Characters

The Lion Family
Theodor and Cleopatra (Theo and Cleo for short) are the literary lion and lioness team who serve as proprietors, hosts, chief storytellers, and managers of a remarkable library. Their cubs, Lionel (age seven) and Leona (age four), are playful, energetic, intensely curious, and mischievous—ideal surrogates for our target audience. Lionel and Leona love all the same elements of pop culture that non-leonine kids love—superheroes, ridiculous jokes and riddles, storybooks and comic books, sports, video games, computers, and music—and a few other things that human kids don't, such as roaring, pouncing, and feasting on raw meat.

Theo
Theo is proud and regal in demeanor, if just a bit scruffy in appearance, with a deep, masterful voice perfect for storytelling. He has a zestful—indeed, ravenous—love for stories, biographies, plays, periodicals, poems, and ballads and also for individual words, letters, phonemes, illustrations, punctuation marks—even page numbers.

Cleo
In traditional lion families, the lioness does most of the hunting, and Cleo is no exception. Her huntress instincts make her both a voraciously eager director of acquisitions for the library and the ideal librarian, relentlessly tracking down, and pouncing upon, whatever story or reference work the library's patrons may request. Cleo's instincts also make her a wondrous investigative reporter—a talent that reveals itself when she hosts "Between the Covers" and literally enters books so she can report on what's happening.

Lionel
Lionel has discovered the joys of independent reading—he'll devour any text he can get his paws on. He also loves being read aloud to, and serving as a mentor and "designated reader" for his younger sister, Leona. Though he's always trying to convince Leona that his "look-before-you-leap" approach to life is the way to go ("Trust me, I'm seven, I've lived"), she remains a leap-before-you-look kind of cub.

Leona
Leona is frequently hunting and stalking and pouncing—on her brother and on unsuspecting samples of text that she loves to bring back and show off to her family. Leona welcomes any chance to experiment or change things around "just to see what happens." She has also inherited her dad's talent for writing. Her literacy skills aren't really developed enough for her to get the words down without help, but she grabs every possible opportunity to dictate new stories—or revisions of familiar old ones—to her parents, to Click the Mouse, and—most of all—to her brother.

Click the Mouse
Half cyborg and half rodent, Click serves as the technology guru, ringmaster, and chief facilitator of the library—an essential yet sometimes underappreciated creature. Whenever she points and clicks, something remarkable happens. And when the lions want to enter a book, they count on Click to "drag and drop" them in the right place (or get them back out—quick!). Click would happily show off more of her many technological talents, if only the lions would ask.

Arty Smartypants (a.k.a. The Great Smartini)
An eye-popping and somewhat discombobulated puppet, Arty performs a variety of feats: reading a series of words without any assistance whatsoever, conjuring up surprising objects from his oversized "smarty pants," and introducing a series of easy-reader books.

Cliff Hanger
The intrepid explorer Cliff Hanger stars in a continuing series of animated adventure stories. Luckily for our viewers, who may not always watch our shows in order, each episode begins (and ends) in the same place—with our resourceful but spectacularly unlucky hero hanging from a cliff. Through a combination of quick thinking, his trusty survival manual, a backpack filled with every necessity, and, yes, literacy skills, our hapless adventurer once again manages to get off the cliff. But after a series of unexpected twists (naturally involving our key words and sounds), our man Cliff always ends up back where he began—hanging from a cliff.

The Dixie Chimps
This remarkably talented trio of female chimpanzees—strangely reminiscent of a Grammy-winning country music act—star in a series of elaborate music videos designed to build phonics skills.

Fred
Fred Newman uses simple hand motions, a few props, word parts, and his unique ability to create an extraordinary array of sound effects to demonstrate a simple but essential step for beginning readers: how to sound out words.

Gawain
This knight in shining armor is the host of Gawain's Word, where two knights crash together and form words from beginning and ending sounds, building phonological awareness and vocabulary.

Gus
A talented and athletic rabbit who can really jump. Gus has a hard time learning how to read. At first he is afraid to admit that he can't read very well, but his good friend Lionel helps him realize that it's okay to ask for help.

Information Hen
This chicken runs the library's telephone reference department and is always on hand to field questions about the library, hens, or any other topic that callers have on their minds. "Yes, lions do run our library," she informs one caller. "But," she adds reassuringly, "they don't eat our patrons—not even if they're wildebeest."

Joy Learno
This animated talk show host introduces factual information and vocabulary as she interviews a variety of unusual guests, including the moon, dinosaurs, an alligator from the bayous of Louisiana, and a not-so-angelic angelfish.

Dr. Ruth Wordheimer
The word doctor is the one to call if you're a word that's feeling out of sorts. "Let go of that s," Dr. Ruth (played by none other than Dr. Ruth Westheimer) advises the word sad on her analyst's couch. Look: here comes gl to transform sad to glad. The good doctor is also a comfort to those suffering from Long Word Freakout—the panic and angst beginning readers often feel when they come across a frighteningly long word. A visit to Dr. Ruth shows them how to figure it out "one part at a time."

Opposite Bunny
This much-loved superhero uses his special powers to turn bad to good through his clever use of opposites.

Polly and the Pirate
An animated pirate and her parrot (both named Polly) illustrate key directional and locative words like front, behind, under, over, across, sideways, beneath, and next to in a series of adventures that build fluency through repeated text.

Synonym Sam
An animated girl genius, assisted by her dog Rufus, demonstrates shades of meaning in sets of words like walk, stride, strut and scared, terrified, petrified.

Trampolini Bros.
The high-wire acts performed by this talented animated circus trio demonstrate comparative and superlative adjectives (e.g., loud, louder, loudest).

The un People (and the re People)
The un People, a mysterious band of evil, gremlin-like characters, add the prefix "un" to words, thus reversing the progress good, upstanding folks are making (and teaching our viewers some remarkable facts about prefixes). Luckily for the victims of these distressing events, the heroic re People come along to redo, through the timely use of the prefix "re," what the un People have undone.

The Vowelles
This puppet singing group, composed of gloved hands, colorful mouths, and feather boas, have a remarkable repertoire—as long as you ask them to sing only vowel sounds. On occasion they provide back-up vocals for Martha Reader, and sing with the inimitable Johnny Consonanti, a legend in his own mind, who is known for his singular talent of crooning the final consonant of a word.