Jay Jay the Jet Plane

Jay Jay the Jet Plane is a CGI/live action musical children's television series based at the fictional Tarrytown Airport. It has about 60 episodes and is aimed at ages 2–7. The series is centered around a group of anthropomorphised aircraft who live in the fictional city of Tarrytown. The episodes are commonly distributed in 25-minute-long (as without commercials) pairs, with one header sequence and one end credits for each pair. Each episode contains one or more songs.

The theme song and the majority of the other songs were written by well-known children's singer/songwriter Stephen Michael Schwartz and sung by his popular musical group, Parachute Express. Created by David and Deborah Michel, the series is intended to be educational and to teach life and moral lessons to children (and sometimes also to parents), although it has received extreme criticism for coming across as frightening, seeing as the planes are portrayed with large, bloated human faces.

History
The series premiered on November 2, 1998 on The Learning Channel before all episodes were started broadcasting on PBS Kids on June 11, 2001; additional episodes were created 2001 and 2005. Home video editions were released by Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment through 2003 as part of their "Columbia TriStar Family Fun" collection. Distribution was then moved over to Tommy Nelson, the children's division of book publisher Thomas Nelson, although not being a "Christian" series. Voice actress Mary Kay Bergman provided the original voice of Jay Jay and several other characters.

In 2006, "new" episodes were produced featuring additional characters, including the red Latino plane Lina. Each episode begins featuring a "Jay Jay's Mysteries" segment in which Jay Jay and Lina explore such things that may be mysteries to the intended age group, such as how planes fly and how the five senses are used. The mysteries segment is followed by a story that comes from the original episodes of the series so in effect the new series repackages previously broadcast content.

Previous to the 1998 series, a short live-action series was made in 1994, with real model plane characters and animated crafted human characters. They didn't talk, but had the same personalities. The original series was narrated similarly to early episodes ofThomas The Tank Engine or Theodore Tugboat.[1 ] It contained three videos: Jay Jay's First Flight, Old Oscar Leads the Parade, and Tracy's Handy Hideout. These three episodes were known as the "pilot series".