Who is pong pagong

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Share your opinion and get rewarded just like eatee Sign up to start earning now! Pong Pagong was a character in the Filipino children's show Batibot. Pong was in the form of a turtle standing on its hindlegs. Like Big Bird of Sesame Street, Pong was an enlarged small-animal character, standing over six feet tall and towering over human co-stars and aged to be around six years old.

In both characters were pulled out from the show by the Children's Television Workshop CTW because of licensing issues. I was already working when I first saw Pong Pagong in one of the episodes in Batibot. I was very curious to find out how well the Batibot episodes were produced. It was satisfactory to me but I never liked Pong Pagong used as the main character of the show.

I even had an argument with my officemate and said that it was wrong to use Pong Pagong. Tapos, they found me a bit lanky with my movements. But fortunately nakapasok ako at ako yung napiling maging kuya figure sa show. It also helped that he used to tell stories to his younger cousins in his teenage years. While not exactly a newbie in television, Kuya Bodjie remembers his first day on the set with fondness.

Those are the things I had to get used to during the first few taping days. But the head writer of Batibot , Rene Villanueva, insisted storytelling is a Filipino tradition. The Pinoy kids, especially those in the provinces would really sit and enjoy a story. However, in order to catch the attention of kids, the writers kept the stories short and invited celebrities to host the segment, similar to how Sesame Street does it. Thing is the production people had difficulty booking celebrity guests so the storytelling always ended up with Kuya Bodjie.

He employed his theater training to make the narration lively and to give each character in the stories their unique voice. Scripts would undergo several revisions before they get approved. In fact, it was called Sesame Street at the outset and was co-produced with Children's Television Workshop with the backing of former Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos.

Government support for Batibot ended in after the economy collapsed following the assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino. Lydia Brown, Batibot's executive producer, said the government has no pre-school education program and only the children of affluent families can afford to attend exclusive kindergartens.

Batibot is the kindergarten of the poor and many children pack the homes of lucky television owners in remote barrios to watch Pong and Kiko. The names of the two key characters of Batibot are a clue to the philosophy behind the program: to develop a sense of national identity among children and to use the Tagalog dialect to further mass education.

In a sense, Batibot initiated a move among Filipino educators to use Tagalog, one of many dialects in the island nation, as a medium of instruction in the former American colony, where English is the official language. The one-hour program is shown every weekday on two television channels.

Its skits are replete with Philippine scenes and symbols, local fables, folktales and legends that Philippine toddlers can easily identify with. Television ratings surveys show Batibot now is more popular than Sesame Street, which has been shown in Manila since Brown said while Sesame Street concentrates on cognitive skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic, Batibot tackled other aspects of the child, especially being Filipino.