Jay Jay the Jet Plane

Jay Jay the Jet Plane
Jay Jay the Jet Plane
Genre	Animation
Written by	John Semper Eleanor Burian-Mohr
Voices of	Donna Cherry Gina Ribisi
Country of origin	United States
Language(s)	English Welsh
No. of episodes	60
Production company(s)	PorchLight Entertainment Tommy Nelson Wonderwings.com Entertainment Modern Cartoons
Distributor	Columbia TriStar Television
Broadcast
Original channel	The Learning Channel, PBS Kids
Original run	2 November 1998 – 27 August 2002

Jay Jay the Jet Plane is an American CGI children's television series based at the fictional Tarrytown Airport. It has about 60 episodes and it is aimed at ages 2–6. The characters are talking airplanes, a helicopter, some humans, and two talking ground vehicles. The episodes are commonly distributed in pairs, with one header sequence and one end credits for each pair, and each pair is 25 minutes long. Each episode contains one or more songs; each song tends to occur in one episode. The theme song, as well as the majority of the other songs, was written by the well-known children's singer/songwriter, Stephen Michael Schwartz, and sung by his popular group, Parachute Express. Produced by John Semper, the series is intended to be educational and teach life and sometimes moral lessons to children (and sometimes also to parents).

History

The series premiered originally on November 2, 1998 on TLC, but later moved to PBS Kids on June 11, 2001 with the same episodes plus new episodes in 2001 and in 2005. Home video releases were released by Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment through 2003 as part of their "Columbia TriStar Family Fun" collection, the reason why it is distributed by Columbia TriStar Television. Distribution was then moved over to the children's division of book publisher Thomas Nelson.

The original voice of Jay Jay and several of the other characters was voice-over actor Mary Kay Bergman.

In 2006, new episodes were produced featuring new characters, including a red Latino plane named Lina. The new episodes feature a beginning segment called "Jay Jay's Mysteries", in which Jay Jay and Lina solve mysteries such as how planes fly and how the five senses are used. The mysteries segment is followed by a story pulled from the original version of the series, making the "new" episodes a repackaging of a new format with old episodes tacked on to the end.

Before the well-known animated series there was a short non-animated series made in 1995, where the plane characters were live action films of real models and human characters were of crafted models. They did not talk, but had the same personalities. The original series was narrated similarly to early episodes of Thomas The Tank Engine or Theodore Tugboat. It contained three videos: Jay Jay's First Flight, Old Oscar Leads the Parade, and Tracy's Handy Hideout. These three episodes were known as the "pilot series".

Within the series, the propeller speeds of all the plane characters have varied over the years. The first 20 stories show the propellers spinning very slowly. Beginning with the story "Picture Day", the propellors are made to look more believable. The remaining stories have the propellors spinning rapidly (unless a character is underwater). Before "Picture Day" the characters had lights but they did not appear to function. The opening theme has the propellers spin rapidly: this opening is used for the entire series.

Each of the plane characters seems to have a biological part including a stomach, that needs the same food as humans eat, and a mechanical part that needs fuel and engine oil. Some of the things that the planes are reported as doing off-camera, would need them to have foldaway arms to handle items with, but those arms are never seen on camera.

Characters

The planes and ground vehicles are CGI characters.

Young plane characters

• Jay Jay. Male. 6 years old. Small blue and red jet airliner. Mary Kay Bergman was the first to provide his voice. Debi Derryberry replaced Bergman after her death. Danica Lee replaced Derryberry after insituation.
• Tracy. Female. 6 years old. Small pink and yellow jet airliner. Normal hearing, but understands American Sign Language.
• Snuffy. Male. 4 years old. Small green propeller monoplane. Is equipped for skywriting. In episode consistency (which depends on the order), one episode says that he has not flown further away from Tarrytown than Lightning Bug Lake, but other episodes show him flying much further; in "Catch the Buzz" Snuffy still has not got rid of his original shyness, but in many other episodes he shows no sign of shyness.
• Herky. Male. 5 years old. Yellow and green helicopter. Has skids instead of wheels and cannot taxi on the ground. In the original series, he spoke with a stutter. In the CGI series, he rolls his "R"s whenever he speaks, and often pronounces stressed "er" as long vocalic "r" ([ɹ̩]), e.g. "I'm Herky" as [aɪm hɹ̩ːˈkǐ], with a strong high-rising pitch accent on the final "-y".

Older plane characters

• Big Jake. Male. Adult (supposed early 40's). Father figure. Silver Cargo carrier. Propeller-driven.
• Savannah. Female. Adult (supposed mid 30's). Mother figure. Purple supersonic airliner. She was made at Savannah in Georgia (USA), hence (in the story) her name.
• Oscar. Male. Old adult (supposed early 80's). Grandfather-like figure. Old green biplane.

Ground vehicles

• Revvin' Evan. Red fire engine, Cousin of Tuffy.
• Tuffy. Blue and red towtruck, Cousin of Revvin Evan.

Humans

• Brenda Blue: Woman in bib overall and usually wears either red or blue cap. In charge of the airport, and is the mechanic. She does not use the airport's control tower but communicates with the planes by a portable two-way radio from the ground. Played by Eve Whittle and Vanessa Stacey in the UK version.
• Mrs. Blue: is Brenda Blue's mother who sometimes visits Tarrytown Airport.
• Miss Jones: is a deaf librarian at Tarrytown Library who knows American Sign Language.
• Easy O'Malley. He founded EZ Airlines and his cousins are Grumpy O'Malley (lives at Dewdrop Farm), Pierre O'Malley (lives in France) and Tex O'Malley (lives in Texas).
• There are other human characters who appear from time to time.
• Tarrytown Airport is run by a small firm called EZ Airlines.
• In Tarrytown is a school called the Michael O'Tarry School.

Animals

• Breezy: is a Monarch butterfly.
• Bobby Bee and Billy Bee: are two bees.
• The lightning bugs at Lightning Bug Lake.
• The Blue Whale in the ocean.

Places

• Tarrytown: is in a hilly area with enough rain to keep the land green, and frost and snow sometimes in the winter. There are forested mountains and desert near.
• Tarrytown Airport: is where Jay Jay and his friends live and Brenda Blue works.
• Tarrytown National Park
• Smiling Meadow.
• Sandy Landing
• Pangabula Island
• Tarrytown Quarry
• Sunshine Desert
• Tippy Toppy Peak
• Frosty Pines.
• Echo Canyon.
• Cherry Tree Lake
  • Tarrytown town and airport are never seen in moving-camera shots, and therefore are likely real miniature sets which were photographed and those photographs were used as backgrounds in the CGI images. The airport runway may be a CGI ground plane texture mapped with a photograph of real full-size or miniature tarmac. Sometimes, the planes taxi on the town streets.

Episodes

See List of Jay Jay the Jet Plane episodes

How the series was produced

The series was produced by Modern Cartoons in their works in Oxnard, California, USA. Unlike Thomas the Tank Engine, this series used a mixture of techniques:

• The backgrounds were miniature sets (usually built on 2 4'x8' sheets of plywood)
• Brenda Blue was a live action actress shot in front of a greenscreen
• The planes were computer models created in Maya and a proprietary software.
• The movement of the planes was recorded by playing out the scene with wood models that had magnetic position sensors. The planes had a switch to aid landing and taxiing, due to some minor fluctuations in the magnetic positioning data.
• The planes' faces and lip synching were done by "face tracking". This is a technique where reflective spots are put on a voice actor's face. The voice track is being digitally recorded along with the spot data. Then using a form of parametric animation the face is rendered.
• Head movement and other effects were done by joysticks.

The complex mathematical and CGI issues were solved by Frank Ford Little, PhD.

A number of proprietary software systems were used:

• The data/audio recording and smoothing was done on a Windows machine.
• The daily cuts were done on "Compaq Alpha" computers running a 64-bit version of Windows NT 4.0.

Jay Jay's Mysteries

10 new episodes

• The Mystery of Plants
• The Mystery of Weather
• The Mystery of Size and Shape
• The Mystery of Flight
• The Mystery of the Five Senses
• The Mystery of Water
• The Mystery of Bugs
• The Mystery of Time
• The Mystery of Stars and Planets
• The Mystery of Dinosaurs

New characters

• Lina: Jay Jay's New Friend.
• Montana: Safari plane.
• Captain Bob: Firefighting plane.
• Solar: Yellow. Long wide wings. 6 propellers driven by electricity from solar panels covering the tops of his wings.
• Truckee: Dump truck

Broadcasting

United States

The series is broadcast over many of the 379 member stations of the Public Broadcasting Service of the United States and it formerly aired on PBS Kids.

Translations

In foreign versions of the show, the human characters are often replaced with different actors. For example, in the Korean version of the show, a Korean actor takes the role of Brenda. Unusually, the Irish version of Jay Jay the Jet Plane mostly uses non-native speaker actors from Belfast (although some minor parts are played by native-speaking actors from the Gaeltacht).

Europe

• • The series is broadcast in English on Channel 5 (UK) and in Welsh on S4C called Ari Awyren
• • The series is known as Jay Jay le Petit Avion
• • The series is known as Jay Jay, el avioncito
• • The series was broadcast in Irish Tadhg an t-Eitleán and English
• • The series is known as Jay Jay, o Jatinho [1]

Asia

• • The series was formerly shown in original version on TV2 in the early 2000s (decade). It was also dubbed in Malay by Filem Karya Nusa and aired on Astro Ria, also in the early 2000s (decade). It was later shown with new episodes on Astro Ceria in 2009 where the Malay dubbing is made in-house.

• • the series formerly aired on MediaCorp TV12 Central.

• • ジェイジェイジェットプレーン (ziĕiziĕi ziĕttopurēn)

External links

• Wonderwings.com (now called Jay Jay the Jet Plane Productions) published the series. This is a new site and it needs Macromedia Flash.
• Official PBS Kids site
• Free episodes at KidMango