Skippy was produced by Fauna Productions, a partnership formed by film producer-director Lee Robin­ son and former film actor John McCallum, with a Sydney lawyer as the third partner. Robinson had had an extensive background in Australian documentary filmmaking and had created the position of Australian and Pacific film correspondent for the High Adventure series on U.S. television, hosted by newsman and explorer Lowell Thomas. Ever the internationalist, in the 1950s, Robinson had produced a series of feature films in Australia, in partnership with actor Chips Rafferty, that combined familiar Hollywood narrative structures. Drawing from such genres as the western, these films used exotic locations, flora, and fauna and were based in different parts of the Pacific.

     McCallum, although born in Australia, had  spent most of his professional life in Britain, where he had worked extensively on stage and in  film.  He  returned to  Australia  to  take  a  senior  executive   position with J.C. Williamson and Company, the largest theatrical group in Australia and New Zealand, where he became involved    with    the    New    Zealand comedy   feature They're a Weird Mob. McCallum and Robinson, both of whom had been production managers on the film, briefly considered producing a spin-off television series. However, they followed the advice of the international distributor Global about what would sell well in the world market and finally decided on Skippy.

     The genre that they settled on for Skippy was a family/children's series with a child and an animal at its center, in a familiar vein that stretched from Lassie to Flipper. The "difference" in the Australian series was the fact that it featured native flora and fauna. Skippy was a bush kangaroo (a universal symbol of Australia), and the series was set in a national park north of Syd­ney that featured bushland, waterways, and ocean shores. The series concerned ranger Matt Hammond (Ed Devereaux). his son Sonny (Garry Pankhurst), the latter's pet kangaroo, his brother (Ken James), and two other junior rangers played by Tony Bonner and Liza Goddard. All together, three different kangaroos played Skippy.

     Airing between 1968 and 1970, Skippy resulted in 91 half-hour episodes together with one feature film, Skippy and the Intruders. The series was produced on film and in color, even though Australian television had not yet moved to a color transmission system, and was sold to the Packer-owned Nine Network, where it first aired in February 1968. With high production values, the program was costly to produce and an initial financial risk for the packaging company Fauna. However, Fauna soon achieved sufficient overseas sales to maintain their cash flow, and the series eventually achieved very high sales. In the meantime, Fauna had become bored producing Skippy and had embarked on a new series, Barrier Reef, which featured the reef off the northeastern coast of Australia, the largest coral formation in the world.

     In the 1990s, Skippy has had to share international recognition with other Australian series, most especially Neighbours, but there is still strength in the former's format. In 1991, the Nine Network licensed the format from Fauna and produced a spin-off series, The Adventures of Skippy, which ran to 39 half-hour episodes and was again produced on film and in color. Although it was set in an animal sanctuary near the Gold Coast and featured a different group of children and adults, this second series did preserve both the theme song and the kangaroo character from the original.