Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Mr Squiggle

Today at work i noticed a guy with a pen around his ear and teased him that he was trying to be like Mr Squiggle

One of the men in the office didnt know who Mr Squiggle was and it made me think what young children where missing out on these days. A show that you could see creativity without any badness in it at all, showing how drawing was a cool thing to do.

Mr Squiggle used to be on ABC Australia, he was a marionette with a pencil for a nose, who visited his friends from his home at 93 Crater Crescent on the Moon, flying in his pet rocket (named Rocket).

What he did was every episode he would create several pictures from "squiggles" sent in by children
from around the country. I used to think how clever he was as some of the squiggles that where sent in seemed pretty hard to make a picture from but he did each time.

Mr. Squiggle was created by Norman Hetherington, and the character first appeared on the Children's TV Club on ABC TV, but was spun-off into his own programme which first aired on 1 July 1959. Hetherington voiced all the show's puppets, while his wife Margaret wrote the scripts. The last episode went to air just over 40 years later on 9 July 1999.

Mr. Squiggle was always helped by a human female assistant in all of the show's incarnations; they included Miss Gina (Gina Curtis), Miss Pat (Pat Lovell), Miss Jane (Jane Fennell), and later series featured Roxanne (Roxanne Kimmorley) and Rebecca (Rebecca Hetherington, Hetherington's daughter).

At the start the show used to run for 30 minutes but in the 90's the show went to five minutes

The characters where Mr Squiggle, Rocket, Blackboard, Bill the Steamshovel and Gus the Snail

It seems the picture would be drawn upside down (Hetherington manipulated the puppet from above by viewing the drawing upside down), and then Mr. Squiggle would gleefully declare: "Upside down! Upside down!" – asking his assistant to turn the picture the right way up and reveal the completed drawing.

Aww memories, when to me time was innocent still.


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