September sees the twentieth anniversary of Wolves
Witches & Giants. Still airing on the CITV channel, the show featured the
voice of the legendary Spike Milligan.
The idea of adapting
well known fairy tales that featured a baddie [a wolf, a witch, a giant] came
to me when I was recording Spike Milligan in a musical setting of his masterful
tale "Badjelly the Witch". He did the cackling witch so well on that
recording [in the mid 70s] that I determined to do an LP of fairy tales with
musical backing [in the style of Peter and the Wolf]. I knew a record executive
[Dennis Knowles] who was keen to put it out ... he wanted a double LP, so I got
to work adapting the fairy tales [mainly Grimm's fairy tales] and the LP came
out and did reasonably well, with a bit of TV advertising, in the early
eighties.
Fast forward to the
early 90s when I met Simon and Sara Bor. We collaborated on a short animation
on the Television Southwest hero and mascot Gus Honeybun. They came to my house
for lunch and asked [as they were leaving] if I had any projects that might be
good for animation. I gave them the Wolves double LP and that was that! ... We
did a couple of minutes as a pilot – our choice was The Wolf and the Seven kids
– and headed up to Inverness for that year's Cartoon Forum. There we played it
to a roomful of TV execs and before you could say Loch Ness Monster we had been
commissioned to do a series for ITV.
If you will forgive the
pun, that project kept the wolf from our door for many years to come.......
Ed Welch [adapter and
composer Wolves Witches and Giants]
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