Mole Miner

 is an American animated series which premiered on November 5, 2001 on.

The series ran for 7 seasons from 2001 to 2007 and ran for 119 episodes, being one of the longest-running PBS Kids series.

Synopsis
Darren, an anthropomorphic mole miner, works the mines in a mineral-rich region alongside other moles and at the same time teaches the audience middle-school-level knowledge about geology, engineering, history of mining, and industrial uses of different minerals.

Production
Creator Phelan Morkel was only a high schooler when his comic Darren the Mole Miner was featured in the school paper of in  in 1996. The comic gained national attention for it's teaching of geology and the history of mining and Morkel soon signed a deal with to release collections of the comic. In 1999, Morkel was approached by to produce a television series for the comic. Lear and Morkel pitched the series to in 2000. Executives from the broadcaster immediately greenlit the series for a initial season of 20 episodes.

Lear's Act III Productions worked with -based Bedser-Geiger Animation (founded by former animator Ernie T. Bedser and animator Ricky Geiger, the descendant of  inventor ) and -based Jazz Television Media (a division of the Asheville-based advertising agency HRV Advertising, who made donations for funding PBS programming through their charitable arm The Harry R. Voskanyan Foundation)

Morkel originally wanted the series to run for 5 seasons, but the series ended up running for 7 seasons and 119 episodes due to it's popularity with PBS member stations.

Produced in the United States, the voice recording was done in Canada and the show was animated in various Asian and European countries.

The first season consisted of 20 episodes followed by the 15-episode second season, a 23-episode third season, a 20-episode fourth season, an 18-episode fifth season, a 12-episode sixth season, and the final 11-episode seventh season.

Cast

 * (seasons 1-5), Enyu Ni (seasons 4-5) as Darren, a mole miner
 * as Philippe, the manager of the mines