It’s been one of the strangest and most meteoric success stories of the past year, and now, Les têtes à claques, the Quebec Web-based puppet comedy show, is getting set to launch in English in the new year.

A spokesperson for the production company behind the sensation, Montreal-based Salambo, confirms it is hard at work translating the site’s many sketches into English.

‘We’re confident that Les têtes à claques [which loosely translates as ‘heads to slap’] will prove a hit in English as well,’ says communications director Ingrid Gaillard. She offered no firm date for the English-language launch.

The news caps a frantically busy year for those behind the Internet phenomenon.

For the uninitiated, Têtes à claques is a hybrid website where surfers can stream sketches starring an entourage of characters that are a mix of computer animation and real faces. Sketches run from two girls demanding a Pop Tart for Halloween to infomercial spoofs – including one in which a sleazy salesman sells a potato peeler (of the dollar-store variety) for four easy payments of $29.99 each. This latter sketch reportedly earned the admiration of Quebec Premier Jean Charest, who’s a fan. And Charest was far from alone.

Têtes à claques was a massive hit three months after launching, with tetesaclaques.tv pulling in 3.2 million unique visitors, making it the country’s top French-language online destination.

As intriguing as the show’s strange appeal are its origins.

Seventeen months ago, advertising designer Michel Beaudet ventured to a dollar store and bought some cheap dolls. He then began experimenting by digitally recording his own mouth and eyes and superimposing those images onto the dolls.

After coming up with some zany characters, Beaudet sent 50 of his friends an e-mail talking up the site. Word spread quickly – by January, more than half of Quebec’s online community had visited the Têtes à claques site, according to comScore Media Metrix Canada.

By October, Têtes à claques had its first DVD compilation release, and the success continued. Packed with the show’s first 45 sketches, the DVD shot to the third spot on the country’s DVD sales charts, according to Nielsen VideoScan, behind Transformers and Meet the Robinsons.

Perhaps even more surprising was the show’s success across the pond, where the French – notoriously disdainful of Quebecois culture – were suddenly lapping it up, joual (Quebecois slang) accent and all.

France’s French-language daily Le Monde raved about ‘these heads that often deserve to be slapped, but which mostly make us laugh to death.’

Part of the phenomenon’s appeal is the use of ‘franglais’ – a self-consciously clumsy (and very Quebec) collapsing of French and English into one. Nonetheless, whether it will translate or get lost in translation remains to be seen in 2008.