Setting
The characters live in houses adjoining a large backyard common to the three central houses (Pablo's, Tyrone's and Uniqua's) that is transformed by imagination into various adventure settings. While the Backyardigans' adventures take place all around the world, the Backyardigans reside in Southern Ontario. Each house roughly corresponds to the color scheme of the character: Pablo lives in a blue house, Uniqua in a pink one, and Tyrone in an orange one. Tasha's house, which is to the left of the three central houses, is yellow and Austin's, to the right, is partially obscured by a fence but what is visible is purple. The fence, which surrounds the combined properties of the three main characters (Pablo, Tyrone and Uniqua), has a gate in it which leads to Austin's house. The curve of the street allows the play area to be roughly equal in distance from each house's back door.
Not everything that appears in the imaginary world has a real-world counterpart. Often trees, boulders, brickwork, or similar objects appear where nothing originally existed. By the same token, even large trees in the real garden disappear completely when the imagination part of the story commences.
When playing in their imaginations, the characters often pull items out of thin air, from behind their backs or from something clearly not large enough to hold them; a technique known in animation as hammerspace. The episode "Eureka!" had a running gag in which Pablo would search for certain items on his saddlebag, pulling out enormous objects in the process (e.g. a tuba, a surfboard and a fully inflated rubber raft.)
Other examples include occasions in "Riding the Range", where Tyrone could produce a seemingly inexhaustible supply of apples, "The Snow Fort", where Tasha and Uniqua each have a rucksack that contains a rescue kit, including shovels, hooks, and suction cups, "Race Around the World", where Austin has a racing pack in which he keeps numerous items, such as a hook, rope, Band-Aids, a water bottle, and a pair of scissors, and "High Tea", in which Tasha manages to store tea-leaves, a teapot and four cups and saucers in a small purse.
Read more about this topic: The Backyardigans
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“Teaching Black Studies, I find that students are quick to label a black person who has grown up in a predominantly white setting and attended similar schools as not black enough. ...Our concept of black experience has been too narrow and constricting.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“The setting was really perfect for a brisk bubbling murder....”
—Vladimir Nabokov (18991977)