Who's that wonderful girl on TikTok? It's Mona from Nanalan' — and she lives on Toronto Island
CBC
Jamie Shannon has a new morning routine. He straps a puppet onto his right hand, torques his voice to mimic a three-year-old girl and hits live on his cell phone.
Suddenly, he's sending and receiving love worldwide on TikTok. Today, there are fans from locations as diverse as Panama and Switzerland, and they're all watching because of Mona, a delightfully chaotic toddler with beady, black eyes, two wispy ponytails and a pea-shaped head. She sort of looks like an alien.
It doesn't take long for Mona to launch into her now signature song: "Who's that wonderful girl, could she be any cuter?"
You may have heard it while scrolling your feed recently. Shannon is belting it loud from his puppet studio, inside an old school on Toronto Island that's been converted into artist spaces. His assistant says a neighbouring artist has made noise complaints.
"I'm amazed my voice still works like that," said Shannon.
Mona is the pint-sized protagonist of the Canadian children's show Nanalan', a show Shannon created with fellow puppeteer Jason Hopley in 1999.
The show has been off the air for nearly two decades, but old clips have blown up online over the last few weeks, particularly on TikTok where the Nanalan' tag has 145 million views, spawning millions of memes.
"It's outrageous," said Shannon, who started posting Nanalan' clips online earlier this year and has pulled out the puppet again after some went viral.
"A lot of the comments are 'That's me, that's me, that's me,' " he said. "They feel like Mona."
"It's actually flooring to me to think after all of these years, it's suddenly reaching millions and millions and millions of people," said Hopley, who plays the titular Nana, Mona's organ-playing grandmother who sings the "wonderful girl" song to Mona in the original clip.
"We have a reach that we've never had before."
Nanalan' started as a series of shorts on YTV, before expanding into full episodes that aired on CBC-TV. It could also be seen on Nickelodeon and PBS.
The show follows the adventures of Mona, who gets dropped off at her Nana's house and plays in her backyard with Nana's dog Russell (or Russer, according to Mona's delightful mispronunciation.)
This quirkiness helped Nanalan' stand out from other children's television shows that aired in the early 00s — you can often see wires attached to the puppet
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