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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

The Singing Ringing Tree

16:17 / 27.01.03

Excellent little radio 4 programme recently on this. Pundits explaining why this 1960's BBC children series scarred those of us psychically who saw it as kids and puzzling over its unlikely roots in the communist propaganda of East German State tv's children's output, made in the historic Babelsberg Studios.

Lots of images remain vividly in my mind after so many years: the evil dwarf, the snotty princess with her nose turned up, the good and noble bear prince (ah, how that template endured into mature sexual deviance!), and the extravagantly ornate fish trapped in the ice.

They even spirit up the Princess (Christel Bodenstein) for an interview, doggedly insisting on a Marxist subtext in her dotage.

BBC blurb here, and from there you can link to the Listen Again option. Really wish I could see the programme again though. Damn fine!

I'm off to find out if there are websites to further whet my appetite for grim fable. Anybody got any auggestions?

18:18 / 27.01.03

Yes, back in the old days when kid's TV meant we got these bizarre foreign TV offerings. Robinson Crusoe anyone? They were all brilliant. Or the theme songs were anyway. Why hasn't some smart person released all this on DVD?

The Fast Show did a great sketch which IIRC was called The Singing A-Ringing A-Binging Tree. Or something. But there was a great scene when a character walks across a musical bridge that played Gary Numan's Cars! Excellent stuff!

18:38 / 27.01.03

I'm listening to the Radio 4 docu right now.

Fantasy's place in childhood has just been discussed, and someone has just mentioned Barbie dolls as an example of imaginative play.

Then the narrator said "...the Berlin Wall was built soon after the film was made, to keep East germans in, and Barbie culture out."

And God help me, for an instant my brain processed the phrase as "Barbeculture."

Barbelith is everywhere, my friends.

19:14 / 27.01.03

Seems to be many, many Singing Ringing Tree sites on the Interhighwebnet.

Damn, I'm jonesing to see this now: sounds like the makers of this film caught some of the same spirit as Aleksandr Ptushko, whose works (even in the bastardized forms I've seen them in, being mocked on MST3K) glow with the pure light of unhinged genius—bringing ancient folktales head-to-head with the demands of the State but somehow always managing to come down on the side of the Kids.

DVD of Singing Ringing is available. Ptushko is ripe for a larger-scale rediscovery.

Two more observations:

A) Who knows how many other forgotten treasures are mouldering in the vaults of non-allied nations, works we'll never see because their creators—by accident of geography—were our "enemies"?

B) Between this and Sapphire and Steel, I'm horribly jealous of your British childhoods—the sheer unpredictability of your pop culture. In the US, sure, we had the occasional wild card on kid's TV, but man, you guys seemed to have a deck stacked with jokers.

15:29 / 28.01.03

you guys seemed to have a deck stacked with jokers.

Couldbe another thread - Monkey, Harold Lloyd, Battle of the Planents and... erm, Grange Hill.

Who knows how many other forgotten treasures are mouldering in the vaults of non-allied nations, works we'll never see because their creators—by accident of geography—were our "enemies"?

I got this feeling when I watched the original of Solaris for the first time.

16:55 / 28.01.03

'PlanEnts'? Is that the one where they uprooted Fangorn and moved it to Mars?

18:16 / 28.01.03

Thanks for the link, Sir Jack, particularly that second one. Can't wait to track down the dvd and see it all again, in colour!

And I'm with you re Robinson Crusoe, arcboi. Having been tormented by being unable to remember the wonderful theme tune exactly for years, I fell upon a videotape of the first six episodes one happy, happy day and scampered home gleefully with it. Exquisitely morose.

18:46 / 28.01.03

Echo and The Bunnymen used the Robinson Crusoe theme to open live performances - and it always worked so well.

Somewhere in the arcboi archives (ha!) I've got the excellent themes for Double Deckers and White Horses. I see a concept forming for a compilation CD here......

05:42 / 30.01.03

Damn, I wish I'd known about this when I was in Moscow last July. Last week I did get a line on the entire 7-part run of
Raumpatrouille Orion, that is, Space Patrol Orion, a 1966 West German classic, on DVD. The guys in the German hacker group Chaos Computer Club are just nuts about it; it's their Star Trek and Space 1999 rolled into one. Friends of mine in the States gave me a tape, but I can't wait to copy the DVD. Another friend living in Hamburg tells me the TV stations there run East German movies late at night.

I'm still looking for episodes of "Worker and Parasite," the East German ripoff of Itchy and Scratchy...

05:45 / 30.01.03

There was also supposed to have been a late-Soviet (mid-80s) Rambo knockoff, and even a James Bond-style TV series called something like A Cold Day in Spring.

Find it before it rots or is taped over, rip it to DVD or VCD, and upload it before it's gone, because the internet is all about anamnesis, if it's about anything.

21:12 / 30.04.03

Ah, sweetest little elephant god in the world surprised me with the dvd of Das Singende Klingende Bäumchen today, just out over here! Such joy to relive it and, this time, in glorious technicolor, YEAH! "Ach, der liebe arme Bär..."

06:16 / 01.05.03

All round to yours, then? I'll bring the Cresta and Bazooka Joes.

And the short pants, obviously.