The Magic Roundabout is an English-language children's programme that ran on BBC Television from 1965 to 1977.
It used the footage of the French stop motion animation show Le Manège enchanté but with completely different scripts and characters. The French series, created by Serge Danot with the help of Ivor Wood and Wood's French wife, Josiane, was broadcast from 1964 to 1974 on ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française). The scripts are simple fantasy stories aimed at pre-school children, with no relation to the real world. The BBC originally rejected translating the series because it was "charming ... but difficult to dub into English", but later produced a version of the series using the French footage with new English-language scripts unrelated to the original storylines. This version, written and told by Eric Thompson, was broadcast in 441 five-minute episodes between 18 October 1965 and 25 January 1977. It proved a great success and attained cult status, and when in October 1966 it was moved from the slot just before the evening news to an earlier children's viewing time, adult viewers complained to the BBC.
Characters Although the characters are common to the French and English versions, they were given different names and personalities in each language.
The main character is Dougal (also known as Doogal; Pollux in the original French-language version), who is a drop-eared variety of the Skye Terrier.
Characters include Zebedee (Zébulon), a talking jack-in-the-box with magical powers; Brian (Ambroise), a snail; Ermintrude (Azalée), a cow; and Dylan (named after Bob DylanMagic Roundabout, The (1965–78) BFI Screenonline. Retrieved 23 August 2013.) (Flappy), a hippy rabbit. There are two notable human characters: Florence (Margote), a young girl; and Mr Rusty (le Père Pivoine), the elderly moustached operator of the roundabout.
Other characters include Mr McHenry (Bonhomme Jouvence), an elderly gardener who rides a tricycle, and a talking locomotive with a 4-2-2 wheel arrangement and a two-wheel tender. Three other children, Paul, Basil and Rosalie, appeared in the original black-and-white serial and in the credit sequence of the colour episodes, but very rarely in subsequent episodes. The characters all reside in a place called The Magic Garden (Beautywood in the US version).
The show has a distinctive visual style. The set is a brightly coloured and stylised park containing the eponymous roundabout (a fairground carousel). The programmes were created using stop-motion animation, which meant that Dougal was made without legs to make him easier to animate. Zebedee was created from a giant pea which was available in the animation studio and was re-painted. The look of these characters was the responsibility of British animator Ivor Wood, who was working at Danot's studio at the time (and who subsequently animated The Herbs, Paddington Bear, Postman Pat, Gran and Bertha).
English-language version Narration in the British BBC version was entirely new and bears very little to no resemblance to the French version. It was created by Eric Thompson from just the visuals, without any translation of the French scripts by Serge Danot. Thompson provided all the voices, whereas in the French version each character was voiced by a different actor.
The first British broadcasts were shown every weekday on BBC1 at 17:50, just before the early-evening news at 17:55. Although the exact time of the early evening news varied over the years, The Magic Roundabout kept its slot before the bulletins for the duration of its original broadcasting, except for 16:55 time slots during October to November 1966, and earlier times during parts of 1972 and 1973. This was the first time an entertainment programme had been transmitted in this way in the UK. The original series, which was a serial, was made in black-and-white. From the second series onwards it was made in colour, but the series was still broadcast in black-and-white by the BBC; the first colour episode of the show ("Chocolate Soldiers") was transmitted on 5 October 1970.
(At the time of broadcast, the main BBC1 channel was still broadcast on the VHF band which was limited to 405 lines and did not support colour, while the newer BBC2 channel was in colour in the higher UHF band using PAL transmission for 625 lines.) https://www.bbceng.info/additions/2017/TV%20Broadcasting%201960-70%20(J.%20Redmond%20IEEE%20review%20Vol.%20117).pdf
52 additional episodes, claimed to have been not previously broadcast, were shown in the United Kingdom from January to March 1992 on Channel 4's "The Channel Four Daily". Thompson had died by this time, and the job of narrating them in a pastiche of Thompson's style went to actor Nigel Planer. These episodes actually had been previously narrated by Thompson (particularly from the 1970–1971 series), being redubbed editions of the original French colour episodes by AB Productions (with different music) broadcast in 1990. An additional 43 episodes were narrated by Planer from April to September 1993, this time, with most of the episodes coming from a batch of new French episodes broadcast during that same year up until 1995.
The English version of Dougal was generally disparaging and had similarities with the television character of Tony Hancock, an actor and comedian. Ermintrude was rather matronly and fond of singing. Dylan was a hippy-like, guitar-playing rabbit, and rather dopey. Florence was portrayed as courteous and level-headed. Brian was unsophisticated but well-meaning.
Part of the show's attraction was that it appealed to adults, who enjoyed the world-weary Hancock-style comments made by Dougal, as well as to children. The audience measured eight million at its peak. There are speculations about possible interpretations of the show. One is that the characters represented French politicians of the time, and that Dougal represented Charles de Gaulle. In fact, when Serge Danot was interviewed by Joan Bakewell on Late Night Line-Up in 1968, his associate (perhaps Jean Biard) said that in France it was thought at first that the UK version of Pollux had been renamed "De Gaulle", mishearing the name Dougal (as seen in the Channel 4 documentary The Return of the Magic Roundabout (broadcast 08:50 on 25 December 1991 and 18:00 on 5 January 1992), and in the 2003 BBC4 documentary The Magic Roundabout Story).
Sometimes, the series broke the fourth wall. At the end of one episode, "A Peaceful Day", when Zebedee called his catchphrase of "Time for bed", Florence asked "Already?", and Zebedee replied that "It's nearly time for the news, and you've had enough magic for one day". The news was broadcast just after The Magic Roundabout. This story was later republished in print from Bloomsbury's 1998 book The Adventures of Brian.
In 1971 Brockhampton Press, under their paperback imprint Knight Books, published two books written by Eric Thompson, The Adventures of Dougal and Dougal's Scottish Holiday. These were original stories written by Thompson using the characters, and not versions of scripts from the series.
In 1998, Thompson's stories were published by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc as a series of four paperbacks, The Adventures of Dougal, The Adventures of Brian, The Adventures of Dylan and The Adventures of Ermintrude with forewords by his daughter Emma Thompson. While The Adventures of Dougal featured republications of three exclusive book stories, the latter three featured scripts from the TV series. She explains that her father had felt that he was most like Brian of all the characters and that Ermintrude was in some respects based upon his wife, Phyllida Law.
For years, the series had reruns on Cartoon Network and was later moved to its sister channel, Boomerang. These airings mainly used episodes from the 1974 series, which have been renarrated by Jimmy Hibbert (who unlike the previous British dubs, actually translated the French scripts, though not entirely verbatim), though some episodes from the Nigel Planer dub aired as well.
A new version is being made by the French studio Method Animation, initially targeted for 2024, that will try to "find a balance between the French and English contexts".
Foreign-language versions In Italy, the series was known as "La giostra incantata" ("The Enchanted Carousel") and part of the series was broadcast since 1970 by the RAI state television network. In this version, Pollux/Dougal was renamed Bobo (initially Peluche) and the show stuck with the idea of giving each character its own voice. Bobo was still referred to as English but did not have an accent. The series was then re-distributed to local broadcasters as "Bobo & Company". In Portugal, the series was known as "Carrossel Mágico" (spelled as "Carrocel Mágico"), and aired on RTP in 1966. The dub was based on the original French version (with the characters having their own voices), and several of the characters were renamed, with Pollux/Dougal being called "Franjinhas". It was also the first foreign children's series to be dubbed into European Portuguese. In Germany and in Austria it was translated to Das Zauberkarussell. Most of the characters are given different names, except for Dougal and Zebedee who retain their original French names (Pollux and Zebulon, respectively). In Austria there was in 1974/75 a special version in "Betthupferl" (the same as the German "Mr Sandman") called Gucki und seine Freunde (Cookie and his Friends), in which Cookie and his friend Apollonius always went through a hole in a tree to join the garden. In the United States, the series was called The Magic Carousel and it aired in the 1980s on Pinwheel, a programme on the children's channel Nickelodeon. This version used American actors such as Michael Karp (the voice of Dougal in this version) and was based on the original French incarnation, such as the scripts being word for word translations, and the characters having voices strikingly similar to the French dub's voices. Dylan and Mr. McHenry also retain their original French names (Flappy and Bonhomme Jouvence a.k.a. Mr. Young, respectively) with Mr Rusty having Mr. McHenry's name. Aside from that however, most of the characters have their names from the British version. In the Netherlands, a Dutch version was aired by the NTS (Dutch Television Foundation, one of the national broadcasters at the time) in black-and-white as De Minimolen ('The Mini Carousel'). Running from 5 June till 30 September 1967, the series aired on a six-days-per-week basis. The script in Dutch was written by Wim Meuldijk, who at the time was very successful in writing (and co-producing) the Pipo children's series. A brief second run of De Minimolen went on air in the late summer of 1980.
Theme tunes The show's theme by Alain Legrand was a cheerful organ tune. In the early black-and-white episodes, it was played more slowly with a degree of sadness. There were also two different additional theme songs for reruns of the original French version; the first, "C'est moi, Pollux" (1983), was a moderately popular single in France, while the theme from 1990 was an upbeat Hammond organ pop tune with children's vocals.
Film versions Unlike the series, both films featured a villain in the Magic Roundabout canon.
Dougal and the Blue Cat