Made by
Oliver Postgate and
Peter Firmin of
Smallfilms, the Clangers was one of the children's
TV shows that warped the largest number of small
British minds.
The Clangers films were first shown in 1969, the year man landed on the
moon. They were described by a
NASA scientist as an attempt to bring a note of realism to the
fantasy of the
Space Race.".
The charmingly surreal series concerns the daily life and adventures of the Clangers--a race of highly civilised, small, bright
pink, long-nosed
mouse type people who stand upright on oversized feet. They talk in a high pitched
whistling language that makes
perfect sense to you until the
tragic day on which you hit
puberty.
They have large animated ears that they pull over their eyes when are
sad or distressed.
The Clangers live inside a small blue cratered
planet (with the craters covered with metal lids) inside which they hide from the cold and the
plethora of objects falling from space.
Other inhabitants include the
Soup Dragon, who lives in the
soup well and who provides the Clangers with green soup and blue-string
pudding; the
Glow Buzzers which provide light for the Clangers'
caves and tasty Glow
Honey for the Clangers' pantry; the conjuring
froglets, inexplicably strange sideways orange, oval stick-legged creatures which travel in a top hat and live in a vertical pond deep within the planet; and the skilled
inventor the
Iron Chicken.
p.s. until I was given a video of the Clangers a few years ago, I was convinced that the show was made in black and white. Discovering the extreme pinkness of the little beasts was a shock from which I have still not quite recovered.
According to Oliver Postgate, the voices are created by speaking the script through a slide whistle as it was played. The BBC insisted on script changes because the original version of the text was just too rude and sweary. That said, the squeezable talking clanger dolls do say, "Oh, bugger. The bloody door's stuck again." Allegedly.