spooky tuesday is a (now not so new!) podcast where we’re breaking down all of our favorite slashers, thrillers, monster movies and black comedies on the new scariest day of the week.
would it even be legal to do obsession month without putting obsessed (2009) on the lineup? we knew we had to include this movie as soon as we came up with february's theme, and it doesn't disappoint. or, uh, it actually might if what you're looking for is a horror flick that inspires genuine fear, but if all you need is queen bey, a little camp, and a catfight for the ages, then you're in for a good time. starring beyoncé, idris elba, and ali larter, this cautionary tale is all about what happens when an intra-office flirtation goes wrong, and we're breaking it all down on a new spooky tuesday.
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Controversial movie based off the book by Nikos Kazantzakis.
It enraged Christian zealots enough that they fire bombed a movie theater in France. Other theaters refused to show it. The church bitched and moaned. The old nutty nun from EWTN called it "the most blasphemous ridicule of the Eucharist that's ever been perpetrated in this world" and "a holocaust movie that has the power to destroy souls eternally." 😂😂
And Martin Scorsese head to have bodyguards for several years after.
The A-Z of Classic Children’s Television by Simon Sheridan - The Moomins
ITV / Produced 1979-1980 / A Semafor Studios Production for Film Polski-Jupiter Films (UK version adapted by FilmFair for Central Independent Television) / Created by Tove Jansson / Animated by Lucjan Dembinski, Krystyna Kulczycka, Dariusz Zawilski and Jadwiga Kudrzycka / Adapted and written by Anne Wood / Edited by Andi Sloss / Music by Steve Hill and Graeme Miller / Narrated by Richard Murdoch / 100 episodes (UK) / First broadcast (UK) 24 January 1983
Jansson and Pietilä travelled the world with the royalties from the Moomin books (by the mid-1970s her books had been translated into 30 languages) and in 1978 an animation studio called Semafor, based in Poland’s central city of Lodz, approached the author’s publishers with a view to adapting her novels for TV. Poland has always had a strong tradition of animated films, although many of the cartoons were barely-disguised critiques of the country’s communist rule. At the time all Polish animation studios were state owned, but were pretty much allowed to do what they wanted, provided they adhered to the strict bureaucratic guidelines. Studio Semafor was famous for its esoteric children’s animation, something that Tove had admired for some time. After agreeing to let Semafor adapt her books, as well as some stories from the Moomin cartoon strip, which had appeared in the London Evening Standard from the mid-1950s, the author travelled to Poland to oversee the project.
The original Polish productions were nearly an hour long, but throughout the world the animation was adapted for different television channels. In 1981 Lewis Rudd, the then-head of children’s programmes for ITV, bought the series in its original format and offered it to producer and writer Anne Wood, hoping that she could Anglicise it for a UK audience. ‘I was thrilled to be asked,’ recalls Anne, now better known as the creator of Rosie and Jim, The Teletubbies and Boohbah. ‘I knew Tove Jansson’s work very well since I’d worked in children’s publishing and on a magazine called Books for Your Children. Her work was just brilliant. It transcends age and culture and I had long recognised her as a very great writer.’
Anne had no doubts that she could adapt the series. ‘I felt a great affinity to Tove’s work and, because she had personally visited Studio Semafor when it was being made, I knew it would be good stuff,’ she says. ‘It was distributed by a German company back then and I seem to recall we cut it down from half hour chunks. ITV wanted it in five minute long episodes so Andi Sloss, the editor, and I got to work on it. All-in-all, it probably took us about two years to complete.’
Anne recalls her determination to not lose a single second of footage for her adaptation. ‘I saw the series and was amazed at how beautiful it was,’ she remembers. ‘I didn’t waste one scrap of film, although creating 100 episodes out of it was quite a task. Poland has produced some wonderful animation in the past and the visual quality of The Moomins was second to none. The Studio Semafor was the best in Europe and the total opposite of Disney’s productions in the US. The thing about The Moomins was that it had such great depths and lushness, something you just can’t capture using cell animation.’
The Polish animators used a stop-motion technique to bring Jansson’s imaginary world to life. Three-dimensional felt characters gracefully glide over delicately painted backgrounds - the series has been dubbed by aficionados as ‘The fuzzy-felt Moomins’, to distinguish it from an inferior Japanese cartoon version from 1991. In addition to the cuddly warm shapes of the Moomins, there is a vibrant use of textures (sand, glitter, flowers, buttons, feathers) and fabrics (corduroy, gingham and woollen skeins). By creating layers of exotic colour and interesting weaves the series’ fastidious animation style is completely unlike any British series of the era.
‘I totally revered Tove’s original books,’ admits Wood, ‘so when I was writing the scripts for my version of the series I constantly referred to the Puffin paperbacks, marked up in pen with all the relevant dialogue.’ However, Wood was surprised when some of the Polish visuals had no connection with the novels. ‘Andi Sloss and I would be watching the episodes and we’d stumble on subliminal political messages! It would be like: “Oh, what’s this then? This isn’t in the book!”‘ Although careful to remain faithful to the text of the novels, Wood still managed to cleverly inject some of her own dry humour into the storytelling. Snufkin, for instance, becomes an out-and-out hippy, affixing a ‘Far out, man!’ to the end of much of his dialogue and slipping in the odd line never seen in any of Tove’s novels. ‘Cocktail parties are not my scene,’ he drawls in one particularly droll episode. Even Moomintroll gets to laugh at himself. ‘I’m not a hippo,’ he explains. ‘I’m a Moomin!’
The job of voicing the Moomin characters was awarded to veteran actor Richard Murdoch. He brings a befuddled tension to the stories - on occasion it sounds like he’s ad-libbing - yet he still flits between the numerous, crumbly voices with great aplomb. Murdoch, who was 78 at the time of recording, created some minor headaches for the British production. ‘We had a discussion, early on, as to who we wanted to do the narration,’ explains Wood, ‘and we came up with Richard’s name. I was always there when he did the dubbing, and although he was excellent, I did have to coax him through it. He was always late to the recording sessions too and and because it was a period when so many great actors had suddenly died, like Peter Sellers and Arthur Lowe, I was always worried that he’d never make it back!’
The breath-taking Polish animation perfectly captures the melancholy spirit of Jansson’s illustrations. It’s like watching the highly decorated lid of a chocolate box, just after the Christmas holiday: there are still so many delights, but you can’t help but feel slightly sad. The series is imbued with a certain amount of dark horror too. The menacing Hattifatteners, long white sock-like creatures with pale eyes and sharp paws, spookily crackle with electricity across the screen. Worse still is the Groke - the dread spirit of winter, who glides across the grass, freezing everything she touches. The latter creature, animated with flashing eyes and dubbed with slow, heaving breathing, is enough to give any four-year-old nightmares for a month. ‘It’s very difficult to pull off tension and horror in a children’s serial,’ explains Anne Wood. ‘There’s a definite fear factor in The Moomins. I mean there’s that scene where Moomintroll climbs into the Hobgoblin’s hat and then emerges as a monster. That is really frightening for little children. But the stop-frame animation and the cuddly, toy-like characters help children to accept these terrifying concepts.’
Also adding to the melancholy is the series’ haunting incidental music, composed by two young British performers, Steve Shill and Graeme Miller. ‘We did the music in three batches, I think,’ says Miller, ‘and we supplied individual themes for each character or situation. We had to be very specific when writing music for creatures like the Hattifatteners because so much of Jansson’s writing is quirky and ironic. There’s a kind of nostalgic quality to her books and we tried to reflect that in the music.’ The pair’s music, performed on synthesizers, is some of the saddest ever to make its way onto kids’ TV. ‘We were very influenced by the sad theme to Robinson Crusoe [an imported black-and-white series, screened by the BBC during the sixties and seventies], but also by Kraftwerk, so there’s a bit of both in there,’ he laughs. ‘You must remember that we were only in our early twenties when we wrote the music, so it was such a thrill when, at 4.15pm, we’d hear our tunes on the telly. Writing a theme for a children’s TV series is like writing an ice cream van jingle in a way; it is injected right into people’s consciousnesses.’
Miller and Shill’s enchanting music captures the Eastern European flavour of the animation, and the wistful penny whistle-like theme tune is eerily memorable. This emotive music, coupled with the whimsical dreamlike quality of the animation, creates a deeply affecting atmosphere of dark forebodings in the Moominvalley shadows. Despite the stories not being in chronological order, the Polish production is undoubtedly the definitive accompaniment to the novels. The Moomins is consistently dazzling and you’d be hard pressed to find a more beautiful image in classic kids’ TV than the shimmering, bejewelled seahorses leaping out of the ocean in the series’ adaptation of Moominpappa at Sea. It is quite simply breathtaking.
‘I was really proud to have been associated with The Moomins,’ says Anne Wood. ‘People forget that creating a children’s series is actually an art form, but it really is. In general terms children’s TV is not given serious attention, and this is a tragedy. I later met some of the animators from Studio Semafor and used them on my own series, Tots TV, because you don’t get animators of their calibre very often. The important thing about The Moomins is that it was a children’s series made with great skill, with great respect to Tove Jansson and ultimately made with a lot of love.’
