Hugo (Skærmtrolden Hugo in Danish, meaning "Hugo the Screen-Troll") is a media franchise created by the Danish company Interactive Television Entertainment (later ITE Media) in 1990 for the purpose of interactive television for children. It is based around the fictional character of Hugo, a friendly, small Scandinavian folklore troll engaged in a conflict against a wicked witch, often to save his family. Since its premiere in 1990, the Hugo game show has been aired in more than 40 countries, spawning dozens of video games for various platforms. Hugo spawned other merchandise, including dedicated magazines. As of 2012, the commercial parts of the franchise consist mostly of mobile games being published by the Danish company Hugo Games (renamed 5th Planet Games in 2018).

The show is set in a cartoonish contemporary fantasy universe. The franchise's titular protagonist, Hugo, is a one-meter-tall troll living in the "Troll Forest", located somewhere in Scandinavia. Hugo's family includes his beloved wife Hugolina (Hugoline in the original Danish version) and their three children, Rit (TrolleRit), Rat (TrolleRat), and Rut (TrolleRut). Their main antagonist is the evil Scylla (Afskylia, named differently in some localized versions, such as Hexana in German), an ancient and cruel witch with a grudge against the trolls dating back centuries and Hugo always standing in her way. Scylla often kidnaps Hugo's family because she needs their presence to restore and keep her own youth and beauty due to a curse. She uses her magic and minions, as well as various traps, to stop Hugo from rescuing his family or foil her other plots. The later-added characters are mostly non-human creatures and anthropomorphic animals, including Hugo's friends (such as Fernando the toucan and Jean Paul the chimpanzee in Jungle Island) and more of Hugo's enemies (notably Scylla's faithful but dumb henchman Don Croco, leading a humanoid crocodile army on Jungle Island to protect his mistress and help her oppress the Kikurians, a primitive tribe of the island's native creatures). All of this is presented in a humorous way, by default tailored to children aged 4–14. According to Hugo creator Ivan Sølvason, the program's intended message was to teach children to protect their own families at any cost, including risking their lives to save them if needed.

Some later video games and other adaptations dropped the usual Hugolina-kidnapping motif, making Scylla beautiful by default yet still as hateful as ever. In their stories, the witch would variably seek revenge against Hugo personally or even try to get rid of the trolls everywhere once and for all, cause other mischief such as attacking Hugo's old friend Santa Claus in the Christmas games, or search for an ultimate power to take over the world, and several even dropped her as a character altogether. In 2001, a beaver minor enemy character received its own spin-off show, titled Stinky & Stomper. In the 2005 science fiction reboot titled Agent Hugo, Hugo became a futuristic James Bond-parody special agent as an employee of the crime-fighting spy organization R.I.S.K. to fight against high-tech enemies such as mad scientists and robots.

The idea for an interactive game TV show was conceived in 1987 by Ivan Sølvason, founder of the initially small video game studio SilverRock Productions and former editor-in-chief of Oberoende Computer, who was the creator of the computer video game OsWALD (1988) that came out in Nordisk Film's TV2 Denmark in 1989, and Niels Krogh Mortensen, an animator. Sølvason's small company SilverRock Productions, which was later renamed Interactive Television Entertainment (ITE) ApS in 1992, developed the character of Hugo as well as the designated, custom-built computer hardware system that would convert telephone DTMF signals into remotely controlling the characters in the game and allow the interaction of the audience and the TV action without delay. Sølvason and Krogh Mortensen created the concept of "Hugo the TV troll", and the first Hugo TV program was launched in September 1990. Since the show's second season, the player's objective has usually been to help Hugo free his wife and children from Scylla's captivity. Hugo had to journey through one of the different game environments before he got to one of Scylla's lairs, avoiding various traps and other dangers while collecting gold along the way. Once the player finished the game, he or she would receive a prize reward according to the obtained game score, which was based on the player's performance in the main scenario but greatly depended on how well Hugo fared in his final and purely luck-based task to rescue his family, with a special bonus for capturing Scylla.

Hugo was invented by Krogh Mortensen while he was biking to his grandmother from Hellerup to Gladsaxe in the spring of 1990. The character Hugo was originally supposed to be called Max, but the producer of Eleva2ren, John Berger, insisted on the name Hugo, forcing ITE to change the name and logo about one week before the premiere. The new name caused trademark problems because it was already registered in most European countries by Hugo Boss, while ITE A/S was first in Denmark and Portugal and could potentially stop Hugo Boss from launching any products in these markets. Eventually, both companies reached a coexistence agreement with the help of ITE in-house lawyer Nina Wium. ITE also fought hard against any attempt to abuse Hugo's "good name and reputation", resulting in more than 170 lawsuits against Danish producers and advertisers.

The programs were licensed for more than 40 (43 as of 2007) TV shows around the world, tailored to individual markets. Many of the more than half a billion viewers believed that the program was native to their countries, as Hugo spoke Danish only in Denmark. By 1994, Sweden's Datormagazin compared the European popularity of Hugo, with its branching off into merchandising, to that of the Ninja Turtles. On German-language kabel eins, there was also a spin-off show titled Hexana-Schloss ("Hexana's [Scylla's] Castle"). A more advanced show, Hugo: Jungle Island (Hugo Vulkanøen), premiered in January 1999. Some Danish Hugo items were released exclusively for the fanclub Den Faktyrlige Bogklub (Hugo's Book Club), which was established in cooperation with the Danish publisher Carlsen Verlag in 1999. A "giant" Hugo theme park has also been considered at one point, circa 2000.

At first, Niels Krogh Mortensen was doing all of the graphics and animation using Deluxe Paint on an Amiga computer. His brother, Lars Krogh Mortensen, later assisted him. They were later joined by Torben B. Larsen, Jonas Fromm, Claus Friese, Anders Morgenthaler, Jakob Steffensen, Jonas Raagaard, Stephen Meldal Foged, Martin Ciborowski, Ulla Gram Larsen, and many other 2D and 3D artists; eventually, over 100 people were working on developing Hugo for ITE. Niels Krogh Mortensen worked on Hugo between 1990 and 1998. During this time, he usually directed and managed the projects; he also created storyboards and drew graphics. The Krogh Mortensen brothers and Jakob Steffensen left ITE in 1997 and founded their own company, Krogh Mortensen Animation A/S (KMA), who was later contracted to animate several more Hugo games.

In 2002, Sølvason sold ITE to the venture capital company Olicom A/S; Olicom then invested $22 million in the company, reduced the staff of ITE by a third to 60 employees, and attempted to expand more into the US, UK, and Asian markets. Olicom in turn sold ITE in 2006, by then staffed by only 35 employees, to NDS Group, where it became NDS Denmark.