Montreal's CineGroupe is basking in critical accolades for their CGI science fiction comedy TV series "Tripping The Rift".Based on two short animations published on the web by Chris Moeller and Chuck Austen, the series originally aired on specialty channel SPACE in 2004. Teletoon has been airing the series since August 2006. As of September 2007, Teletoon is airing the third season.
Many episodes parody movies, TV series or novels, with broad sex jokes/situations.
In 2002, CinéGroupe acquired rights to a five minute Moeller/Austen short "Love and Darph" and approached animator Bernie Denk to direct a series, with Sci Fi Channel submitting scripts. Denk's team prepped in Montreal on character design, modelling, texture, while both Montreal and Malaysian teams worked on animating, lighting and compositing. 'Keyframe' animation was chosen instead of motion capture.
Premise is patterned after the "Star Trek" universe, including 'warp drives', 'Confederation' and 'Vulcans'.
Characters include 'Chode McBlob', a three-eyed, purple alien captain of spaceship 'Jupiter 42', 'Six', a 'sex cyborg', voiced alternately by actresses Gina Gershon (season 1), Carmen Electra (season 2) and Jenny McCarthy (season 3), 'T'nuk', the gnarly quadrupedal pilot, 'Whip' a bipedal teenage reptile, 'Gus', Chode's C3PO ship engineer and 'Spaceship Bob', the A.I. computer that controls the ship...
Evil 'Darph Bobo', aka the 'Dark Clown', wants to take over the universe because he was teased as a child...
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