Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Thames TV promotional poster with Duckula


I recently received an email from David Wakefield, who happens to have been a former employee at Thames TV back in the early 1990's, and was kind enough to offer me a photo of this rather interesting piece of media he managed to take out of a media industry magazine. It's a promotional article regarding some children's programmes that were screening or being developed at the time, while having some focus on Duckula as well. I've made sure the text here is still readable but here's the Duckula part anyways:

"He's green. He's a vegetarian vampire. And he's looked after by his nanny. A bizarre combination. Even for a duck. Yet Count Duckula is one of Thames Television's biggest stars and most appealing personalities. We don't accept that animated characters need be one-dimensional. Instead we've treated Duckula just like any other television character with a fully formed personality of his own. When the series was created, the Duckula writers gave each character his or her own personal biography, CV and personality analysis, complete with problems, phobias and foibles. Does all this sound like a lot of trouble to go to for a children's programme? It should do because at Thames we take making programmes for children as seriously as making programmes for adults."

Now that part about the characters having their own profiles like that has really intrigued me. Based on all my gatherings, I've been attempting to make my own biographies of the major characters but that sounds like something much better...

Thanks David for showing me this, not only is the Duckula picture on this beautiful, the writing around will be intriguing for a lot of us.