By Catherine Newton
Knight Ridder Newspapers
It's a safe bet your preschooler doesn't know that binturongs smell like buttered popcorn. And she's probably never seen the webbed feet of a capybara up close, either.
That, say brothers and animal adventurers Martin and Chris Kratt, is a shame. And they decided to do something about it. Beginning Monday, the popular hosts of the 2-year-old ``Kratt's Creatures'' PBS series for children bring a new wildlife series to public television: ``Zaboomafoo.''
Sharing host duties with the brothers is Zaboomafoo himself, an endangered leaping sifaka lemur from the island of Madagascar that is at various times shown as a puppet, animated clay figure and real-life primate. Although portions of the show involve adventures in Zabooland, the lemur's imaginary clay-animation world where he learns life lessons in cooperation and friendship, the heart of the show is the up-close and personal interactions among the Kratts, Zaboomafoo and a wide range of wild animals.
``It's about making friends with animals,'' Martin Kratt says. To that end, for the premiere season, more than 500 untrained creatures visited the set's Animal Junction, including a flesh-eating Southeast Asian catlike creature with a prehensile tail (the binturong) and a 4-foot tailless South American rodent (the capybara). Squirrel monkeys escaped into the lighting grid. A black bear ducked out through an air-conditioning duct. A camel made a large wet spot on the floor.
For the Kratts, it's all part of the fun. ``Just as preschoolers are learning about animals, we hope that a lot of parents have the opportunity to see animals from a more personal perspective,'' says Martin Kratt, whose experiences 10 years ago working with lemurs as an undergraduate at Duke University provided the inspiration for the series. ``We'd like parents to come away reaffirming that learning is fun.''
