Hugo (Skærmtrolden Hugo in Danish, meaning "Hugo the Screen-Troll") is a media franchise created by the Danish company Interactive Television Entertainment (later ITE Media) in 1990 for the purpose of interactive television for children. It is based around the fictional character of Hugo, a friendly, small Scandinavian folklore troll engaged in a conflict against a wicked witch, often to save his family. Since its premiere in 1990, the Hugo game show has been aired in more than 40 countries, spawning dozens of video games for various platforms. Hugo spawned other merchandise, including dedicated magazines. As of 2012, the commercial parts of the franchise consist mostly of mobile games being published by the Danish company Hugo Games (renamed 5th Planet Games in 2018).
Setting and characters
The show is set in a cartoonish contemporary fantasy universe. The franchise's titular protagonist Hugo is a one-meter-tall troll living in the "Troll Forest" located somewhere in Scandinavia. Hugo's family includes his beloved wife Hugolina (Hugoline in the original Danish version) and their three children Rit (TrolleRit), Rat (TrolleRat) and Rut (TrolleRut). Their main antagonist is the evil Scylla (Afskylia, named differently in some localized versions such as Hexana in German), an ancient and cruel witch with a grudge against the trolls dating back for centuries and Hugo always standing in her way. Scylla often kidnaps Hugo's family because she needs their presence to restore and keep her own youth and beauty due to a curse, and uses her magic and minions as well as various traps to stop Hugo from rescuing his family or foil her other plots. The later-added characters are mostly non-human creatures and anthropomorphic animals, including Hugo's friends (such as Fernando the toucan and Jean Paul the chimpanzee in Jungle Island) and more of Hugo's enemies (notably Scylla's faithful but dumb henchman Don Croco, leading a humanoid crocodile army on the Jungle Island to protect his mistress and help her oppress the Kikurians, a primitive tribe of the island's native creatures). All of this is presented in a humorous way, by default tailored to children aged 4-14. According to Hugo creator Ivan Sølvason, the program's intended message was to teach children to protect their own family at any cost, including risking life to save them if needed.
Some later video games and other adaptations dropped the usual Hugolina-kidnapping motif, making Scylla beautiful by default yet still as hateful as ever. In their stories, the witch would variably seek revenge against Hugo personally or even try to get rid of the trolls everywhere once and for all, cause other mischief such as attacking Hugo's old friend Santa Claus in the Christmas games, or search for an ultimate power to take over the world, and several even dropped her as a character altogether. In 2001, a beaver minor enemy character received its own spin-off show, titled Stinky & Stomper. In the 2005 science fiction reboot titled Agent Hugo, Hugo became a futuristic James Bond-parody special agent as an employee of the crime-fighting spy organization R.I.S.K. to fight against high-tech enemies such as mad scientists and robots.
History
The idea for an interactive game TV show was conceived in 1987 by Ivan Sølvason, founder of initially very small video game studio SilverRock Productions and former editor-in-chief of Oberoende Computer, who was creator of the interactive TV program OsWALD made for Nordisk Film's TV2 Denmark in 1988, and Niels Krogh Mortensen, an animator. Sølvason's small company SilverRock Productions, which was later renamed as Interactive Television Entertainment (ITE) ApS in 1992, developed the character of Hugo as well as the designated, custom-built computer hardware system that would convert telephone DTMF signals into remotely control the characters in the game and allow the interaction of the audience and the TV action without delay. Sølvason and Krogh Mortensen created the concept of "Hugo the TV troll" and the first Hugo TV program was launched in September 1990. Since the show's second season, the player's objective has been usually to help Hugo free his wife and children from Scylla's captivity. Hugo had to journey one of different game environments before he got to one of Scylla's lairs, avoiding various traps and other dangers while collecting gold along the way. Once the player finished the game, he or she would receive a prize reward according to the obtained game score, which was based on the player's performance in the main scenario but greatly depended on how well Hugo fared in his final and purely luck-based task to rescue his family, with a special bonus for capturing Scylla.