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Oskar, Kina and the Laser

NOW THIS is what we call obscure. Apparently, Oskar was a ten-year-old kid in a rural village, who gets bored one summer and decides to build a laser, as you do. Oskar goes to a lecture about lasers, and thus makes a laser (out of a bit of glass painted red – no rubies required in this tale) which he totes about in a sort of wooden box a bit like a a school satchel. Strangely, he never had to plug it in after the first episode or so. The laser causes all manner of mayhem on the farm, his dad flips out and confiscates it, he gets pissed off and sneaks out one night with the laser and Kina (a goose, of course) in tow. The laser starts talking to him and advising him to head off to… some kind of wacky adventures or something. Much later whole thing ended with multiple tear-jerker when said laser ran out of power and shut down for good. We’re continually surprised as to how many people actually recall this badly overdubbed (an English narrator’s voice barely conceals the original Eurodialogue still faintly audible underneath) wonder.

13 Comments

13 Comments

  1. mark

    October 7, 2010 at 9:29 am

    cant believe i finally put a name to this prog after decades of it hiding in the back parts of my brain,remember it fondly,probably due to seemingly exotic accents,seemed exotic at the time anyway,thanks tvcream

  2. Poppy

    November 3, 2010 at 8:38 pm

    Having had a simialr problem to Mark (above) regarding the Secret of Steel City I didn’t remember this at all until I read the description. It’s like some sort of weird dream, I know I have seen it but it almost seems too mad to believe now!

  3. Antonuzzo

    January 9, 2013 at 3:30 pm

    I can expand on this because, my freaky darlings, I HAVE A COPY OF THIS.

    It was actually a film! Made in 1978 in Barcelona, and serialized / overdubbed for the UK.

    Oscar had borderline autism, I reckon – he managed to successfully build a working laser from memory having looked inside a real one for all of five seconds. The laser’s beam was also prone to creeping along through the air and stopping inches away from Oscar’s face before speaking, in a manner not unlike that water thing in The Abyss, thus consigning General and Special relativity to the bin forever.

  4. FuzzyMemory

    October 31, 2013 at 9:59 pm

    BLIMEY! I didn’t know that I knew this until I read the description too! I think I really liked it.
    BTW, this is my sixth day in a row of reading TV Cream’s reviews: excellent, funny and bringing back so many memories! Thanks TVC!

  5. palimpsest

    November 26, 2013 at 11:01 pm

    Any one know where I can get a copy of this.

  6. mista nik

    May 8, 2014 at 3:14 am

    For some unknown reason, this programme popped into my head this evening. I can vividly remember (…most likely misremembered) the talking red laser and it’s soft voice, although that may have been the audible soundtrack below the dubbing.

    Now onto eBay to find a copy on DVD. I needs to see it again.

  7. Charles Faulkner

    July 7, 2014 at 12:55 am

    I can expand upon this even further, thanks to the fact that I still have a copy of this on my PC, which I transferred to CD from a video recording 🙂

    So, the basics: You already know about Oscar – he’s 10, he owns a weird assed goose which can vanish at the drop of a hat, he’s a smartarse and builds a laser over the summer because he’s bored as hell. But – this laser is special. Brilliantly voiced by Felip Peña, it is about as intelligent as you can get. It can as you already know, make him invisible, and cause all sorts of hell, resulting in Dad confiscating it.

    Oscar finds out on the news one day, about a small boy called Tony, who has been kidnapped and taken to the region of Galicia, where he’s being held for ransom. The laser convinces Oscar, to go find this kid, and rescue him.

    Duly, Oscar goes and recovers his laser, and off they go. Donned in his little yellow raincoat, hat and wellies, he uses various methods of transport including a bus, where Kina vanishes and the laser stays under his raincoat. Parents, obviously, as panicked as hell, and alert the police. During this ginormously hugemongous adventure, his life is made slightly more difficult, although about 10 times as funny, by three incompetent boobs, Tadio, Felicia and Jim – who quite frankly have the combined intelligence of an orange, and they’d make the three stooges look like they studied at Cambridge University.

    Anyway, to cut a long story short – and I can make this longer later, when I’ve refreshed my memory by watching it for the 11th time – Oscar manages to recover Tony and take him home, safe, sound and perfectly well. The end however, takes a sad little twist, when as Oscar lays down to go to sleep one night, he says good night to the laser, sitting on his bedside table, and the laser simply replies “goodbye, oscar”. After it induces Oscar to sleep, it never glows, or speaks again.

    This was shown in the UK on the BBC Children’s slot (before it became CBBC I believe) and it was broken into 6 x 20 min episodes (140 mins), slightly edited down – the original film was 132 minutes.

    A very large part of my childhood, which I watched when I was 8 – 32 years ago, and I loved it. Every single part of it, even the absolutely appalling overdub by Andrew Sachs (Manuel from Fawlty Towers).

  8. HardcorePrawn

    January 21, 2015 at 5:59 am

    “Oskar goes to a lecture about lasers, and thus makes a laser”
    To give him his dues Oskar did take some notes at the lecture. I remember him borrowing a pencil and paper from a friend and writing L-A-S-E-R very sloooooowly…

  9. Steve

    August 6, 2015 at 10:26 pm

    Glad this was areal program id seen after all. I thoughtid imagined or dreamt id watched it!

  10. Captain Jarrett

    March 17, 2016 at 8:26 pm

    Thank god some other people remember this show. I though my folks must have spiked my milkshake with acid.

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  12. Victoria

    January 6, 2018 at 9:45 am

    I’ve always had fond memories of a ‘foreign’ programme from my early childhood involving a boy wearing a wooden box around his neck accompanied by a duck (I thought). Occasionally I’d ask others if they could remember it (they couldn’t) or google trying to find it. Well last night I succeeded! An ambition achieved. It’s on YouTube but in Spanish only as far as I can tell. Happy memories.

  13. Clive Shaw

    August 15, 2021 at 10:06 pm

    I loved this and it is probably the first time in life I experienced real loss and sadness when the laser ran out of power at the end. I was not used to Children’s programmes ending in sad endings 🙁

    I always thought it was a Greek, not Spanish production. But I strangely remember it better than many of the BBC produced 5.10pm dramas around this time.

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