Summer Penguin

PERFORMER	Jessica DiCicco
DEBUT	2018

Summer-Puppet — Summer puppet from *Muppet Babies Play Date*.

MuppetBabies-SummerPenguin-Illustrated-MyFirstLookAndFind-ActivityBook — Illustrated Summer Penguin from "First Look and Find."

Summer is a penguin featured in the 2018 Muppet Babies animated series. During the planning stages for the reboot of the show, she replaced the initially concepted character Bobbi Baba.

Her official description characterizes her as "super creative. She loves to draw, she loves to paint, she loves to dance—all at the same time. She's the smallest of the group, but she definitely has the biggest heart."^[1]

Like most penguins, Summer hails from Antarctica. Her sun-adorned sweater reminds her of home where she used to ride an Icicle Tricycle around the icebergs with her friends.^[2]

Her catchphrases include the surprise exclamation "icicles!" and the mild curse word "fish sticks!"

Unlike her Muppet Babies cohorts, who first appeared in puppet form, Summer was only reimagined as an actual Muppet for the Muppet Babies Play Date shorts, where she was puppeteered by performer Alice Dinnean.^[3]

Behind-the-scenes[]

Executive producer Tom Warburton on Summer's creation:

“It was me and our art director Chris Moreno sitting in a room just doodling and drawing, and I came up with this little sketch of a lollipop-shaped penguin with a turtleneck. We probably did a hundred different characters^{[note 1]} trying to figure out who this was going to be, and when we came into Disney Junior with this penguin and a couple others, they immediately went to the penguin and said, ‘That one.’ We have that original drawing hanging in the studio now.^[1]”