Talking Friends is an animated Mini Series based on the Talking Tom and Friends franchise by Outfit7, as well as its first Animated Adaptation. The show is about the occurrences of the popular videogame character Talking Tom and his crazy adventures with his friends. It has 10 episodes that ran on Disney Channel from June 8, 2012 to August 31, 2012. This show is also available on Disney's official YouTube channel and it has the most viewed videos on it, with only "I'll Make A Man Out Of You" from Mulan beating it.
Not to be confused with Talking Tom Shorts, Talking Tom and Friends, Talking Tom And Friends Minis or Talking Tom Heroes, later animated adaptations of this characters.
Talking Friends contains examples of:
- Adapted Out: Several Talking Friends characters of the time such as Larry the bird, Roby the robot, Lila the fairy, Baby Hippo, among others, are completely absent from this show.
- Advertised Extra: The Hand. In the teaser trailer, The Hand was shown as one of the main characters, but in the show, it only appears in the opening, in the transitions and a little gag from the episode "Newserator".
- Butt-Monkey: Poor Pierre, he always gets the worst.
- Early Adaptation Weirdness:
- This is the only Talking Tom cartoon to feature physically the characters of Pierre and Gina, who both dissapeared from the franchise in 2016.
- Likewise, this is the only Talking Tom cartoon that doesn't feature Hank, as he was not created yet.
- Tom, Angela and Ginger have very high-pitched voices that heavily contrast with child-like voices from current games or their more natural sounding voices from Talking Tom and Friends, althought this is loyal to the games at the time, where these characters had high-pitched voices.
- Angela is completely naked. In later adaptations, Angela is now shown fully clothed.
- The main cast live in a trailer park in the middle of a desert, rather than a suburban house like in later adaptations.
- Expospeak Gag: Ben is like that all the time.Ben: The atmospheric conditions and pressure ratios combined with the lack of any precipitation make it a fine A.M. for our test.
Tom: What?
Ben: It's a beautiful morning for blast off.
Tom: Why didn't you just say that? - Minimalist Cast: As you can see in the picture, there are six Funny Animals throughout the whole show.
- Mythology Gag:
- The wallpapers inside Tom and Ben's trailers are based on the living rooms of Talking Tom 2 and Talking Ben respectively.
- In the episode "Newserator", the scene where the townspeople attack Pierre by throwing tomatoes at him is a reference to an option in Talking Pierre where you can throw tomatoes at Pierre.
- Shout-Out:
- Episode 5, "Rock the Catsbah", is a pun on The Clash's "Rock the Casbah".
- The name of episode 9, "Angry Parrots", refers to Angry Birds.
- Episode 10, "Tom After Tom", is a pun on the phrase "time after time", most likely referring to the Cyndi Lauper song of the same name since the episode includes throwbacks to various decades, including the 80's.
- In the above episode, Tom drops a lot of 80s references, including quoting Mr. T's "I pity the fool" line, saying the 80s were "bad to the bone! B-b-b-b-bad!", a reference to "Bad to the Bone" by George Thorogood and the Destroyers, and mentioning Madonna in his song.
- Pierre's 50's look includes a hairdo resembling that of Elvis Presley; his song is also in a similar style to Elvis' music.
- The Smart Guy: Ben the dog is very smart and loves to do experiments and invent things.
- Turned Against Their Masters: Ben's robots, Self-Aware and Newserator 3000 turn against him and his friends in their respective episodes.
