Pong Pagong is a muppet-style character developed by the

Children's Television Workshop Sesame Workshop (SW), originally known as the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), is an American nonprofit organization and television company that has been responsible for the production of several educational children's programs—includin ...

(CTW) for the Filipino children's show ''Sesame'', a co-production between CTW and the Philippine Children's Television Foundation (PCTF) which debuted in 1983. Pong Pagong is an

anthropomorphic Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. It is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology. Personification is the related attribution of human form and characteristics to ...

turtle, similar to Big Bird of ''

Sesame Street ''Sesame Street'' is an American educational television, educational children's television series that combines live-action, sketch comedy, animation, and puppetry. It is produced by Sesame Workshop (known as the Children's Television Worksh ...

'', standing over six feet tall and towering over human co-stars and aged to be around six years old. Together with its co-muppet, Kiko Matsing, the characters were custom made in New York for ''Sesame''. Both characters were inspired from a Filipino

fable Fable is a literary genre defined as a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a parti ...

, " The Monkey and the Turtle", which was annotated to English by

José Rizal José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda (, ; June 19, 1861 – December 30, 1896) was a Filipino nationalist, writer and polymath active at the end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. He is popularly considered a na ...

in 1889. After the cancellation of ''Sesame'' in 1984 due to the cancellation by CTW of the co-production venture, both characters appeared in its 1985 replacement show, '' Batibot'', under a license arrangement with CTW. Both characters were returned to CTW in 1994 and never used again.

References

International Sesame Street characters Fictional turtles Anthropomorphic turtles Television characters introduced in 1983 {{tv-char-stub