Pig Goat Banana Cricket: Characters, Cast and Show Facts

Some cartoons are weird. Pig Goat Banana Cricket was weird on a level that still makes me question how it ever got greenlit at a major kids’ network. That is a compliment. This is my fact-checked, first-person look at Pig Goat Banana Cricket, the surreal Nicktoon about four roommates named, yes, Pig, Goat, Banana, and Cricket.

Here is the quick version.

The show was created by indie comic artists Dave Cooper and Johnny Ryan and produced by David Sacks.

It premiered on Nickelodeon in July 2015, aired its first season there through early 2016, then got shuffled over to sister channel Nicktoons for its second season.

If you blinked, you missed it, which is part of why it has quietly turned into a cult favorite.

Who Are Pig, Goat, Banana, and Cricket?

At the center are four anthropomorphic best friends and roommates who share a treehouse: a pickle-obsessed pig, a stardom-chasing goat, a video-game-loving banana, and an inventor cricket.

Each episode splits off into their separate misadventures, then weaves those threads back together by the end.

That interwoven structure was the whole creative hook, and Johnny Ryan has said it was a nightmare to write inside an 11-minute slot.

They live in Boopelite City, a gigantic, whirring metropolis where the buildings look like archaic clockwork and the sidewalks are packed with anthropomorphic animals, robots, and walking, talking sea creatures.

It is a wonderfully dense, strange world, and the background art is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Surreal Storylines and Eye-Catching Animation

The look is what hits you first. It teeters between grotesque and fascinating, all rubbery shapes and eye-searing color, and it never once tries to be cute.

That is a direct result of who made it, and I will get to that.

The animation flips between hand-drawn and Flash, built in Toon Boom Harmony, with most of the work done at Yeson Entertainment in South Korea and some episodes farmed out to Anima Estudios in Mexico.

Ryan and Cooper have named influences like Basil Wolverton, Jim Woodring, Dr. Seuss, Tex Avery, and Chuck Jones, and you can feel all of them fighting for space in every frame.

Why Pig Goat Banana Cricket Resonates

Under all the chaos, there is a simple idea: four wildly mismatched friends who stick together anyway. The show never lingers on the message, which I appreciate, but it is there.

My honest take? This is not a show for everyone, and it was never trying to be.

The humor leans hard into gross-out and absurdist gags, and if that is not your thing, you will bounce off it fast. But if you grew up loving Ren and Stimpy and you want something that commits fully to its own bizarre logic, it is a fun, short, strange watch.

I rank it as an acquired taste that rewards the people who acquire it.

The Creative Minds Behind It

This is the part that explains everything. Pig Goat Banana Cricket was created by Dave Cooper and Johnny Ryan, two veteran artists from the world of alternative comics, not from TV animation. Cooper is a Canadian illustrator known for surreal graphic novels and design work on Futurama. Ryan is an American cartoonist known for chaotic, boundary-pushing indie comics.

The pair go all the way back to a comic they made for Nickelodeon Magazine in 2005, which is where these four characters first appeared.

So this was not a studio committee invention. It was two comic-book guys handed a network budget and told to make their thing, and the finished show looks exactly like that.

For a mainstream kids’ channel, that is wild.

Meet the Main Characters

Pig: The Eternal Optimist

Pig, whose full name is the ridiculous Pignatius Abalonea Plutonius, is the fool of the group and the source of most of their problems. He is dim, can barely read, and is defined above all by his obsession with pickles. He also happens to be nearly indestructible, shrugging off injuries that would flatten anyone else. His catchphrase is a cheerful “That’s my favorite!” Pig is voiced by Matt Jones, who you may know as Badger from Breaking Bad.

Goat: The Soulful Artist

Goat is the artist and the most level-headed of the four, a musician girl chasing stardom with her guitar. She is the emotional core, but she has a short fuse, and when she gets angry she famously dissolves into gibberish. Her catchphrase, “Totally goatally,” is peak mid-2010s cartoon. She is voiced by animation veteran Candi Milo.

Banana: The Video-Game Fanatic

Here is a correction worth making, because plenty of write-ups get it wrong. Banana is not the science guy. He is a walking, talking banana who is obsessed with video games and can be pretty selfish and self-absorbed. He is the wild card of the group, and the show gets a lot of mileage out of the sheer absurdity of a sentient banana just existing in this world.

Cricket: The Mad Scientist

Cricket is the actual brains of the operation, an inventor bug forever tinkering with gadgets and half-baked schemes that tend to blow up in everyone’s faces. He has a not-so-secret crush on Goat, speaks with a lisp, and works alongside a lab assistant named Burgerstein, a hamburger-headed Frankenstein parody. Cricket is voiced by Paul Rugg, and there is a story behind why he exists at all.

Production and the Mantis Question

The show grew out of a pilot called Pig Goat Banana Mantis!, directed by independent animator Nick Cross. Yes, Mantis. The fourth friend was originally a praying mantis, not a cricket.

When the series got picked up, that character was renamed and redesigned into Cricket. Matt Jones, Candi Milo, and Thomas F. Wilson all carried their roles over from the pilot, but the mantis-turned-cricket got a new voice.

From Nickelodeon to Nicktoons: A Rocky Run

Nickelodeon believed in it early, renewing the show for a second season before the first even aired.

Ratings opened solid, then slid, and reviews were split. Some critics loved the Ren and Stimpy energy and the fearless art. Others found it too gross and too strange for the Nick audience it was aimed at.

After the first season wrapped on Nickelodeon in February 2016, the network pulled it and left it in limbo for months.

Season two eventually resurfaced on Nicktoons in late 2016 and trickled out through 2017, with a few of the very last episodes airing in Poland before they ever reached American screens.

It was a messy ending for a show that deserved better, and the cult audience it later found among teens and adults is, in my opinion, the correct verdict.

Pig Goat Banana Cricket Theme Song

The theme is exactly as loud and unhinged as the show. Give it a listen and you will understand the tone in about ten seconds.

Pig Goat Banana Cricket Voice Cast

The main four plus a seriously stacked bench of guest voices, as logged at Behind the Voice Actors. That last row is not a typo.

Pig Goat Banana Cricket Quick Facts

So where do you land on this one? Pig Goat Banana Cricket is proof that Nickelodeon occasionally handed the keys to real oddballs and let them drive.

It did not last long, but it left a mark.

Did you catch it during its short Nick run, or discover it later?

Let me know in the comments.