Jakers! The Adventures of Piggley Winks-The Salmon of Knowledge (2003)

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General		Extras
Category	Childrens	Main Menu Audio
Rating
Year Of Production	2003
Running Time	69:07
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Ads Then Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	None Given
Studio Distributor	Roadshow Home Entertainment	Starring	Peadar Lamb Maile Flanagan Russi Taylor Tara Strong Charles Adler Nikka Futterman Melissa Disney Pamela Segall Mel Brooks Susan Silo
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	$19.95	Music	Geoff Levin Harriet Schock Paul Fisher

    Jakers! The Adventures of Piggley Winks is an animated children's television series made for the Public Broadcasting (PBS) network in the United States and currently screening here on the ABC. So far, two series of this show have aired in the US, the first one starting in 2003, totalling about 26 episodes. I would guess that the series is aimed at the 3 to 8 age group, and the main characters are 8 year old animals who live on Raloo Farm in Ireland. The stories are told in flashback by Piggley Winks, who is now a grandfather, telling them to his grandsons Sean & Seamus.

    Each episode quickly gets into a flashback story which always features Piggley Winks, an 8 year old pig and his best friends, Ferny (short for Fernando) the Bull and Dannan the Duck. Other recurring characters are Molly, Piggley's little sister and Wiley the Sheep, a ram who is trying to educate the rest of the flock. Wiley is voiced by Mel Brooks and is quite funny. My 20 month old son, who is really too young for this show, laughs his head off every time he sees Wiley. He has become quite a fan of the show itself as well, and started asking me for 'Piggy on' very early this morning. At the moment at least, it seems to have replaced the Fimbles and Wiggles in his affections.

    Incidentally, the word 'jakers' would seem to be an Irish expression for surprise and wonderment, which the characters use regularly with every new discovery. As is often the case with American children's television, each episode must have a 'message' but luckily this show does not beat the 'message' to death as some shows like Barney do.

    There are three twenty-three minute episodes included here, which are:

• The Salmon of Knowledge - Piggley decides that instead of studying for the exam they have on the next Monday he will catch 'The Salmon of Knowledge' who will give him all the answers. Surprisingly, this plan does not succeed.
• Picture Perfect - Piggley gets sent a camera by his Uncle Squiggley and has a great time taking photos until he takes an embarrassing one of Ferny, which he promises to tear up, but does not. He must apologise to get his friend back.
• Rock Around the Cluck - Piggley and Molly are introduced to Rock and Roll and Piggley decides to learn guitar and play at the big school concert. He needs his friends' support to get over his stage fright.

    The characters in Ireland seem to have been voiced authentically and are very cute.

    This show is a lot of fun and I can see no reason why kids of the right age group would not love it.

Video

    The video quality is excellent.

    The feature is presented in a 1.56:1 aspect ratio, non 16x9 enhanced which is very close to the original aspect ratio.

    The picture was clear and sharp throughout, with no evidence of low level noise, as you would expect from modern computer animation.

    The colour was excellent throughout and extremely well saturated.

    The only artefact I noticed was some minor aliasing on a guitar in Episode 3 at 21:43.

    There are no subtitles or layer change.
    

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The audio quality is very good and perfectly suitable for the material.

    This DVD contains one audio option, an English Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack encoded at 224 Kb/s.

    Dialogue was clear and easy to understand.

    The music used is very good and gets the kids bopping along. My son certainly does! 

    The surround speakers and subwoofer were not used.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    The menu is simple, includes music and allows for playing all episodes or each one individually.

    As far as I can tell this show has not been released on DVD in Region 1.

    The video quality is excellent.

    The audio quality is very good.

    The disc has no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall