UNDERGROUND, OVERGROUND… and oversold during the seventies, if you ask us. Were two films and countless singles and albums really necessary? MIKE BATTery aside, the original stop-mo series was a cracker. The furry, prehensile-nosed Wombles (Great Uncle Bulgaria, Tobermory, Orinoco, Bungo, Tomsk, Wellington, Madame Cholet, Adelaide) tidied up Wimbledon Common with their tidy-bags, making good use of the things that they found. BERNARD CRIBBINS narrated as well as can be done.
Wombles, The
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THX Kling Klang
September 25, 2011 at 11:10 pm
I always remember the one where Orinoco almost got caught by an actual person. He looked like a businessman reading a newspaper on a bench, except at the time I thought it was weird he appeared as cartoonish as the Wombles themselves instead of lifelike.
“Two films”? What was the other one (apart from Wombling Free)?
Graham Pearson
April 11, 2015 at 7:49 pm
Mike Batt was the guy who sang a song about the Wombles and I know that his mother Elaine was best known for making Wombles stage costumes. Mike said back in the nineties that if the guys inside the Wombles needed the bog they had to wee into a bucket.
richardpd
August 5, 2020 at 11:24 pm
Chris “Motorbiking” Spedding was normally inside the Wellington costume IIRC.
Thw Wombles weren’t Mike Batt’s only involvement with burrowing furry creatures with a environmental agenda, writing Bright Eyes for Watership Down.
Tom Ronson
October 25, 2022 at 6:34 pm
Wombling Free was the first film I ever saw at the cinema, so I’ll always have a soft spot for it, even though the wet fart of an ending remains a crushing disappointment. The ‘Wombling White Tie and Tails’ sequence is worth the admission price on its own, frankly.