Loeki is a lion who usually encounters an absurd situation or does something clumsy in his films. Each short lasted only five seconds and was done almost entirely without dialogue, except for Loeki's catchphrase: "?" which usually appeared as his closing statement to each film. When things turned out in his favour he typically said: "Voilà!". Loeki was named after the famous Dutch football playerLouis Biesbrouck, but also it is said that his name is a derivation of the verb to look. The series also had a group of side characters, but Loeki was the most well known.
History
Loeki de Leeuw was originally created by animator in 1952 as a mascot for KLM in honour of the Dutch national football team. In the early-1970s, new regulatory requirements for television advertising, originally introduced on Dutch public television in 1967, were drawn up so that the public could make a clear distinction between the programmes and the adverts, and the solution chosen was a short break bumper which would signal the beginning and end of the advertisement breaks, as well as bumpers that played between advertisements, which marked Loeki's move to television. These bumpers consisted of humorous animations of Loeki and his friends, and were such a success with the public that Loeki soon started appearing in between individual adverts. Studio Geesink, who made the animated shorts, estimate that over 7,000 individual films were made, several of which survive on home-made VHS recordings which have been uploaded to YouTube. Some of these break bumpers also aired on WFLD. Since Loeki de Leeuw was purely visual comedy it had no trouble being sold to other countries too. Some of his shorts have been broadcast in France, Austria, Italy, Japan and the United States. In its later years, Westward Television and LWT of the United Kingdom would occasionally use a short clip of Loeki at closedown. Some of these have been uploaded to YouTube. Also the regional German TV channel Nord-3 & N3 aired Loeki de Leeuw clips between 22 February 1972 and 2 December 2001. Loeki de Leeuw also found its way onto Super RTL, 3sat, RTL II, Tele 5, ProSieben, Kabel 1, Sat.1, Das Erste and ZDF STER retired Loeki in late 2004, citing increasingly unaffordable production costs; the time saved by axing Loeki's appearances would instead be sold to advertisers. Original puppets and props from Loeki's films have been exhibited since December 2006 in a large display at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum. They consist of a number of series on themes. Puppets, props and films also formed part of the exhibition "100 years of advertising classics" in the Beurs van Berlage between 18 December 2010 and 6 March 2011. Loeki made a one-off return to Dutch television on 30 January 2019, after a petition started by a radio show a week earlier reached more than ten thousand signatures within 24 hours. A Loeki short produced in late 2016, featuring the lion as a DJ, was shown shortly before 8pm that night on NPO 1; the film reached an audience of 1.4 million people. STER stated that they were seriously considering proposals to bring the character back on a permanent basis, although the following month STER decided against reintroducing Loeki during its advertising blocks, again citing high production costs.
Legacy
Loeki is the mascot of the theme parkHuis ten Bosch, in Nagasaki. His name also inspired three Dutch-language TV awards, namely "De Gouden Loeki" for "best TV commercial", its Flemish counterpart "De Gouden Welp" and "De Loden Leeuw" for "worst TV commercial". On 16 March 2005 Loeki was supposedly kidnapped by a student from Utrecht, because they did not want him to wither away in a dusty archive. It turned out to be a publicity stunt, when Loeki moved to the Efteling amusement park. After 2005, Loeki was used there to supplement the Carnival Festival. This attraction was also designed in 1984 by Joop Geesink. Loeki was removed from Carnival Festival in 2012 and replaced by their original mascot, Jokie. On 21 August 2005 Loeki returned to television in a commercial for Edah. This was Loeki's first appearance on commercial channels. This appearance used 3D animation rather than the traditional stop-motion format. The European Football Championship 2008 used Loeki in an advertisement for supermarket chain C1000. In June 2010 Loeki returned to Dutch TV for the World Cup 2010 promotional activities of Samsung. Loeki was featured in a TV commercial, online at Facebook, as a car sticker and in a life-size form as part of the Orange 'building wrap' on the Samsung headquarters in Delft. The various shapes of the famous multimedia advertising lion are provided by communication Quince. In 2016 an early Loeki de Leeuw short was featured in a commercial for ING Group.
Media adaptations
A pantomime comic strip was made about the character by Wil Raymakers. It ran in the children's magazine Okki from 1986 on. In 2016 he also inspired a one-shot magazine named Loeki.
