Jay Jay the Jet Plane


Jay Jay the Jet Plane is a 1998-2005 American live-action/CGI-animated musical children's television series based at the fictional Tarrytown Airport, which aired on The Learning Channel and PBS Kids. The series has 50 episodes, and is centered on a group of aircraft who live in the fictional city of Tarrytown. The episodes are commonly distributed in 25-minute-long pairs, with one header sequence and one end credits for each pair. Each episode contains one or more songs.
The theme song and the majority of the other songs were written by well-known children's singer/songwriter Stephen Michael Schwartz, and sung by his popular musical group, Parachute Express. Created by David and Deborah Michel, the series is intended to be educational and to teach life and moral lessons to children.

History

In late 1994, a short live-action series was produced at AMS Production Company in Dallas, Texas, with real model plane characters, and handcrafted human characters; they had the same personalities as in the later series. This original series was narrated similarly to the first eleven seasons of Thomas & Friends or Theodore Tugboat. Three videos were released: Jay Jay's First Flight in December 1994, Old Oscar Leads the Parade in February 1995, and Tracy's Handy Hideout in October 1996. This original series was narrated by and features the voices of John William Galt. These three were known as the "pilot series".
On November 2, 1998, the CGI-animated/live-action series premiered on The Learning Channel as part of the Ready Set Learn block. Debi Derryberry took on the role of Jay Jay after Bergman's death in 1999, with no new characters voiced by her. The show was close captioned by the National Captioning Institute with the old close caption credit logo when seen on the Learning Channel back then. The Learning Channel pulled the series on March 14, 2000. On June 11, 2001, all episodes began broadcasting on PBS Kids; the end credits changed, and additional episodes were created from 2001–2005. VHS and DVD editions were released by Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment through 2003 as part of their "Columbia TriStar Family Fun" collection. Additional distribution was added with Tommy Nelson, the children's division of book publisher Thomas Nelson, although the series is not overtly "Christian". Voice actress Mary Kay Bergman provided the original voice of Jay Jay, Herky, Savannah, and Revvin Evan. After her death, Debi Derryberry and Donna Cherry replaced her.
In 2005, new episodes were produced featuring additional characters, including the red Latina plane Lina. Each episode begins featuring a Jay Jay's Mysteries segment in which Jay Jay and Lina explore such things that may be mysteries to the intended age group, such as how planes fly, and how the five senses are used. The mysteries segment is followed by a story that comes from the original episodes of the series, so in effect, the new series repackages previously broadcast content.
Reruns continued to air on PBS Kids until August 28, 2009.

Characters

The planes and ground vehicles are CGI characters, while the humans are live-action actors.
Relationship words for the airplane characters refer to being in loco parentis for purposes of upbringing, and education, not to biological parenthood. The story says that the airplane characters were made in factories.
Some of the stories describe characters as doing actions off-screen that would need foldaway arms, but those arms are never seen on-screen.

Aircraft characters

Sometimes, the planes taxi on the town streets.

Episodes

Production

The series was produced by Modern Cartoons in Oxnard, California, United States. Unlike Thomas & Friends, this series used a variety of animation techniques:
The complex mathematical and CGI issues were solved by Frank Ford Little, PhD.
A number of proprietary software systems were used:

10 new episodes