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Muzzy is a set of educational videos used to teach foreign languages in classrooms, named after the clock-eating monster, Muzzy, who is a main character in the set - ET that visits the kingdom of Gondoland where the story takes place.

Language Availability

Currently, Muzzy is used to teach Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, German, French, Gaelic, Italian and Esperanto, as well as English to ESL students.

Characters

Muzzy is the story's main character; a large clock-eating friendly monster. The stories are set in the kingdom of Gondoland, which Muzzy lands on in his spaceship. Inhabitants of Gondoland include the royal family, who are lions: the King, who is "strong" the Queen, who is "fat, fat, fat," and their daughter Sylvia; Bob, their gardener; Corvax, a giant-nosed green evil scientist in a black cape, who often reminds you he "has a computer" and is "clever," and, later in the set, Amanda, the daughter of Bob and Princess Sylvia. Most characters are dogs, except for the King, who is a lion, and Corvax, who is a goblin. The story is often interrupted by educational interludes, animated in a different style and featuring a cyclist character named Norman who explains grammar with tunes like "good morning/I'm Norman/good morning..." The names of the characters and places are changed in each version to fit in with the language (i.e. Norman becomes Carlos "buenos dias/soy Carlos/buenos dias..." in the Spanish version).

Corvax also has a cat with a gambling addiction that plays video slot machines on his computer when he's out plotting. After watching him lose on a multitude of spins "a plum, a plum, some grapes!" You finally see him hit the "jackpot" when the computer spits out an entire produce aisle, burying him in "plums, plums, plums!"

Story

Muzzy is distributed by Early Advantage, a subsidiary of the BBC, in two installments, Muzzy and Muzzy II, with the latter being more advanced than the first. In the first film, Bob falls in love and runs away with Princess Sylvia on his motorbike. He is thrown in prison on charges of kidnapping, where he meets Muzzy, jailed for eating parking meters while hungry, in his cell. Muzzy eats the bars of the prison cell, and they escape. While they escape, Corvax, also in love with the princess, uses his computer to clone her, which ends unsuccessfully, because the clones hate him as much as the original. In the sequel, as Muzzy revisits Gondoland for his birthday party, Corvax, now head chef, assisted by a convicted felon, Thimbo, as his punishment, kidnaps Amanda with plans to make her queen as part of their new kingdom.

Other uses

In other references to modern day pop culture the word "Muzzy" has been used as a derogatory term for anyone that looks like or is of Muslim background. This term is more common in England, which has a much more noticeable Muslim presence, than in the United States, where it has been widely used only in northeastern Connecticut and is spreading throughout New England. (See "muzzy" in Urban Dictionary)

• Teaching
• Language education