The Umizumiz (partially found pitch pilot of "Team Umizoomi" Nick Jr. live-action/CGI animated series; 2008)

Still of The Umizumiz cast.

Status: Partially Found

Team Umizoomi is an American CGI-animated/live-action series that premiered on Nick Jr. on January 25th, 2010. The show revolves around the three tiny superheroes Millie, Geo, and Bot solving various problems in Umi City and teaching simple math concepts such as numbers, shapes, and measuring.

In 2008, a pilot was made to pitch the show to the Noggin channel, then titled The Umizumiz. This pilot features numerous major changes from the final show, with the show originally slated to premiere the same year on Noggin.^[1]

History

In 2006, showrunners Soo Kim, Michael T. Smith, and Jennifer Twomey would concept the original idea for Team Umizoomi, then called The Umizumiz. The earliest use of the The Umizumiz name comes from a trademark filed on April 20th, 2006.^[2]

This original concept was very different from the show, with these differences including different character designs, names (such as the "Umi Car" being called the "Zipmobile", and two extra characters that did not make it into the final show which include:

Zig Zag: A purple girl who's purpose is unknown.
Alphonse: An orange boy who likes shapes and geometry, being scrapped and recycled for Geo.

Development continued until 2008 when a pilot was produced to pitch the show to Noggin, an educational channel operated by Nickelodeon. The show was planned to premiere on Noggin the same year, according to some sources.^[3] Most of the differences in the original concept carried into this pilot, with the same characters and title.

The actual premise of the pilot is unknown, however, the footage available seems to involve a dinosaur in a museum. This seems to match the description of the eighth episode of the series, "The Dinosaur Museum Mishap", where dinosaurs get frightened away by thunder and it's up to Team Umizoomi to find them.^[4] Other than this not much else is known about the pilot itself. The pilot would eventually be greenlit into a full series, with The Umizumiz being re-tooled and premiering as Team Umizoomi on January 25th, 2010 on Nickelodeon as part of the Nick Jr. morning block.

Availability

After the pilot was pitched to Nickelodeon and greenlit into a full series, the pilot has not been seen by the public since. This is most likely due to the pilot being very different from what the series would eventually become, similar to Blue Prints, another pilot for a popular Nick Jr. show. All that remains from the pilot are some screenshots, a few pieces of concept art, and the theme song, which is available on composer Nick Balaban's website. Even then, the theme song has been confirmed to be just a demo, and wasn’t actually used in the final pilot.^[5]

On November 11th, 2018, YouTube user The Official CompleteGamer! uploaded an 8-second clip of The Umizumiz pilot. While low-quality and having no audio, this is the first clip of the pilot available anywhere on the internet, the video was later taken down and reuploaded to Google Drive.

Some of the found clips and screenshots (before the clips were found) belonged to an animation reel found on Vimeo and a personal website. While the clips of the pilot have been edited and removed out of the reels in question for unknown reasons, as well as the website being excluded from archival for similar unknown reasons, archived versions with the clips intact have been found and reuploaded.

On September 15th, 2020, YouTube user Yaili The Lost Media Boy uploaded the same clip of the pilot as The Official CompleteGamer!, albeit with audio. It's unknown how these clips were obtained by the respective users, it was originally believed that the cilps had originated from the now-deleted video Nickkit UberHotmix LOSSLESS-desktop.m4v which showcased clips from several internal Nick projects. however, this was debunked, although it's still unclear where the clips with audio and screenshots had originated from.

On November 26th, 2023, an archive of a portfolio was discovered to contain a piece of concept art of a girl from the pilot, which confirms the existence of human characters in the pilot.^[6]