The Olden Days podcast
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Thanks for that - I'm sure we'll buy that upcoming DVD release before very long!
Some comparisons with Knightmare are included in this podcast on Incredible Games: http://yourlisten.com/TheOldenDays/the-olden-days-episode-17-incredible-games
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Incredible Games is one of those programmes I watched every week even though I never really felt it was living up to its potential. It seemed like it should have been awesome (the title certainly implied as much!), but it just... wasn't. Still, it was quite memorable, with the lift character (whom I remember as having weird yellow hair and an American accent, evidently confusing two different hosts), the alphabet soup game, the Dark Knight, the Victorian classroom game, and the penthouse endgame. Indeed I can't ever hear the word "penthouse" without thinking of this show.
By contrast, I don't remember the drawing programme at all...!
(I also have no recollection of Incredible Games being moved from Sundays to Tuesdays, even though I definitely watched both series. How curious.)
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Oh wow, our tastes really differ on this latest one. The Iron Man is one of my all-time favourite books - my reading group at first school read it together and we all loved it. I watched The Iron Giant in 2004 and absolutely hated everything about it! Maybe it would have annoyed me less if the book didn't already hold such a special place in my heart, but I really disliked the way they changed the story completely, the Americanisation of it (complete with mocking Hogarth's name ), and how sappy it was - that whole "Superman" thing made me gag. Can't believe they didn't include any of the best scenes from the book! All the charm and beauty of it was lost. I was baffled when I later learned of the film's popularity.
Looking forward to the Narnia podcast; it'll be interesting to see if we have the same opinions about the various books and adaptations!
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Looking forward to the Narnia podcast; it'll be interesting to see if we have the same opinions about the various books and adaptations!
Hmm, it turns out we don't agree on very much here either...!
I watched the BBC series at the time and had mixed feelings about it, I think - I didn't remember much apart from how grim it was, but I did get the full set of books for Christmas afterwards so I must have liked it to some extent. I certainly have fond memories of watching those Sunday dramas with my family whilst tucking into various teatime treats.
I wasn't sure if it was worth checking out the film version of TLTWATW as I'd never been all that keen on the book, but I saw it at the cinema and found it absolutely enchanting - I even stayed right to the end of the credits because I was enjoying the music so much, and later got the soundtrack CD. I thought the whole thing was flawless (apart from Dawn French being far too recognisable as the voice of Mrs Beaver), and I'm still impressed by it every time it's shown on TV. Tilda Swinton is just magnificent in that one. Such a shame the sequels were rubbish by comparison! Prince Caspian was so boring I could barely concentrate (and I couldn't understand half the dialogue), and they made so many unnecessary changes to TVOTDT instead of using all the great material from the book.
Will be interesting to see if the next film is any better when it eventually comes out... I agree it's a pity they didn't make The Silver Chair while Will Poulter was still young enough.I re-read the books in 2010; TLTWATW is a good story but I still found the killing scenes too unpleasant. Prince Caspian was pretty uneventful. TVOTDT was one of my favourites this time around (I'm not sure if I finished it when I was little), so I was really looking forward to the film a few months later, but that was a huge disappointment as mentioned above. I couldn't get into The Horse And His Boy as a kid but appreciated it much more as an adult. The Silver Chair started out brilliantly and Puddleglum was hilarious, but most of the plot was way too predictable. The Magician's Nephew had always been my favourite book in the series by far, and it was every bit as good as I remembered - I so want to see a screen version of this! The Last Battle had a few decent moments but was largely dull and riddled with problems, especially the ending.
After that I rewatched the BBC adaptations, and found them very dated in appearance, with a lot of bad acting. I liked Aslan though. There were some serious goofs in The Silver Chair, and I didn't think Tom Baker did a very good job of capturing Puddleglum's dry humour, but I mentioned the giants as a highlight in my review.
Rosey's comment about TVOTDT starting well and then dropping off at the end sums up pretty much all of C.S. Lewis' books for me! They always tend to be fun until they trail off into some weird religious allegory. I think George Orwell complained about the same thing...
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Regarding Look & Read - Dark Towers was the first one we did at school! (Never did The Boy From Space, though I've watched it as an adult because of John Woodnutt being in it.) The others we watched were Geordie Racer, Fair Ground and Badger Girl, but the only one I can remember anything about is Geordie Racer, probably because we appear to have done that one twice for some reason! (I still have my activity books for them all.) The details of the story escape me but I know it involved the Great North Run and a pigeon race, there was a character called Spuggy (as there was in Byker Grove, IIRC!), and bizarrely enough I do remember the pigeons being called Blue Flash and Perfect Lady. There was also something about a flooded causeway stranding the protagonists at a lighthouse, which was the first time I'd ever come across the word "causeway" so it always reminds me of this programme. And I remember the final exercise being to write our thoughts on all the characters, and I was the only person in my class who chose the criminal Victor as their favourite character rather than one of the good guys - I wrote that I felt sorry for the baddies because they always get caught in the end! Quite funny as I still tend to prefer villains to this day. The "magic e" song rings a bell, too. I've heard of Through The Dragon's Eye but I don't believe we ever watched it. (There's nothing about pomegranates in it, is there? I've long been driven crazy trying to remember where I first heard that word - I'm sure it was in some dragon-related story that was shown or read to us at school.)
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Proof there that there was actually proper follow-up work to do, even though our school never bothered buying the activity books! Having watched Through the Dragon's Eye all the way through, I'm sorry to report that the word "pomegranate" is not mentioned.
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Yeah, I didn't think the pomegranate thing was from TTDE, but good to know for sure.
How strange that you were shown the videos without all the accompanying exercises! They mostly consist of filling in missing letters or words (sometimes in the form of "Bill the Brickie's Word Wall"), and similar stuff like adding in capital letters and punctuation marks, replacing words with their opposites or changing them to past tense, thinking of words with a certain letter combination, and matching up related things. There are also some crosswords and wordsearches. Other activities include answering questions about the characters and plot so far (presumably to check you've been paying attention!), trying to guess the meaning of clues and what will happen next, drawing pictures of the characters and scenes, identifying places from the story on a map, occasional general knowledge questions (e.g. collective nouns for animals), and prompts to write about your own experiences (e.g. "How did your pet get its name?", "Have you ever had to choose between two things?", "Do you know anyone with a nickname?" and "What would you do in this situation?"). Interestingly, when we did Geordie Racer for the second time (a couple of years after the first), we only did about three of the same sheets and quite a few different ones - perhaps they were aimed at different age groups?
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How strange that you were shown the videos without all the accompanying exercises!
This is what happened to me too. We watched TTDE in Year 3 and did follow-up work, but no official exercises. I suppose it's up to the teacher what the students do with Look and Read series.
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Round The Twist had one of the best theme songs of any TV show ever - always enjoyed singing along with it (and occasionally still do)! The show itself didn't appeal to me quite as much - I did watch it, but I think it was a bit too weird and a bit too gross for me. (I don't remember it being shown at the weekend, just on after-school CBBC.) The only episode I clearly remember is the one you mentioned briefly, where they find a cloning machine in the attic, and Linda employs "Adnil" to give her an advantage in a sponsored stair climb. I've always remembered someone thinking she had her T-shirt on inside-out, and the sad bit at the end when Adnil dies, and the duplicated clocks melting like in that Dali painting. That one made quite an impression on me for some reason! The only other thing that vaguely sticks in my memory is something about a fake puddle of sick, or similar item?? I think the thing about the dead fox's eyes rings a distant bell now you mention it.
I liked Kelly too! Did you guys ever watch The Girl From Tomorrow or Escape From Jupiter? I would loooove to hear a podcast on TGFT...
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The fake puddle of sick sounds like something that may well have been used in series 3 or 4 - we've forgotten all the finer details of those already (having watched them a couple of months ago) because we don't really engage with them. Sadly we never did watch The Girl From Tomorrow or Escape From Jupiter, so you won't be hearing podcasts about those.
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I don't think I ever saw those later series. Maybe I'm thinking of something from another programme.
If you can find The Girl From Tomorrow / Tomorrow's End to watch anywhere (cough), I highly recommend it! Along with Knightmare it's my all-time favourite kids' TV show.
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Aww, I really loved Going Live. Live & Kicking was pretty good too, though never quite the same. (For one thing, those annoying leprechaun puppets were hardly a suitable replacement for the legendary Gordon the Gopher.) I think I must have stopped watching sometime in the late '90s, as the later stuff you described doesn't ring any bells.
I have no memory of Trevor & Simon being temporarily replaced! They are total comedy heroes in my eyes. Picklin' Time was hilarious, it so appealed to my sense of humour.
Wasn't The Raccoons on before Going Live, rather than during it? I remember that as being one of the very early morning programmes, along with the likes of Ovide, Mighty Mouse, ChuckleVision and Eggs 'n' Baker. (Hard to believe I was regularly awake that early on a Saturday!)
I also watched Parallel 9 and Fully Booked on Sunday mornings in the summer - I particularly liked the first series of Parallel 9, even though it was very strange. (I still remember all the characters with their weirdly-spelt names - Mercator, Calendular, Steyl, Skyn and Thynkso.) No idea why they changed it completely in the second series, scrapping all the cool stuff and introducing stupid things like the dinosaur puppet. I did like Lucinda Cowden in her caravan on Earth, though.
I wasn't keen on Ghost Train but I do remember seeing bits of it occasionally - I probably channel-hopped if there was something on BBC1 that didn't interest me. Pretty sure they used to show Trap Door, and possibly Count Duckula?
In later years I often saw or heard some of SM:TV Live while waiting for CD:UK, though I never watched it properly. I'm still gutted that I changed channels for a few minutes during something annoying, and found out later that I'd missed a fun U2 segment, never to be repeated or uploaded anywhere.
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Fortunately the Going Live uploads on YouTube confirm that The Raccoons is in the line-up, though it does seem it was always very early in the show. I remember I always wanted to hear the closing song (Run With Us) properly but Phillip and Sarah always talked over it (to be fair, it's horrendously long) so there's something else to thank 80scartoons.co.uk for!
I also found Feed the Dog and Feed the Frog in those YouTube clips; Rosey certainly described Feed the Dog to the letter, despite the haziness of her other Going Live memories. Now I remember the instructions ("Left, left, catch!") and the board games Sarah gave out as prizes to the lucky winners!
According to Wikipedia, it was actually the penultimate series of Going Live that Trevor and Simon didn't do, and their replacements' full names were Nick Ball and James Hickish. The only sketch I remember them doing was some kind of black-and-white schoolboy thing (Nicholas & Jamie) but I'm sure they were terribly disappointing compared to Trevor and Simon!
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Fortunately the Going Live uploads on YouTube confirm that The Raccoons is in the line-up, though it does seem it was always very early in the show. I remember I always wanted to hear the closing song (Run With Us) properly but Phillip and Sarah always talked over it (to be fair, it's horrendously long) so there's something else to thank 80scartoons.co.uk for!
I thought Muppet Babies was on before Going Live, too. Having consulted BBC Genome (how I love that website!), it appears we are both right... Muppet Babies was originally on at 9am when Going Live didn't start until 9:30, but Going Live then shifted to 9am in late 1988 and Muppet Babies started to be included within it. And you're quite correct that The Raccoons was usually part of Going Live... but! Apparently in the spring-summer of 1989, Going Live was replaced by a similar programme called 'On The Waterfront' (which I don't remember at all?!), and the cartoon immediately before it at 8:35 was either Muppet Babies or The Raccoons, so that's probably why I recall both of them being in that earlier slot. Muppet Babies was also shown at 7:50 in 1990, when the summer magazine show was something called 'The 8:15 From Manchester' - I have no memory of that one either! (This website mentions them both, along with the equally mystifying 'It's Wicked' and 'UP2U'.)
Run With Us was always my favourite part of The Raccoons - such a great song!
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Ah, Jurassic Park - I loved the first film (enough to purchase some kind of tie-in comic afterwards), and still found it just as impressive when I watched it again a couple of years ago. I never liked the sequels, though. Haven't seen either of them since they were in the cinema, but I was massively disappointed by The Lost World (which so underwhelmed me that I can barely recall a thing about it), and the third one just seemed completely pointless, rehashing all the same scenes they had in the original!
I quite enjoyed Jurassic World, and felt it to be a far more worthy sequel than the previous two. Like all modern 3D blockbusters it had too much chaotic action for my taste, and was somewhat predictable and silly in places, but I loved how they successfully recaptured the feel of the original - the believability of the park, the scary suspense and the little moments of humour. Plus the theme music still gives me goosebumps!
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Back To The Future is such a great trilogy. I haven't seen the films all that many times, but I love them, enough to get the DVD box set a few years ago. I kinda wanted to be in them when I was younger. The first one is the best but I also like the third one a lot, with that awesome train sequence. (I originally found the second film to be the weakest by far, but when I rewatched it as an adult, it was much better than I remembered. I think maybe I could appreciate it more once I knew the whole story.) Quite enjoyed the animated series as a kid, too, though I only remember the Benjamin Franklin kite-flying episode and I think a live-action experiment with a lemon battery?
Haha, I knew you were referring to Pirates Of The Caribbean when you mentioned good films with crappy sequels - I had the same thought!
Thank you for all the fun podcasts this year! Can't wait to hear your plans for 2017.
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Hey Annie, thanks for all your support and comments about our podcasts.
The live-action section with the lemon battery is definitely on one of my videos, though I can't at all remember which episode it goes with. That Benjamin Franklin episode (Go Fly A Kite) must be very memorable because it was the first one that sprung to my mind when I was talking about the series, as you may be able to tell. Verne becomes convinced he is Ben Franklin's son and this leads to Verne accidentally stopping Franklin from discovering electricity - very weird but fun!
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We are back with Warner Brothers cartoons: http://yourlisten.com/TheOldenDays/the-olden-days-episode-26-warner-brothers-animation
There will be a new release on the final Sunday of every month, so put February 26th in your diaries!
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