Paddington Bear

In Tribute To Michael Bond Who Sadly Died 28th June 2017

Paddington, 1975

From a golden era of kids TV the original television series of British animated shorts, based on the Paddington bear books by Michael Bond.

Produced by the BBC this was the first television series based on the popular children’s books.

It was one of the few television programmes to combine a puppet with cartoon animation – Paddington himself was a puppet, but other characters in the series were depicted as cartoon characters.

The animation gives the series a very distinctive art style. Paddington himself is a stop-motion animated puppet who moves within a 3-dimensional space and interacts with 2-dimensional animated drawings of the human characters, buildings, etc. The idea was unusual at the time even today it has a distinct style but the idea worked.

Between 1975 and 1976 there were 53 episodes produced. Three specials were produced in 1980, 1984 and 1986. All broadcast on BBC.

Summary

Based on the books the short 5 minute episodes featured the adventures of Paddington Bear.

Paddington is always polite — addressing people as “Mr”, “Mrs”, and “Miss” and very rarely by first names—and well-meaning, though he inflicts hard stares on those who incur his disapproval. He has an endless capacity for getting into trouble, but he is known to “try so hard to get things right”. He is an adopted member of the (human) Brown family and thus gives his full name as “Paddington Brown”.

Clips