Reading screenplays is difficult, with fewer clues apart from stage directions to imagine the scene, they often come across as strange and in the case of the first Magic Roundabout movie, completely bonkers. The screenplay written by Eric Thompson, (Emma’s dad, in case you didn’t know), who wrote the English scripts to all the episodes too is bonkers, although the book has a section of plates from the film, so is not totally without reference. The film and TV episodes were all made in France by Serge Danot, and Thompson wrote new, often quite surreal, scripts to fit and narrated them. I went to see the film in 1972 as soon as it came out in the UK; I was 11 and a huge fan of the Magic Roundabout. It turns out that Dougal and the Blue Cat is one of Mark Kermode’s favourite films too – he loves its bonkers-ness.
In the film, a blue cat called Buxton turns up in the garden, and Dougal is the only one who is suspicious. Buxton is the tool of Madame Blue, only heard as the ‘Voice’, voiced by Fenella Fielding, who wants to turn the world blue. Buxton steals Zebedee’s magic moustache and imprisons all the inhabitants of the garden except Dougal who must save the day, by dying his fur blue and calling himself ‘Blue Peter’ (aka the BBC’s long-running kids magazine show), surviving torture by exposure to his favourite thing in the world (sugar) and rescuing his friends.
I love Dougal. He’s rather verbose and Thompson gives him pun after pun, and in-jokes for grown-ups, (he’s picking flowers for Florence and says ‘Constance Spray strikes again,’ for instance). Because he does go on a bit, people often lose interest in what he’s saying, but his heart is in the right place.
ZEBEDEE: Er . . . Dougal’s got a bit of a problem he wants to talk about.
FLORENCE: A problem?
ZEBEDEE: That’s what he told me – a problem.
But no one really wanted to know about Dougal and his problems. They had a blue cat and couldn’t think of anything else.
MR RUSTY: It’s not a day for problems . . . it’s a day for celebration and delight.
MR RUSTY turned the magic roundabout. The BLUE CAT laughed slyly to itself.
CAT: Oh, this lot’s going to be a pushover. A pushover!
This was such a delightful nostalgia trip. I could imagine Thompson doing all the voices, aided by Fenella Fielding’s husky villainess. Although this script was only published for the first time in 1999, there are four other books of stories, The Adventures of… Dougal, Brian, Dylan and Ermintrude, originally written in the mid-1970s, published in the same 1990s livery by Bloomsbury. There are loads of Magic Roundabout episodes to be found on YouTube too, such fun!
Source: Own copy. Bloomsbury paperback, 1999, 80 pages, plus colour plate section.
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