Mainzelmännchen

The Mainzelmännchen are six comedic cartoon characters used as mascots for the German public service television broadcaster ZDF.

They first appear on television in 1963 to accommodate a government regulation prohibiting confusion between broadcast advertising and content.

[1] They appear in between ads during broadcasts, in roughly three to five-second clips, and often during the satirical news program Heute-show.

The name is a portmanteau of Mainz, home to the ZDF headquarters, and Heinzelmännchen, a type of gnome common in folklore in the region surrounding the city of Cologne.

Their most famous saying is the traditional greeting "Gud'n Aamd", a dialect-accented "Guten Abend" ("good evening").