ZeFronk Cooks Up One Hot Dog

My original plan to post once or twice a week has been shattered, and I’m still finding that there’s much too much for me to write about to be able to get to it all, a case in point being all the great new shows that have been premiering for the past two months. But lest I miss the next big thing, it’s called Tasty Time with ZeFronk and it’s premiering on Playhouse Disney this Saturday morning at 6:25 a.m. (as this blog by the production company OddBot says, that’s “just in time for breakfast.”)

Tasty Time with ZeFronk is an animated cooking show with the titular chef, a French Dachshund, (voiced by veteran voice actor Rob Paulsen) and his not-so-helpful feline neighbor (voiced by Mark Hamill, who it turns out has done quite an immense amount of voice work himself, besides his wonderful guest appearance on The Simpsons about a decade ago). The show’s an interstitial, with about a five-minute running time per episode, but it looks to be one of the funniest new programs on the docket, with an emphasis on wordplay (you’ve got a Wiener dog in the kitchen, after all, whose very name is a French-accented pun), and, I hope, slapstick, though that’s entirely a Swedish Chef-influenced wish.

The curriculum is nutrition of course, and the show is included in a programming block that will include similarly themed episodes of Disney shows. Tasty Time will prove a welcome addition to Playhouse Disney’s lineup, particularly as it squares up against to Noggin's Cooking for Kids with Luis, an excellent live-action Australian cooking interstitial; while these two programs are ostensibly competing, it looks to me like they're sufficiently different to serve as very good complements to each other. ZeFronk is, as mentioned, produced by OddBot Inc., a Los Angeles-based animation production company.

Here is an article from Animation Magazine. And here is the show's official page on Playhouse Disney, with videos and recipes that will update as the show proceeds.