A remarkable phenomenon in the industry of children’s entertainment, The Wiggles has been around for nearly 30 years, having published their first album in 1991, simply titled The Wiggles. Since then, Murray Cook, Jeff Fatt, Anthony Field and Greg Page, commonly referred to as the OG Wiggles, would release a plethora of albums up until their collective retirement at the end of 2012. However, following this, Anthony Field would remain in his blue skivvy, mentoring Lachlan Gillespie, Simon Pryce and Emma Watkins starting in 2013. In 2021, four additional Wiggles were brought into the group via a TV Series known as Fruit Salad TV, and Emma Watkins would retire at the end of that year, being succeeded by former red wiggle Tsehay Hawkins. Since then, yellow wiggle Kelly Hamilton left the group and was succeeded by Evie Ferris, who previously donned the blue skivvy, and Lucia Field has since taken Evie’s former role. The current generation of Wiggles continues to release new albums frequently, and the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) has seen it all. However, after 35 years worth of hot potatoes, doing the pretzel, and quacking with a dancing pirate king, the Wiggles have ended their commercial partnership with the ABC just a couple of months ago.
There was a formal announcement that was pushed out on February 17th, as both The Wiggles and their current distributor, Universal Music Group (UMG), issued a joint press release that had confirmed a “landmark strategic global agreement,” effectively confirming that the ABC and The Wiggles were no longer commercially affiliated as they had been for three decades. In this time, many Wiggles songs and albums on streaming services, especially old songs, were unavailable due to the change in copyright, although they would be gradually reuploaded to their respective platforms under the new distributor. In a similar sense, old TV Series, namely the first set of series in “Ready, Steady, Wiggle,” were made unavailable on streaming services such as Netflix, and still remain unavailable as UMG negotiates rights with respective platforms. Other TV Series such as the “Emma!” and “Lachy!” spinoffs are also unavailable due to these changes. However, “Ready, Steady, Wiggle! Series 8,” their most recent TV Series, remains available for viewing on ABC For Kids as of this publication, as well as various other TV Series on varying platforms.
Ever since the switch, The Wiggles have released a number of albums. Some of these albums are “Wiggly Dance Party,” “Doors, Doors, Who’s Coming through The Doors?,” and “In The Wiggles World,” just to name a few. The songs mostly come equipped with either remakes/re-recordings of old songs or tracks taken directly from “Ready, Steady, Wiggle! Series 8.”
The Wiggles had first started in 1991 as a student-led project involving former member of The Cockroaches Anthony Field as the founder. He had attended Macquarie University alongside Murray Cook and Greg Page while studying childhood education after his former band The Cockroaches had disbanded. The three of them eventually teamed up with musician Phillip Wilcher, who was a music instructor at the university, and Anthony’s former bandmate, Jeff Fatt, to create a children’s album simply titled The Wiggles. This was released under the ABC Music label, effectively bringing to life one of the most prominent children’s acts of all-time. Two promotional videos for the album were also created and released by the ABC for their “ABC For Kids Video Hits Volumes 1 & 2.” The next year, the Wiggles released their second album “Here Comes A Song.” By this point, Wilcher was entirely absent from the Wiggles, with no one entirely sure as to what happened with him. Whilst some sources suggest that he left on his own terms, either due to his passion for classical music or not wanting to perform for the children’s demographic, other sources point to Wilcher being kicked out of the group after failing to meet recording deadlines for the album.
In 1993, the Wiggles released their first video on VHS, titled “Wiggle Time.” It involved music videos for songs from the first two albums, as well as a couple of new ones. The video was advertised as a way to see The Wiggles anytime, outside of their live performances. It sold incredibly well, and their next album, Yummy Yummy, also came with a video that performed successfully. The ABC was involved in the distribution of both of these videos. In 1997, The Wiggles had released their first and only feature length film, officially titled The Wiggles Movie: A Magical Adventure. It performed moderately well in theatres, but saw immense success in home video, ranking as the fifth-highest-grossing Australian film of 1997. At around the same time, their first TV Series was being filmed, and was eventually released and aired on ABC For Kids, as the successor to a cancelled pilot from 1995, which was pitched to the ABC and barely filmed before being called off. In 1998, the Wiggles remade the album Yummy Yummy and released it primarily for international audiences, taking old songs and also rerecording a few of them. Most notably, songs such as Hot Potato or Can You (Point Your Fingers And Do The Twist)? received their most iconic or well-known recordings to date. In the coming years, the Wiggles released additional TV Series, albums, CDs, DVDs, and more. They also hosted live shows very frequently.
Come 2006, Page had retired due to orthostatic intolerance, being temporarily replaced by Sam Moran for the next five years. In 2011, Moran was allegedly fired from the wiggles, though the group says that Moran voluntarily walked out after his contract expired. Field mentions that at the time, the band was in huge debt due to Greg’s decision to leave the company in 2008, with his resulting payout being just about $20 million Australian dollars, and they couldn’t afford to pay Moran the salary he was requesting. For a year, Greg Page had returned as the yellow wiggle.
The original plan was for Greg Page to stick around for less than a year, mainly to help smooth the transition from Sam to Simon Pryce, who had been with the wiggles for years at that point. For a very long time, he was a backing vocalist who sung Anthony’s parts, eventually making his video debut in 2004’s Woo-Hoo Wiggly Gremlins as one of the two gremlins in the opening scene. In 2011, he was given the role of Ringo The Ringmaster, a side-character who mostly appeared in live shows, but appeared in the album and DVD for “Ukulele Baby!” in 2011.
In May of 2012, Cook, Fatt and Page announced that they would be retiring come the end of the calendar year, while Field would remain as the blue wiggle going into the next year. The group put on their tour simply titled “Celebration!” which was advertised as the final set of shows involving the original four wiggles all together on stage. It was also around this time when the next set of Wiggles would be announced: Lachlan Gillespie, Simon Pryce and Emma Watkins. All three had been with the company for years, with Watkins and Gillespie first appearing in the Dorothy The Dinosaur TV Series in 2010, with Watkins cast as Fairy Larissa and Gillespie cast as Captain Feathersword. Over the next nine years, this set of Wiggles would continue performing for children around the world, also introducing four new Wiggles in 2021 as part of their TV Series: Fruit Salad TV. This set of wiggles, featuring Evie Ferris, Kelly Hamilton, Tsehay Hawkins and John Pearce, were referred to as the Fruit Salad TV Wiggles. Around October of that same year, Watkins announced that she would be leaving the group to focus on her PhD, eventually going on to start her own successful IP known as Emma Memma. Hawkins took the role of the yellow wiggle and longtime choreographer and performer Caterina Mete filled in as the red Fruit Salad TV Wiggle.
In July of 2022, Hamilton had left the group as she moved to the US, making her the Wiggle with the shortest tenure, lasting just under a year. In her place, Ferris donned the yellow skivvy and Anthony’s daughter Lucia Field took Ferris’ former blue skivvy. This is the group’s current lineup.
