Jay Jay the Jet Plane is a CGI children's television cartoon fiction series. It has about 60 episodes, each 25 minutes long. The characters are talking aeroplanes, and some humans, based at a fictional Tarrytown Airport in the USA. The series contains much good matter with good advice for real children (and sometimes for parents). It is issued in joined pairs of episodes and each pair has one header sequence.

Character list
Here, for the aeroplanes:-

Relationship words refer to being in loco parentis for purposes of upbringing and education, not to biological parenthood.

The story says that the aeroplane characters were made in factories.

The aeroplanes depict a typical family. Information from the makers of the series says that their (mental) ages are as stated; but Jay Jay and Tracy act more as if they were around the beginning of teenage.

The planes and ground vehicles are CGI characters.

• Jay Jay. Male. 6 years old. Small jet airliner.
• Tracy. Female. 6 years old. Small jet airliner. Normal hearing, but understands American Sign Language.
• Snuffy. Male. 4 years old. Small propeller monoplane. Is equipped for skywriting
• Herky. Male. 5 years old. Helicopter. Has skids instead of wheels and cannot taxi on the ground.
• Big Jake. Male. Adult. Father figure. Cargo carrier.
• Savannah. Female. Adult. Mother figure. Supersonic airliner. Was made at Savannah in Georgia (USA), hence (in the story) her name.
• Oscar. Male. Old adult. Grandfather-like figure. Old biplane.

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• Revvin' Evan. Fire engine.
• Tuffy. Towtruck.

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The humans, and a dog that appears in one episode, are live-acted.

• Brenda Blue. Plump woman in bib-and-brace overall. In charge of the airport. She does not use the airport's control tower but communicates with the planes by a portable two-way radio from the ground.
• Miss Jones, librarian at Tarrytown library. Woman. Deaf, knows American Sign Language.
• Easy O'Malley. He founded EZ Airlines. He has relatives Grumpy O'Malley (cousin, lives nearby at Dewdrop Farm), Pierre O'Malley (lives in France), Tex O'Malley (lives in Texas).
• There are other human characters who appear from time to time.
• Tarrytown Airport is run by a small firm called EZ Airlines.

In Tarrytown is a school called the Michael O'Tarry School. Within the world of the story, it may be named after the man who founded Tarrytown.
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Animal characters that occur more than once are:

• The monarch butterfly Breezy. One episode shows Jay Jay following Breezy's long autumn migration from Tarrytown to a hibernation site in a mountaintop forest in Michoacan state in central Mexico.
• The two bees Bobby Bee and Billy Bee. They first appear in the episode "Catch the Buzz" where they accidentally get into the electronics of Big Jake and Herky (in that order) causing locomotor ataxia forcing Big Jake and Herky to land until Brenda Blue goes inside them and investigates.
• The lightning bugs at Lightning Bug Lake.

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Consistency between some of the episodes depends on the order of the episodes. For example, one episode says that Snuffy has not flown further away from Tarrytown than Lightning Bug Lake, but other episodes show him flying much further; in "Catch the Buzz" Snuffy still has not got rid of his original shyness, but in many other episodes he shows no sign of shyness.

Sometimes the planes taxi on the town streets.

Going into places impossible for planes (outer space and underwater) happens only in dreams that some of the characters have. A few episodes have a geographical fault and show an airstrip on land at the North Pole. One pair of episodes shows Santa Claus as existing.

Tarrytown is in a hilly area with enough rain to keep the land green. There are forested mountains and desert near.

Other places in the story are:-

• Tarrytown National Park.
• Smiling Meadow.
• Sandy Landing: a small seaport.
• Pangabula Island: a small remote tropical island.
• Tarrytown Quarry, and a big building site. Both are represented by the same scenery set, which seems to be a real miniature which was photographed and used as a background; or it may be a painting.
• Sunshine Desert.
• Tippy Toppy Peak: the highest mountain in the area round Tarrytown.
• Frosty Pines.
• Echo Canyon.

Popularity of this series may have led to at least one case of a real family's new baby being named Savannah.

Tarrytown town and airport are never seen in moving-camera shots, and therefore are likely real miniature sets which were photographed and those photographs were used as backgrounds in the CGI images. The airport runway may be a CGI ground plane texture mapped with a photograph of real fullsize or miniature tarmac.

The end credits say that the series was produced by "Compaq Alpha Powered Rendering". In the episode "Supersonic Jay Jay" Savannah has to carry Jay Jay on her back, and Jay Jay wavers about somewhat compared to Savannah: this seems to show that in the CGI package used, one character could not be parented to another character as can be done in Curious Labs Poser.

Broadcasting

The series is broadcast over many of the 379 member stations of the Public Broadcasting Service of the United States.
The series has been broadcast in Britain.

External link

Wonderwings.com published the series.