Nigel and Marmalade

Overview

Nigel and Marmalade or Nigel the Tiny Wizard is an animated web series created by Tom Bates about the adventures of a wizard named Nigel and his dog/horse steed Marmalade in a fantasy world. The series is written, animated and voiced by Bates with each episode running about a minute in length. It premiered in January 2023 and became notably popular on YouTube Shorts and TikTok over the following year, inspiring fan art and content. In April 2024, Bates announced that the success of the show allowed him to work on it full time, also announcing that he'd start making longer episodes to be released on YouTube.

History

On January 2nd, 2023, YouTuber^[1] Tom Bates posted an original animated video titled "I came up with a new character so I made him a theme song. It’s Nigel the Tiny Wizard!" garnering over 1.7 million views in a year. The animation features a tiny wizard character riding on what's described as a "dog horse steed" named Marmalade (shown below). The animation was posted to his TikTok^[2] page, @tompbates, that same day, garnering over a million views in the same span of time.

Bates continued to release short animations about the characters throughout the year, expanding on their lore and settings. The episodes regularly gained millions of views on both YouTube and TikTok. In the animations, Nigel talks in a fantasy language which is translated through subtitles while Marmalade speaks English. The episodes typically feature Nigel and Marmalade traversing a fantasy world and helping its residents using magic.

On December 26th, Bates released a video on YouTube^[3] compiling all 41 episodes of the show released at the time, garnering over 500,000 views in four months (shown below). Since then, seven additional episodes have been released in 2024 (at the time of writing).

Full-Time / Longer Episodes Announcement

On April 9th, 2024, Bates posted a video to YouTube^[4] in which he thanks the viewers and announces that he can now work on the show full-time thanks to its success. He also announced that he'd like to start making longer episodes of the series for release on YouTube (shown below). The video gained over 199,000 views in 10 days.

Online Presence

Nigel and Marmalade gained a significant fanbase throughout 2023 and early 2024, inspiring fan art and content depicting the characters on sites like X^[5] and Tumblr^[6] (examples shown below), with the episodes also gaining viral spread. On March 3rd, 2023, an episode of the series was posted to /r/funny,^[7] garnering over 1,100 upvotes in a year.

Search Interest

External References