Between the Lions

Between The Lions is a Preschool Children's Television CGI live action TV Series on PBS Kids will Premiere on April 3, 2000.

## Characters

* Theo Lion[2] – The owner of the library, Lionel and Leona's father, and Cleo's husband with a scruffy attitude, loud gravelly voice, and large appetite. He loves to eat meat and devours it all in one second. He loves to joke but also has a powerful roar. Theo has an unending love for storytelling and is always proud to show library patrons the best books available.
* Cleo Lion – The mother of the cubs and the family hunter. She loves to read to her cubs and use the stories to teach them important life lessons. She has the alter ego of a country lion singer, Tammy Lionette. Cleo's hunting instincts also make her a good investigative reporter and she can track down any book in the building, regardless of genre.
* Lionel Lion – Theo and Cleo's seven-year-old son. He loves to read "Cliff Hanger" books and always looks forward to the next one, much to Leona's annoyance. Lionel can get flustered when his family embarrasses him when they are devouring their food or if he is reading a baby book to Leona, but he loves them just the same. Since Lionel is always so self-confident, he is often convinced he doesn't need any advice or help with his problems, but he always ends up needing it after all.
* Leona Lion – Theo and Cleo's four-year-old daughter. Leona is curious about everything and is preparing to read as well as her brother, Lionel. Unlike Lionel, she is more in touch with her feral instincts and always practices her pouncing and hunting on her brother or her father. While Lionel loves Cliff Hanger books, Leona hates them because of how predictable and repetitive they are.
* Barnaby B. Busterfield III – A grumpy rock statue who is the founder of the library, which is named after him, and lives on the second floor. He is often left annoyed by the antics of Walter and Clay Pigeon. Being a statue, he cannot go anywhere, so the pigeons and the viewers are the only ones to whom he can address his complaints. He is annoyed when anyone calls him "Buster" and when the announcer pesters him. Buster is absent after Season 4.
* Walter and Clay Pigeon – The two birds that live in the library's dome with Buster. They conversely talk to and annoy him. Walter is the male pigeon and Clay is the female pigeon. Walter and Clay Pigeon are not the most intelligent; without each other's help, they have difficulty completing their own thoughts. That means one pigeon can't manage to say complete sentences without the other's help and vice versa (for example, the Pigeons say, "We are going roller...uh...skating."). Walter and Clay are absent after Season 4.
* Click – A live computer mouse shaped like the rodent of the same name. Click is technically skilled in that she can drag and drop objects and characters into and out of books and websites. When a character needs her, they only need to call out her name (usually screaming if it's an emergency) since she doesn't mind helping others and will do what they tell her to do. Her only hindrances are, being a computer mouse, she must always stay connected to a computer and that she is vulnerable to computer viruses, as shown in one episode. Click vanished for a while after the fourth season, but returned in the last couple of seasons.

* Dr. Alexander Graham Nitwhite (often mispronounced as "Dr. Nitwit", which he hates being called, by his duck assistant, Watson and sometimes by other characters: a regular routine has Theo and Cleo saying hello to "Dr. Nitwit" and when they are corrected (Nitwhite) they proclaim "Right...") – A pelican scientist. In his skits, he announces to Watson that he's discovered "the only word in the entire English language" with a certain letter combination (which is nearly always related to the lesson of the whole episode). However, his "discoveries" always turn out to be incorrect, as Watson inadvertently points out; as such, his nickname is rather apt. His name is a pun on Alexander Graham Bell, the creator of the telephone.
* The Information Hen – The library's information specialist. Each time she appears, she gives information about the library and reading to various callers usually by telling a joke or singing a song. She appears in animated segments in Season Five.
* Heath the Thesaurus – The library's thesaurus who is literally a giant dinosaur (a sauropod dinosaur; Brontosaurus) as a pun on the word "thesaurus" or "the saurus". He lives in the basement and often shows up unexpectedly when a character asks about a homophonic word or when a situation is called for one. He was voiced by Tyler Bunch in Season 1 and Peter Linz from Season 2 onwards. Heath does not appear after the fourth season.
* Grandpa Lion: Cleo's father, Lionel and Leona's maternal grandfather and also the father-in-law of Theo. He visits the library in the episode *Out in Outer Space* and tells of his friend Ellen Ochoa, the first Hispanic American woman in Outer Space. Lionel and Leona even made a biography of Grandpa Lion. He was performed by Martin P. Robinson.
* Gus the Rabbit: Lionel's best friend who is on his school hopping team. He has a reading disability and is still learning. He was afraid to tell Lionel about his problem, but he encouraged him to keep trying and ask for help when he needs it.
* Aunt Priscilla and Uncle Otto Lion – Lionel and Leona's aunt and uncle who were told by Leona that they had 3 new cubs in *But Mama But* in which Leona visited in the episode. Aunt Priscilla and Uncle Otto would be Cleo's younger sister and Cleo's brother-in-law, the maternal aunt and uncle of Lionel and Leona, and the sister-in-law and brother-in-law of Theo Lion.
* Announcer Bunny - A rabbit in a top hat who acts as the show's announcer. He has a microphone right next to his hat. He appears before the intro in the first four seasons, saying something like "Announcer Bunny Here! Don't touch that remote, here comes Between the Lions!", at which point a preview of a clip shown in the episode plays and then it goes back to him, saying "If you think that was fun, watch this!" and in the episodes with two segments from Seasons 5-10, he appears to introduce the next episode. He also appears to introduce Arty Smartypants in his segments "Magic Time With The Great Smartini", "Four Words Without Any Assistance Whatsoever" and "Not As Smart As A Puck" and also introduces other segments such as the segments with Bertice Berry (saying "Dr. Bertice Berry with the [letter sound] in [word]!"), Fred Says (in the later seasons (saying "And now, a word from Mr. Fred Newman!")) and Monkey Cheerleaders (saying "And now, it's time for those magnificent Monkey Cheerleaders!" while a megaphone appears in front of him before he says "...those magnificent Monkey Cheeleaders!", that bit of which he says through the megaphone). On one occasion, he introduced the Heath the Thesaurus song, "Ten Little Words" (saying "Heath the Thesaurus, Heath the Thesaurus, Heath the Thesaurus! I went to Announcer School."). In some episodes, after a segment with Clay and Walter Pigeon, he would appear to say "Ha, ha, ha! Pigeons, Don't you just love 'em?". In later seasons, he announced the funding for the show. The only time he ever appeared with the lions or in the Library was in The Goat in the Coat, where he appeared to translate for Sierra the Spanish-speaking mountain lion.
* Arty Smartypants/The Great Smartini: A farcical and somewhat discombobulated bunraku puppet man with large overalls (which he refers to as his "smarty pants"). He is the star of two segments; Magic Time and Four Words. In the former, Arty puts on a magic show where he puts two to four words in his pants and says a magic word like ebracadebra, or oobracadoobra, then dances to his song – "Dance in Smarty Pants" – until he has made a compound word and demonstrating it by showing/interacting with the meaning of the word. Due to the popularity of his dance, a short music video was made that featured Arty and various characters from the show (or from other PBS Kids shows) wearing their own "smarty pants" and dancing to the song. In the latter segment, he reads "four words without any assistance whatsoever". Four words appear in each corner of the screen and he points to them first with his hands, then with his feet. After realizing that he is floating in the air, he comically comes crashing down. In later seasons, the segments were replaced with new ones; Short Stories, where Arty reads a small board book and Play With Words, where he Arty changes words into completely different ones.
* Smarmy Marmy Smartypants: Arty Smartypants' mother, who is also his assistant in the Great Smartini segments. While Arty himself doesn't visit the library, Marmy sometimes pops up every now and then to babysit the cubs or read a book to them. She can also be seen sometimes in the background. In the second to fourth seasons, Marmy hosts her own solo segments; "Swami Marmy", in which she plays a fortune teller who reads the future to some monkeys and Marmy's Poetry Corner, where she introduces some celebrities reading a poem from a book.

## Funding

* eToys (2000-2002)
* Cheerios (2000-2001)
* Chick-fil-A (2003-2011)
* Bright Horizons (2006)