What Exactly Is Cyril Sneer? And Why Is He Hot Pink?

Hi Everyone,

The comment above was sent to our TikTok channel recently. To be honest, I often get asked what kind of animal Cyril Sneer and his son Cedric Sneer are. In fact, even this morning, when my wife headed off to her trainer, she wore an old legacy Raccoons T-shirt with a picture of Cyril Sneer on it. The woman

beside her (a stranger) exclaimed that she loved “that show” but always wondered what kind of forest creature the pink guy was. Clearly this is becoming a growing concern so, in order to avoid a perplexing pink international incident, I will try and respond as best as I can. Cyril Sneer and Cedric Sneer are Aardvarks.

Cyril and Cedric are “pink aardvarks”. Aardvarks - because unlike Anteaters, they have long ears and teeth. However, they weren’t always pink. In fact, when I was developing The Christmas Raccoons special, I hired a very talented illustrator friend, John Bianchi, to help create a storyboard that I could use to pitch to potential broadcasters, advertising agencies and investors. John thought that the Aardvarks in the story should be grey… like this:

Personally, I kind of liked the look – after all, it fit in perfectly with how I saw

The Raccoons… like this:

More than a year later, when we were about to begin pre-production on the animated special, I met with our animation director and designer, Paul Schibli, to discuss the style and design that we wanted for the show. Paul had no problem with them being aardvarks…he just wanted them pink! Pink?!

So why are they Hot Pink?

He explained to me that with The Raccoons being fairly close to their natural colours, we needed to make the aardvarks “pop”. Further, the world of animation at that time was full of colourful characters and we wanted to appeal to the cultural zeitgeist of that period. So, I became convinced. After all, it was only a half hour special.

We ended up making The Christmas Raccoons, Cyril Sneer was a pink aardvark (hot pink to be exact), and The Raccoons looked pretty much like… raccoons. Well, the show struck a chord with audiences worldwide and we went on to produce 3 more specials and a series that covered 5 seasons over 12 years.

Why an Aardvark? Well, why not?

So, why an aardvark? I wanted an easily posable anthropomorphic animal, who could communicate with his eyes and hands his unstable nefarious personality quirks. And I wanted him to be unique – a character we hadn’t seen before but could be believable in a forest with raccoons. But the Hot Pink? That I didn’t expect. But thanks, Paul…it worked!! 

A short anecdote: recently, when we were restoring and remastering The Raccoons from the original 35mm film to 4K, we had to re-colour correct every episode. We couldn’t use the original tapes as reference as we had just gone to a definition and colour resolution that didn’t exist when we originally

transferred the 35 mm films to tape. However, we had kept all of the animation cels and backgrounds in a climate-controlled facility and the cels were as vibrant as the day they were painted. As a result, we were able to re-capture Cyril Sneer’s Hot Pink colour – just like the day he was designed…45 years ago!

I hope I have been able to answer your excellent question, Mr. Peckworld. Thanks for reaching out! 

Kevin

PS: I love hearing from every one of you - please feel free to let me know if there is anything special you would like to know, or just talk about!