The Wombles
The Wombles are literary characters by British author Elisabeth Beresford in a number of eponymous children's books ( The Wombles ), which appeared in 1968 in England.
Children's Books
The Wombles are sharp-nosed, furry and teddy bear -like cavemen in Wimbledon, London. In the original children's stories they are committed by ingenuity and inventiveness to clean up the environment and to promote environmental awareness in this way. The name " Womble " allegedly goes back to a slip of the tongue of one of the children of the author, the "Wimbledon" mistakenly " Wombledon " to have been made.
A total of five children's books originated in English: The Wombles (1968), The Wandering Wombles (1970), The Wombles at Work (1973 ), The Wombles to the Rescue (1974) and The Wombles Go Round the World ( 1976). The central Womble characters are: Great Uncle Bulgaria ( Great Uncle Bulgaria), Trinidad ( Tobermory ), Orinoco, Bungo, Wellington, Madame Cholet, Kiev ( Tomsk ), Alderney, Miss Adelaide and Stepney.
TV series and feature film
Between 1973 and 1975, was created by the British production company Film Fair, a television adaptation of the Wombles for the BBC. The sixty five -minute puppet animation films were prepared by means of the stop-motion technique. In the original English Bernard Cribbins gave all Wombles his voice in the German version Dieter Hallervorden. For the German premiere in 1977 in ZDF eve program an alternative dubbed version was produced with distributed speaker roles in which said among other things Arnold Marquis Uncle Bulgaria, and in the German version of the title song was sung in the opening credits. The text read:
Environment starts his own business, Wombles are creatures that do something for it! Quiet and friendly and clean they are, everyone must wombeln, otherwise it never works!
The written by Mike Batt original version of the title song, the Wombling Song, could 1974 - place as a single in the UK charts - in addition to three other compilations taken. Then designed Batt four albums ( Wombling Songs, Remember you're a Womble, Keep on Wombling and Superwomble ). Furthermore, a live-action feature film with actors in costume in 1977 with Wombling free produced as Wombles. Batt supplied for this children's film also the soundtrack. 1998, there was a new edition of the Wombles as a puppet animation series that was produced by the Canadian company Cinar Films. December 2007 is a DVD released with the first 15 episodes and new synchronization on the German market.
Others
The Wombles appeared in Europe in 1974 as the Interval Act during voting under the produced by the BBC Euro Vision Song Contest, in which she - accompanied by a mix of her songs The Wombling Song and Remember you're a Womble - in a box office movie cityscapes from the Brighton venue presented.
The mascot of the football club AFC Wimbledon is a Womble named " Haydon ". The name was hand-picked by a Namensgebungswettbewerb by Elisabeth Beresford and refers to the station Haydon's Road, who was closest to the old stadium of FC Wimbledon, the Plough Lane.