbars, flamethrowers, cinderblocks and even a can of flatulence-inducing beans. For his part, McGrath says that Schooley & McCorkle have "pushed the personalities farther" than his and Darnell's original conception. "They've taken the ball and run with it."

As he has since the original Madagascar, McGrath is back on hand to voice Skipper, going he says for a combination of The Untouchables' Robert Stack, "a little smarmy Charlton Heston and maybe some Peter Graves every once in a while." "It's great to have Tom there," says McCorkle. "He knows characters better than anybody and gives us input when we need it; we get input from whole [feature film] team on everything we do."

John DiMaggio -- Futurama's Bender-- gave Rico his voice in the Penguins' Christmas Caper short and now provides it for the series. Veteran voice artist Jeff Bennett speaks for Kowalski, and James Patrick Stuart does Private, "the most emotionally open and vulnerable of the quartet," according to Nickelodeon's production notes.

Kevin Michael Richardson has replaced Cedric the Entertainer as Julien's right hand lemur Maurice and Andy Richter is back as mega-cute, big-eyed Mort. Voice-wise, though, the biggest challenge McCorkle and Schooley faced was finding someone to replace Sacha Baron Cohen as the infatuated-with-himself lemur king. The directors turned to Danny Jacobs, who had already filled in for Cohen on the Madagascar 2 videogame. "We were blown away" by Jacobs, McCorkle says. "He was incredibly prepared and has great comic instincts." According to Schooley, "even Tom said it's like Danny is just channeling Sasha, the language and everything." Whenever you do a sound-alike," McCorkle muses, "it's a challenge. You want someone who sounds close to the original, you don't want to differentiate too much. Danny sounds like the original character but brings his own sense of comedy to it."

The textural difference between the film and TV penguins isn't particularly noticeable, but the lemurs have traded in their fuzzy coats for a sculpted look that suggests fur.

While Conrad Vernon continues to voice the erudite chimp Mason, his primate silent partner Phil presented an entirely different kind of dialog problem: not unlike the celebrated gorilla Koko, Phil 'speaks' in sign language – and the producers take pains to make sure the monkey gets it right. "We felt strongly it should be real," reports McCorkle. "We have someone on staff who makes sure everything is authentic. Sign language can be very subtle, there can be misunderstandings if you don't do it just right." It's a nod to a segment of the TV audience that usually makes do with closed captions – but it's something the show isn't afraid to have a bit of fun with. "There's a scene where characters are sleeping," McCorkle confides. "Mason is snoring out loud while Phil is signing 'z-z-z…'"

The Penguins of Madagascar is animated overseas at the DK Ent. and Paprikaas studios in India (four early segments were produced in Taiwan at the CGCG studio) but the penguins and their pals were built and rigged at Nickelodeon's Burbank animation studio.

Dean Hoff, Penguins' CG line producer, explains that the decision was "based on the fact that we had to use multiple studios to produce the animation on our schedule. We needed to ensure that we had aesthetically and technically consistent character assets that could be used in the animation pipeline at any studio. This has given us tremendous quality control -- we think it's what separates our animation from others on television."

Even though they had already appeared in two feature films, for all practical purposes Nickelodeon had to start over again and recreate the penguins and lemurs from scratch. The reason, according to Hoff: "DreamWorks produced the Madagascar films at PDI up north." PDI "uses proprietary software to build their models. We were only able to receive gray-scale models of the characters and sets -- and they were in a format we couldn't use. So essentially we used those files as 'approved design' only and rebuilt everything.

"Also, the characters from PDI were much larger files than our render farms and timelines could handle for series production -- we had to down-res the characters to something more suitable for television work. Finally, we could not afford the time or money to do fur for the series, so we needed to develop a stylized solution that would work for us."

The textural difference between the film and TV penguins isn't particularly noticeable, but the lemurs have traded in their fuzzy coats for a sculpted look that suggests fur. However, from McCorkle's perspective "the key is character animation, the staging and funny jokes. Hopefully people aren't watching the show and going 'he looked furrier in the movie.'"