If you have cable television, and if you have a rugrat or two running around your living room, you certainly wouldn’t have any reason to believe that the “Teletubbies” television series ceased production over a decade ago.
Thankfully, though, the unsettling BBC series, which may or may not make sense in the minds of three-year-old children, will return for 60 brand-new episodes on CBeebies, a BBC digital channel, reports the Daily Mail.
In no time, then, Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, Po and that strangely sinister, laughing toddler trapped in the sun will surely be filling American TV screens with new adventures in weirdness.
The producers of the new episodes won’t be content sitting on their laurels, either. The show’s return will feature a “visually enhanced,” “contemporary look” complete with CGI animation, notes the Mail.
Executive producer Maddy Darrall of the London-based children’s television production company Darrall Macqueen described the opportunity to create new “Teletubbies” episodes as “like being handed the television crown jewels.”
The “Teletubbies” series is not without controversy.
For reasons as odd as the show, the kerfuffles have tended to surround Tinky Winky — the big purple Teletubby with a coat hanger-esque antenna on his head who carries a bag that looks like a purse.
In 1997, Andy Medhurst, a media studies professor at Sussex University in southern England gushed that Tinky Winky was “the first queer role model for toddlers,” according to The Independent.
Two years later, televangelist Jerry Falwell called Tinky Winky a homosexual threat.
”He is purple — the gay-pride color; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle — the gay-pride symbol,” Falwell warned in National Liberty Journal, according to The New York Times.
The Itsy Bitsy Entertainment Company, which has licensed “Teletubbies” episodes stateside, has noted that Tinky Winky doesn’t carry a purse but a “magic bag.”
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