Curious about…Retro Acid-Trip Kids TV.
Don’t ask me how I got to this idea. OK, if you insist - I got a bit drunk last night and had trippy, manic dreams, the technicolor kind. I woke up this morning with both a real but also a nostalgia hangover, for the after-school programs I used to watch as a kid, the slightly strange animations, fantasy shows and, typical for that era, charmingly lo-fi explorations into futuristic themes.
The Magic Roundabout (known in the original French as Le Manège Enchanté) was a children’s television programme created in France in 1963 by Serge Danot. Part of the show’s attraction was that it appealed to adults, who enjoyed the world-weary Hancock-style comments made by the main character, a dog named Dougal, as well as to children. The audience measured eight million at its peak. There are speculations about possible interpretations of the show. One is that the characters represented French politicians of the time, and that Dougal represented De Gaulle. Dylan, a hipster philosophical rabbit with a guitar that meandered in and out of scenes, was seen as representative of the drug culture prevalent at the time.
The Clangers was a popular British stop motion animated children’s television series of short stories about a family of mouse-like creatures who lived on, and in, a small blue planet (quite similar to, but not intended to be, the Moon). They spoke in whistles, and ate green soup supplied by the Soup Dragon. The programmes were originally broadcast by the BBC from 1969-1972.
The background of The Clangers was that in 1969, the BBC asked Smallfilms to produce a new series for the emerging colour television, but did not specify any particular storyline. Smallfilms founder Oliver Postgate concluded that in light of space exploration being topical, the new series had to be set in space, and address current fears such as the implications of travel, dealing with space debris and isolation.
Effectively a sitcom, Postgate described the Clangers as basically a family set in space. The Clangers were small creatures living in peace and harmony on - and inside - a small, hollow planet, far far away, nourished by Blue String Pudding, and Green Soup harvested from the planet’s volcanic soup wells by the Soup Dragon. The Clangers looked similar to mice, anteaters and, from their pink colour, pigs. They wore clothes reminiscent of Roman armour and spoke in whistles. The word “Clanger” is said to derive from the sound made by opening the metal cover of one of the creatures’ crater-like burrows. Each of these is covered with a door made from an old metal dustbin lid, which is there to protect against meteorite impacts.
Bagpuss was a 1974 UK children’s television series, also made by Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate through Smallfilms. The title character is “an old, saggy cloth cat, baggy, and a bit loose at the seams”. Although only 13 episodes of the show were made, it remains fondly remembered, and is often been repeated in the UK.
Each programme would begin the same way: through a series of sepia photographs, the viewer is told of a little girl named Emily who owned a shop. However, it did not sell anything: instead, Emily would find lost and broken things and display them in the window of the shop, so their owners could one day come and collect them. She would leave the object in front of her favourite stuffed toy — the large, saggy, pink and white striped cat named Bagpuss. When Emily had left, Bagpuss would wake up. The programme shifted from sepia to colour stop motion film, and various toys in the shop would also come to life.
Finally, The Moomins (Swedish: Mumintroll) were the central characters in a series of books and a comic strip by Swedish-Finn illustrator and writer Tove Jansson, originally published in Swedish by Schildts in Finland. They are a family of trolls who are white and roundish, with large snouts that make them resemble hippopotamuses. The carefree and adventurous family live in their house in Moominvalley, in the forests of Finland, though in the past their temporary residences have included a lighthouse and a theatre. They have many adventures along with their various friends.
What Of It? I love things which are both innocent and subversive at the same time, that appeal to children for their simplicity and adults for their irony simultaneously. The sixties and seventies, fuelled one would assume by the liberation of the mind through psychotropic substances, was a time of great creativity and it is evident from shows like these and others that the intelligence and wit of the creators is coming through. I love that pop culture and current issues such as politics and the emerging space race were addressed in cartoon form. Plus of course, the charming simplicity of these next to the hyper-merchandized and crassly commercialized children’s TV and movies of today is a refreshing counterpart - childlike innocence in media form.
I Am Curious about media that reflects its time in positive ways, about layered narratives where both children and adults can find meaning and humour at different levels, about nostalgia and storytelling, about the simple innocence and light subversion of cartoons of the past.
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