Peter and Li became cousins by virtue of having the same manufacturer, despite their costumes placing them at opposite ends of the Earth. (That’s a silly phrase: The Earth is a sphere, so it has no ends.) It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had no actual place for them in the rotation other than to fill in for otherwise-overexposed main cast members. Peter’s arrival was also the first sign of the cast starting to get out of hand. Not that this stopped me from continuing to add ducks, of course.

Li was originally going to be my vehicle for slightly naughtier humor. This didn’t pan out mainly because I could never work out a good way to work nearly-blue and still make it mostly-funny. F-bombs and body-part jokes are often only funny due to shock value, not from actual cleverness. So I gave up on that angle. Oddly enough, arguably the naughtiest joke I’ve done involved Neil, of all ducks, and quite recently…