Zoboomafoo

Zoboomafoo ran on PBS from January 25, 1999 to November 21, 2001 — 65 episodes of Chris and Martin Kratt welcoming animals into Animal Junction alongside their resident Coquerel's sifaka, Zoboomafoo. The show's signature trick was hiding in plain sight: the real leaping, snack-grabbing lemur was Jovian, a sifaka who lived at the Duke Lemur Center, and the moment Zoboo needed to talk, a puppet seamlessly took his place. Kids universally clocked the switch and universally did not care.

The Kratts had already built trust with animal-obsessed kids, and Zoboomafoo distilled their formula to its most preschool-friendly: real animal footage, goofy physical comedy, claymation interludes, and a garbanzo-bean appetite that became a running joke. Though production ended in 2001, the show lived on for years — many PBS stations reran it through 2009, and reruns continued on the Sprout channel until 2012 — which is why it reads as a 2000s childhood memory despite its late-'90s premiere.

Jovian died of kidney failure in 2014 at age 20, and the internet mourned him like a childhood friend, because he was one. The Kratts, meanwhile, never stopped: their later animated series kept introducing new generations to creature adventures.