Kratts' Creatures

Chris and Martin Kratt grew up in Warren Township, New Jersey, and came out of college as real biologists: Martin with a zoology degree from Duke, Chris with a biology degree from Carleton. Their idea was a wildlife show made for young children rather than for the grown-ups who watched nature documentaries. Maryland Public Television paid for a pilot, the pilot won best children's film at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Festival, and that earned the brothers and producer Leo Eaton a meeting with PBS's head of children's programming, Alice Cahn. They expected an order for a handful of episodes. PBS wanted fifty.

Two years of shooting across Australia, Africa, the Caribbean and North America followed, and Kratts' Creatures premiered on PBS on June 3, 1996. Every half hour sent the brothers into the field with a different animal while their friend Allison Baldwin, played by Shannon Duff, worked the gadgets back at Creature Central, and an animated blue creature named Ttark, Kratt spelled backwards and voiced by Ron Rubin, chimed in with what he knew about ancient animals and got the modern ones wrong. The whole 50-episode run aired between June and August of 1996, then repeated on PBS until June 2000, which is why so many kids remember it as a fixture rather than a one-summer show.

The brothers had found their formula: real animals, real dirt, a lot of slapstick, and two hosts who were clearly having the best day of their lives. Zoboomafoo, built for preschoolers around a leaping lemur, premiered in January 1999, and the animated Wild Kratts followed in 2011 and ran past 150 episodes in its first decade. Kratts' Creatures was the rough first draft of all of it, and for anyone who was six in 1996, the one where the brothers still looked like they might not make it back across the river.