Choco Lore: DingDing

More required reading for majors in Choco Studies:

DingDing in Water:Pillow

Unknown origin. He arrives amid a steamed cloud of futuristic hoo-haw, waving a withered mit. His nose is a television dial. He is a television dial. He is given a return ticket to the stars, first class.

DingDing was a representative of the alien race that helped to create Choco. Although he only appeared as a hologram, his sage advice proved a useful source of burlesque humor and moral support to the beleaguered chocolate hero. Kind and witty -- ever a pillar of staunchness -- DingDing communicated in a melange of hurdy-gurdies, clucks and twiddlings. Translations were offered as subtext or in subtitle, though for most it amounted to little: Dacusse described the accompanying transliterations as "vaguely anomic lisping" and "great gloamy piles of steam rising from a woodpile."

Choco, of course, displayed no difficulty in deciphering DingDing's holographic missives, a fact not lost on Dacusse, whose childhood Choco-Envy "was akin to wanting bigger muscles."

He was so popular in Canada that in 1982 he was given his own CBC television show, The DingDing Hour. The program was made with puppets and continues to be diffused to this day under the direction of Argentine puppeteer Pablo Mollusconi.