Hugo the TV Troll

» see ite.dk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Kanal 6 put Hugo on Turkish television five days a week starting in March 1993. I was nine that year. The premise was identical everywhere it ran: the show asked for callers, one of them got through to the studio, and that person played a video game on national television using the keypad of the telephone they had called from. Three digits were the whole control scheme, the top row of the keypad in some versions and the 2-4-6 cross in others.

It came out of Copenhagen. Ivan Sølvason founded the company in 1988 as SilverRock Productions and renamed it Interactive Television Entertainment in 1992, and Hugo was the successor to an earlier phone-controlled show of theirs called OsWALD. The troll himself was drawn in Deluxe Paint by the animator Niels Krogh Mortensen with his brother Lars helping, which is why a character seen by tens of millions of children across three continents started life as pixel art on a Danish workstation. The first broadcast was 7 September 1990 on TV2, tucked inside a program called Eleva2ren.

The licensing model is the reason almost nobody outside Denmark knew it was Danish. ITE supplied the character along with the hardware that ran him, and each broadcaster produced its own show locally with its own host and its own script. Hugo spoke Danish only in Denmark. In Vietnam the show was averaging twenty thousand calls per episode by 2008 and half a million a week at its peak, and in the United States he was renamed Tino, turned into a duende rather than a troll, and run on Telemundo in Spanish.

Denmark itself stopped making new Hugo in May 1995, five years in, and then kept coming back to it in short revivals through 2004. The format outlived its home country by more than a decade on license elsewhere. The last documented runs were Polsat in Poland, which ended on 28 February 2009, and Canal 5 in Mexico, which ran until that April.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

ITE built its own computer for this. The ITE 3000 took the dual-tone multi-frequency signaling off any push-button telephone in the country and converted it into control commands for the character on screen, which is a sentence that sounds trivial now and was not in 1990. It was replaced later by the PC-based ITE 4000, which added a real-time motion capture rig called the Animation Mask System so the host could talk to a troll that talked back. In 1996 the company put Hugo on a Silicon Graphics Onyx Reality Engine and moved the whole thing to 3D.

What the hardware bought was the only thing that mattered: a stranger at home, on a normal phone line, with their hands on a game that everyone else in the country was watching at the same moment.

~ the turkish run ~

Turkey ran it four separate times. Kanal 6 from March 1993 to October 1996, Show TV from May 2001 to 30 September 2002, Cine5 through 2003 and 2004, then ATV until June 2005. The first run is the one that counts. Hugo became the highest ranking children's show in the country and took 12 percent of the entire television market at a moment when Turkey had only had private channels for about three years and nobody knew what they were for yet. Tolga Gariboğlu, Tolga Abi on air, hosted it for more than a decade.

The Turkish script also went somewhere the other versions did not. Cadı Sila, voiced by Eylem Şenkal, kidnapped Hugo's family because she wanted eternal beauty and intended to get it by drinking their sweat after working them to death. No other country's Hugo carried that motive. And then there is the thing every Turkish adult of my generation will tell you happened, which is that a boy who lost his game swore at Hugo and at Tolga live on air before the line was cut. Tolga has denied it publicly, most recently in a 2015 Hürriyet piece, and no recording of it has ever surfaced.

~ what got buried with it ~

ITE was bought by NDS Group in 2006 and became NDS Denmark. The Hugo rights were sold off separately to Krea Medie A/S in 2008 and NDS Denmark was closed in 2010. ite.dk today issues a redirect to techmagazinet.dk, an unrelated Danish tech magazine sitting on the old domain.

The character survives, which is worth saying plainly. Hugo Games, renamed 5th Planet Games in 2018, still publishes Hugo mobile titles and hugogames.com is a working WordPress site today. The thing in the ground is the arrangement, which needed a live studio on one end of a phone line and one child somewhere in the country holding the controller on behalf of everybody else.

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