"British Television Eccentricity at its Best"
The Clangers, the show Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin created in response to the BBC's request for them to do something modern, perhaps to tie in with the recent moon landings, gets a DVD and Blu-ray release from Fabulous Films.
If you haven't seen the show, the Clangers of the title are large pink mouse-like creatures who wear outfits that look like armour, walk on their hind legs, and communicate via whistling sounds. They live underground and access the surface of their tiny planet by opening the saucepan lids that guard their egress holes.
Other inhabitants of this strange place include the soup dragon, who guards the soup wells. Soup is a Clanger dietary staple, as is blue string, which looks like badly made spaghetti bolognese with bits of mould stuck to it.
We also get to meet the iron chicken in episode three, shot out of space by a clanger rocket and reassembled by the clangers so it can fly back home. Don't ask why a chicken can fly - it's already made of metal and talking to pink mice on a planet filled with soup. A flying chicken is the least weird thing about all of that. There are also the froglets, which are tiny orange bits of plastic with eyes.
The Clangers are probably best known these days for being the creatures Roger Delgado's Master is watching on TV in the Jon Pertwee Dr Who story The Sea Devils, although they were resurrected a few years ago with Michael Palin narrating in the UK and William Shatner (apt choice!) doing the honours for American children.
Fabulous Films' set includes both seasons of 13 ten-minute episodes each, so you get 26 episodes and 260 minutes in all. The restoration job done on the Blu-ray makes the episodes look wonderful. Having been part of the original youthful audience for the show I remember the episodes being rather grainy, making the clangers and their planet look a little cold and grotty. The new Blu-ray transfers are warm and crystal clear and look just lovely. Extras are the same as were on their previous BAGPUSS set (The Story of Smallfilms, the clip where the show wins the BAFTA) plus an eight minute 'extra episode' - Vote for Froglet, in which Oliver Postgate attempts to explain the democratic electoral system using the soup dragon and a froglet as political candidates and the clangers as the voting populace. Presumably there was a general election on at the time.
The Clangers 1969 - 1972 is out on DVD and Blu-ray from Fabulous Films on Monday 30th October 2023
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