The series is not about visuals; it's about "character animation, the staging and funny jokes."

At the moment, Nick's audience seems to be watching the show. Penguins' March 28th premiere was the highest-rated series introduction in Nickelodeon history, bearing out the network's early confidence in the series when it ordered a second season before the show even premiered. The teaming of animation powerhouses Nickelodeon and DreamWorks might have been facilitated by the corporate relationship between the two companies (Viacom's Paramount distributes DreamWorks' animated features); "it certainly didn't hurt," says Brown Johnson, president of Nickelodeon Animation. "No one made both companies work together but the notion of it happening was a no-brainer."

The partnership continues: this past week Nickelodeon revealed a Kung Fu Panda series will be joining the network's schedule (with Po and the Furious Five "protecting the Valley of Peace from threats of all kind") followed by the announcement that the cable network has additionally ordered a Monsters vs. Aliens pilot.

It's obvious that the KFP series will take place after the events of the feature film -- but what's the relationship between The Penguins of Madagascar and the penguins in the Madagascar movies? How did the lemurs wind up in the Central Park zoo as foils to the arctic birds -- especially when they never interacted in the films? (The series' opening credits show the penguins prying open a crate bearing the Madagascar logo and finding the lemurs inside.) And will Alex, Melman, Gloria and Marty turn up to reclaim their cages someday? (In one establishing shot, silhouettes of Alex the lion and Marty the giraffe are quickly but clearly visible on a banner hanging above the penguin's enclosure.)

It's a question one might assume would be of concern only to animation geeks with too much time on their hands, but the producers have wrestled with that riddle as well. "There's a definite school of people who want to know that," says Schooley. "On the spinoff shows we did at Disney, we did worry. Aladdin's continuity was after the movie, Hercules' was within the movie. We kind of expect that with feature spinoffs, but with this one…"It's evidently a puzzler, but he has a theory: "We do occasionally sort of refer to the movie. King Julien is definitely from Madagascar; he refers to 'when I was in Madagascar.' We're just sort of doing it as if someday after all the feature continuity, somehow the penguins ended up back there and the lemurs just sort of tagged along."

"We talked about linking [the two] early on," McCorkle adds, "but when we started the series they didn't have an ending to Madagascar 2 yet. We definitely tried to come up with some convoluted reason for all this, but it just seemed like when you're doing 11-minute stories, there's never time for much backstory; maybe someday we'll do a half-hour special, 'The Day the Lemurs Showed Up.'"

We'll let McGrath, voice of Skipper and half the team that dreamed up the characters in the first place, have the last word. "It's not specifically before or after the movie, I just wanted them all back at the zoo. I think of it as taking place in a parallel universe."

Joe Strike is a regular contributor to AWN. His animation articles also appear in the NY Daily News and the New York Press.