Underplayed Gems

Animal Magic (1962)

Animal Magic poster
Country
United Kingdom
Rating
7.0 of 10 from 1 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this series is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

More series like this

How it feels

A BBC children's series from the 1960s and 1970s. A presenter gives playful voiceovers to animals at Bristol Zoo and teaches basic facts about wildlife.

playfuleducationalwhimsicalnostalgiclightheartedgentleinformative

What happens

Animal Magic is a BBC children's television series which ran from 13 April 1962 to 8 March 1983 from BBC Bristol. It began fortnightly and was transmitted weekly from 1964. The presenter was Johnny Morris. The show combined jovial voiceovers applied to various animals from Bristol Zoo with some basic educational features. Morris' co-presenters over the years were Gerald Durrell, Tony Soper, Keith Shackleton, Roger Tabor, Sheila Young, David Taylor and Terry Nutkins. When Nutkins joined the show in the early 1980s, the producers tried to update it, using new video effects technology. This allowed them to do such things as "shrink" the presenters to allow them to see life from an ant's viewpoint, or to swim in a riverbed for example. Joe Henson and Desmond Morris also appeared on the show. Dotty the ring-tailed lemur appeared as a regular guest for eight years in the 1970s. Other animal stars included the sea lion Gemini, and two parrots, Cocky (a sulphur-crested cockatoo) and Brolly (an umbrella cockatoo). The show was discontinued in 1983 when the programme's anthropomorphic treatment of animals fell out of fashion. A new children's wildlife series, The Really Wild Show, began in 1986, with the former Animal Magic co-presenter Terry Nutkins as the main host. One edition, broadcast in late 1979, featured Tom Baker in character as The Doctor from Doctor Who, discussing ferocious animals on Earth and other worlds. During this programme, the Doctor references the events of the then-current serial, The Creature From The Pit. The 100th edition was transmitted on 4 January 1967. Many editions of the show were junked by the BBC in the early 1990s when they were assumed to be of no further use. Recent documentaries such as The Way We Went Wild have had to resort to using clips from off-air recordings of some shows. In addition to airing on the BBC, the series was also aired on ABC in Australia, TV One in New Zealand and Channel 5 in Singapore. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

This page is from Underplayed Gems. Not quite it? You can browse by genre, country and year, or take this one into the 3D catalogue and ask the Catbot for something closer.