With its two custom-built Olympic-size swimming pools, animatronic alligators and hippos and more than 200 people working on set, Frogger is a TV game show of American scale befitting the NBC network that commissioned it – except it’s being made this month in western Sydney.

Conceived by Sydney and Los Angeles-based Eureka Productions, in partnership with the Japanese creators of the 1980s amphibious video game, Frogger is the latest in a lengthening slate of American movies and TV series being made in Australia, as the local screen industry hopes to convert its pandemic luck into permanent globalisation.