Danger Mouse and the nostalgia wave

The BBC website recently had an article about Danger Mouse, focusing on the level of popularity which it reached during its heyday; it was posted to tie in with a radio programme entitled Crikey DM! David Jason's Tribute to Cosgrove Hall.

Meanwhile, a revival of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin's The Clangers has been announced; it will be written by Postgate's son Daniel and will premiere in 2015. It will be stop motion, like the original, but another stop motion series - The Wombles - is set to be revived in CGI the same year.

The Clangers, The Wombles and Danger Mouse belong to a cluster of animated series, reaching from the late sixties to the early eighties, which seem to be targets of regular waves of nostalgia. I remember a similar boom in the early 2000s, with clip shows such as 100 Greatest Kids' TV Shows on television and Bagpusses on car dashboards. Now, another wave appears to be hitting our shores - and these children's series have shown themselves to be cemented in the popular consciousness.

Thoughts on Gerry Anderson and Supermarionation

If we look at the major cartoon fads of the past few decades, we find that most of them are in the action adventure genre: think of He-Man, Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Pokémon, and Ben 10, for a start. With a handful of exceptions Britain simply does not make cartoons of this type, and the void left by this genre is instead occupied by the puppet series of Gerry Anderson.

Anderson's curious practise of using string puppets to tell stories of dashing action heroes came about by accident. He entered the industry with a desire to make all-action blockbusters, but was instead commissioned to make puppet shows for children.

Eventually, he was given the chance to make a live action series, UFO, which started in 1970. That was the end of his "Supermarionation" line, which had lasted from Four Feather Falls in 1960 to The Secret Service in 1969, although Anderson did return to puppets for the "Supermacronation" series Terrahawks and the two stop motion series Dick Spanner, P.I. and Lavender Castle.

The core Supermarionation series - Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet - are an odd phenomenon. They just never went away. I remember them being rerun in the early nineties, with the toys once again going on the market; a similar revival occurred in the early 2000s, and perhaps there is another waiting in the wings.

The CGI Captain Scarlet.

It is not unusual for children's franchises to be periodically revived: Transformers and Ninja Turtles are routinely brought out of retirement, for example. But in those cases each revival is spearheaded by a new cartoon series with redesigned characters; with Anderson's Supermarionation it is the original series which are regularly dusted off for a new generation. Although a live action Thunderbirds film was released in 2004 to a lukewarm reception, and Anderson himself oversaw a CGI remake of Captain Scarlet the following year, the sixties series have by and large been left alone rather than reinvented.

Another curiosity is that, while the Supermarionation technique is well-known throughout Britain, Anderson has seen few imitators in his own country. The only examples of Anderson-derived puppetry from the UK which I can think of are Space Patrol, a series made in the early sixties by former Anderson associate Roberta Leigh; and Jackboots on Whitehall, a 2010 feature which seemed to owe more to Team America: World Police.

Interster: Andersonian adventures from South Africa.

To find productions which worked with techniques developed by Gerry Anderson, we will have to look elseehere in the world. The USA gave us the aforementioned Team America and the 1998 series Super Adventure Team, both parodies, while South Africa produced Interster in the seventies and eighties.

One country which definitely seems to have takenn Supermarionation to heart, however, is Japan: X-Bomber (dubbed into English as Star Fleet) even called its technique "Sūpāmariorama". However, I suspect that - to some degree, at least - these series developed independently to Gerry Anderson's work. An early example, Osamu Tezuka's Ginga Shonen Tai, premiered in 1963; I have no idea if any of Anderson's series had reached Japan by that time.

Anderson passed away last December, but the worlds which he created live on. Thunderbirds is set to be revived in 2015 for a new series which will combine CGI characters with model backgrounds.

Lacking the historical significance and raw nostalgic appeal of the original series, will the resurrected Thunderbirds catch on? Today's children seem to prefer wide-eyed youth still grappling to understand the world, like Harry Potter; comical, eccentric protagonists like Doctor Who; or grim, violent anti-heroes like Batman. Anderson's leads were generally straight-laced individuals, who seldom questioned orders and instead got on with things with upper lips thoroughly rigid.

Meanwhile, if Anderson's characters are being converted into CGI and live action, then perhaps it is time that we see his puppetry techniques put to use elsewhere. Perhaps somebody could attempt a Supermarionation horror short? Those puppets tend to be a little creepy at the best of times, after all, and are ripe for Svankmajeresque reinvention.

I wish the crew behind the CGI Thunderbirds the best of luck, but I would also like to see more work which explores the potential of the Supermarionation process and its derivatives. There's life in those marionettes yet.

Shakespeare: The Animated Tales

I wrote about S4C's Canterbury Tales a while ago. That series was a follow-up to an earlier project, Shakespeare: The Animated Tales.

Like Canterbury Tales this was a Welsh/Russian co-production. This time, however, the animation was handled entirely in Russia. Novelist Leon Garfield was responsible for adapting the plays into half-hour format.

Macbeth

Hamlet

Romeo & Juliet

Othello

Twelfth Night

As You Like It

A Midsummer Night's Dream

The Taming of the Shrew

A Winter's Tale

The Tempest

Julius Caesar

Richard III

TV Comic Annual 1955

A few scans from the 1955 TV Comic Annual. At this point the comic was aimed at preschool readers (it would later target slightly older kids, with strips based on series such as The Avengers) and was dominated by stories and comic strips starring puppet characters from television programmes for small children.

I'll be the first to admit that these string and glove puppets are not, strictly speaking, animated characters - but I'd say they're close enough cousins to be covered here.

Muffin the Mule appears to have been the comic's main draw at this point, starring in both an illustrated prose story and a comic strip. Neville Main provides art for both, while the prose story is credited to Annette Mills, the presenter who appeared alongside Muffin on television.

Muffin's co-stars Prudence Kitten and Peregrine Penguin get their own strips as well. Annette Mills is again credited with writing for Prudence, but no artist is identified. The Peregrine strip has no credits at all.

More strips credited to Annette Mills, although I'm unsure as to where the characters originated. At first I assumed that Puffer Dog and Charlie Parkin appeared on television alongside Muffin, Peregrine and the rest, but I can find no confirmation online of them ever appearing in anything outside of various tie-in books. Puffer certainly looks like he was modelled around a puppet, so perhaps he was a character who never caught on.

 

Next up we have Hank, a character created by ventriloquist Francis Coudrill for the children's series Whirligig. Coudrill was also an illustrator, and his distinctive minimalist style can be seen in these illustrations.

Here we have the perennial Sooty. His original performer Harry Corbett is credited and was presumably the writer; more surprising is the name of Tony Hart, familiar from numerous children's arts programmes (some of which saw him appearing alongside Aardman's first star, Morph).

Mr. Turnip is another puppet character from Whirligig. His creator Joy Laurey is credited on this strip.

When this annual was published,  S. G. Hulme Beaman's Toytown stories or radio, which starred Larry the Lamb and others, had not yet been animated. However, this Toytown story has an animated connection as its illustrations are credited to George Moreno, the American animator who moved to the UK and set up British Animated Productions, the studio behind the Bubble and Squeek cartoons of the fifties. Bear Alley has a post about him; one of the replies is from an animator who worked for Moreno in the sixties and speculates that some of the artwork credited to him in fifties comics was actually ghosted by members of his studio

The Bear Alley post mentioned above identifies this series, starring a character named Polly-Copter, as being illustrated by Moreno; however, in this annual the only credit is for Dorothy Dee, presumably the writer. As far as I can tell Polly-Copter was created specifically for TV Comic.

And just to round things off... clowns. Because clowns are always favourites!

Sarah and Duck review

I recently had the pleasure of reviewing Karrot Entertainment's charming Cbeebies series Sarah and Duck for Cartoon Brew. The post can be read here.

Margaret Thatcher: Where am I Now? by Bob Godfrey and Steve Bell

Margaret Thatcher: Where am I Now? was a 1999 collaboration between Bob Godfrey, who directed, and the political cartoonist Steve Bell. It took the form of five episodes, each one three minutes long, which were screened on Channel 4.

The first episode can be viewed here.