Welcome to an extra weird Saturday Night Special in The Dungeon!
Tonight's short feature is titled: "WTF!?," no, I mean.......
Listen to that sound clip and you just might have a better historical perspective on what's wrong with the world today!
"Pom-Pom and The Toys" was the first episode of "Torchy The Battery Boy!" The story and the grating Torchy theme song were both written by child's author Roberta Leigh! Roberta also wrote "The Adventures Of Twizzle," and "Planet Patrol!" She just might have been a little cracked!
"Torchy The Battery Boy" was also produced by Roberta Leigh, and was one Gerry Anderson's first films!
The puppeteer was Christine Glanville! Christine went on to be the puppeteer in "Supercar," "Thunderbirds" and many other Gerry Anderson productions, but my favourite credit is that she was also a puppeteer in David Bowie's "Labyrinth!"
This is the kindly Mr. Bumbledrop! He likes to have kids play in his yard! In current modern society, he would probably be under investigation!
Mr. Bumbledrop's dog is named Pom-Pom! Pom-Pom is a poodle with straight hair, so Mr. Bumbledrop has to put curlers in his hair!
Mr. Bumbledrop and Pom-Pom are very happy together
Some of the kids playing in Mr. Bumbledrop's yard are spoiled complaining whiny little brats, so Mr. Bumbledrop gives them some kites to play with!
The brats tie toys to their kite strings and the toys along with Pom-Pom get sucked into space and onto some other planet! Wow! Anything goes!
Torchy takes kind of a Frankenstein crossed with Pinocchio turn at this point! Mr. Bumbledrop creates a toy creature to go and rescue his poodle!
He's called Torchy because he has a flashlight built into his cranium! I don't know about you, but weird dolls kind of creep me out!
Torchy's beam shines near Pop-Pom's portrait on the wall!
Next step for Mr. Bumbledrop, build a rocket in the yard so Torchy can go into space and rescue Pom-Pom and the other toys! Is any of this making any sense yet?
BLAST OFF!
This first episode ended here, but believe it or don't, Torchy continued on for a couple more years!
This first episode is available gratis from the Internet Archive right....
HERE!
But if your world rocks around weirdass space puppets from the future past....
TORCHY! TORCHY!!
I've always had a soft spot for Torchy ever since I was five and it was shown here in Australia, but the Roberta Leigh puppet show that really got me going was Space Patrol (not to be confused with the American Space Patrol show of the 1950's).
ReplyDeleteRoberta did wonders on a miniscule budget and I always felt she got a raw deal compared with the big budgets that Gerry Anderson received for his shows.
By the way, try and catch the episode Space Patrol episode "The Wandering Asteroid"... does it seem familiar? That's right, it's the Bruce Willis movie "Armageddon" some 36 years earlier.
cheers!
Paul from Oz
Love it Paul, Thanx! I'll keep my eyeballs peeled for "The Wandering Asteroid!" (Sounds like the name of a 60's folksinger!)
ReplyDeleteI bought the complete Space Patrol on dvd over ten years ago. An excellent series with one of the extras on the set being the first episode of Roberta Leigh’s series Sara And Hoppity.
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