About Pandapolis

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You're a giant fan of giant pandas. You googled giant pandas and got a link to Pandapolis. You want pandas, not some L.A. human's personal stuff. You clicked on Pandamania and your ursine anxieties have been relieved.

It's only natural I'd have a page at Pandapolis just about pandas. Chauncey wouldn't have it any other way. So check out these fun links to all things panda.

Like we told you on the home page, resistance is futile. Pandas liken themselves as unto the Borg of "Star Trek", but like Seven of Nine, they are quite rightly amiable chaps and chapesses.

Splendiferous Panda Trivia

The earliest, and best known, cartoon panda is Andy Panda, created in the 1940's by Walter Lantz, best known for Woody Woodpecker. Lantz was inspired to create Andy after he and his wife Grace Stafford (Woody's voice) saw a group of giant pandas on loan from China at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. Andy has a girlfriend named Miranda Panda. For years I thought it was Amanda Panda, but nope, it's Miranda.

In the 1980's there was Pam Panda of the Shirt Tales, a gang of cute shirt-wearing animals from Hallmark Cards that the Hanna-Barbera studios made into a Saturday morning TV show. On that show, they were cute shirt-wearing superheroes. For the record they are, clockwise from the top, Rick the Raccoon, Kip the Kangaroo, Tyg the Tiger, Bogey the Chimp, Digger the Mole and Pam the Panda. Comic impressionist Fred Travalena lent his Humphrey Bogart impersonation to the chimp's voice, and a young Nancy Cartwright voiced Kip before landing her best-known gig: Bart Simpson. Ay caramba!

In the 70's and 80's, Hanna-Barbera was the Clear Channel of kidvid animation -- the dominant player of the genre. After all, they invented it. Pandamonium, produced at the same time as "Shirt Tales", involved cute pandas, an evil New Age spirit, some kind of magic crystal, and somehow this all involved saving the world. But alas, the bizarre and incomprehensible plotline was probably its undoing, lasting less than one season.

Panda and Purple Panda were two magical pandas with monotone robot-like voices on "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" who hung out in the Land of Make-Believe. Purple Panda, a friendly visitor from the Purple Planet, used "thinking travel" to magically teleport from place to place like Samantha did on "Bewitched". Fred Rogers himself provided their voices.

And on a personal note, I've always had a sweet spot for Fred Rogers' gentle, easy-paced demeanor; he was that way in real life as well as on TV. And that's perhaps why "Mister Rogers" is still in reruns on PBS, even after his passing in 2003.

Hua Mei was panda born at the San Diego Zoo in 1999. She was moved to China in 2004 to help preserve the endangered panda population back home. Her name in Chinese means "China/USA" or "Beautiful Flower".

Pandas sounds a lot like Padres, but as far as I know, the ones at the zoo don't play baseball.