It has been announced that the classic kids TV favourite Bagpuss is coming to Blu-Ray. The stop frame animated series was fully scanned and restored from the film negatives, and is presented in high definition for the first time.
Made by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin’s Smallfilms, the series of 13 episodes was first broadcast in 1974. The opening sequence told the story of a little girl called Emily, a shop and her cloth cat Bagpuss. In each episode, a new item was left for the toys to ponder. Other characters that lived in the shop include the six mice of the “mouse organ”, a rag doll called Madeleine and a wooden woodpecker bookend called Professor Yaffle.
Episodes include:
1. Ship in a Bottle
2. The Owls of Athens
3. The Frog Princess
4. The Ballet Shoe
5. The Hamish
6. The Wise Man
7. The Elephant
8. The Mouse Mill
9. The Giant
10. The Old Man’s Beard
11. The Fiddle
12. Flying
13. Uncle Freedle
Bonus features on the Blu-Ray include:
Peter Firmin – At Home With Bagpuss
BAFTA Children’s Award: Celebrating Smallfilms
The Story of Smallfilms
Other series by Smallfilms included The Clangers, Pogles’ Wood, Noggin the Nog and Ivor the Engine. As of September 2023, Bagpuss is the only Smallfilms production to be given a high definition Blu-Ray release.
The release is distributed by Fabulous Films, who recently released the Trumptonshire Trilogy on Blu-Ray.
The complete series of Bagpuss on Blu-Ray can be pre-ordered from Amazon. It will be released on the 9th of October 2023.
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