Oobi

Oobi is a television show for children. It was made by Little Airplane Productions in New York City. It is about a group of talking hand puppets with eyes and clothes. The main character, Oobi, is a four-year-old boy hand. He has a sister named Uma, a friend named Kako, and a grandfather named Grampu.
The show was first played in 2000 as a series of two-minute short episodes. It started as a series of longer half-hour episodes in 2003. It was shown on the channels Nickelodeon and .
While it was being made, the show was popular with preschoolers and fans of puppetry. It won awards from groups like and the . In the mid-2000s, there was a cult following of small filmmakers who used Oobi-style puppets in short movies. In 2012, a spin-off of "Oobi" called "Dasdasi" was made in Iran. The entire original show is currently included on Amazon Prime Video.
Structure and plot.
Most episodes are split into two or three parts. Every episode has a main story and some interviews. In the interviews, the puppets ask real kids and families about a topic or place. Episodes in season one also have a "game segment" where the puppets play a simple learning game. In season two, there were no game segments anymore and the main stories were made longer instead.
The show takes place in an old-fashioned town where almost everyone is a talking hand puppet. The puppets have eyes that they wear on the middle finger. The kids have four of their fingers straight, and they use their thumbs as their bottom lips. The adults have their fingers curled up, which makes them look taller. The only regular character who is not a hand is Frieda, a foot puppet.
International broadcast.
The show has also been shown in:
"Dasdasi".
"Dasdasi" was a spin-off/adaptation of "Oobi" made in the country of Iran for a TV channel called . In "Dasdasi", there is a bigger family of hand puppets: a son, a daughter, two parents, and a grandfather. The kids are counterparts to Oobi and Uma, and the grandpa is Grampu's counterpart. Kako does not have a counterpart, but the kids have neighbors and a baby cousin who usually fills the role of a close friend instead. "Dasdasi" was first shown on September 22, 2012, and the last episode was shown on December 20, 2012. There were 78 episodes.
Reception.
"Oobi" got high TV ratings for Noggin. From 2003 to 2004, "Oobi" and two other shows—"Miffy" and "Connie the Cow"—made Noggin's daily viewers increase by 55% over the last year. The average number of preschool-age children watching "Oobi" grew by 43% during the same time. The show's ratings were reported in the newspaper Multichannel News by the author Mike Reynolds, who said Noggin's popularity could be traced to its "breakout original series "Oobi"." The first showing of the "Uma Preschool!" episode on September 6, 2004, got higher ratings than any other Noggin show ever did.
When "Oobi" was still being played on TV, it had a of Muppets fans and small filmmakers who made their own "Oobi" puppets. In 2003, the "Boston Herald" newspaper said that "Oobi" was "already very popular" with "those of the Muppet generation." A worker for Noggin, Tom Ascheim, said in the same article that Oobi "gets fan mail," and he thought it was an interesting idea for a show because "everybody has an Oobi in their hand." In 2004, the magazine "The Melbourne Age" said that "the show - the work of various "Sesame Street" alumni - is developing a strong cult following; the real Uma [Thurman] is said to be a fan of hand Uma." An internet catalog of "Oobi" puppets and eyes, OobiEyes.com, was online from 2006 to 2013. A small group of YouTube.com users who made fan films with "Oobi" puppets existed during the early years of the website, and OobiEyes.com held an advertising campaign with YouTube in 2008.