Here comes a new hero, ready to fight for children’s admiration with Superman and Spiderman. He is cossack Pea-Roll Along.

This fairytale character has a very peculiar story: researchers believe that in the times of Kievan Rus there lived a legendary hero – bogatyr, who accomplished numerous feats. With time, people started attributing to him heroic deeds from various popular myths. Thus, a concept of a hero slaying a dragon comes from an ancient Indo-European culture (Indo-Iranian myth about Fereydun and Zahhak). Another episode, namely Pea-Roll Along and his friends descending to the underworld to fight with otherworldly spirits, stems from pagan beliefs about the realm of the dead.

The miraculous fact of Pea-Roll Along being born from a pea is also a feature of Indo-European myths: unusual circumstances often mark the birth of a mythic hero-rescuer. There is even an idiom in the Russian language that if translated literally sounds ‘when king Pea lived’, an equivalent to American English ‘since Hector was a pup’. This idiom refers to a fairytale about Pea-Roll Along implying that once upon a time there lived a hero who became a wise and fair king but it was so long ago that nobody remembers him.

Nevertheless, the new cartoon series ‘The Adventures of Pea-Roll Along and his friends’ has already gained popularity among children and adults alike. The series was directed by the legendary ‘Ukranimafilm’ studio famous for other cartoon series, namely ‘Cossacks’, ‘Adventures of Captain Vrungel’ and ‘Treasure Island’. Pea-Roll Along together with his friends fights evil, while a talking bird Hoopoe follows them and helps find a solution even in the most difficult situations.