Doctor Snuggles

I looked this up the other day when I heard the great Peter Ustinov passed away.

I used to get up early to catch Dr. Snuggles when it used to run on Sunday morning. The most tripped out, bizarre cartoon I've ever watched. The animation was crude, the stories borderline ridiculous and the voices magnificent. Imagine if W.C. Fields did his script for Never Give A Sucker An Even Break every week - and you might have an idea of the kind of adventures that Snuggles had each week.

My favorite was when he and Badger had to fly to the other side of the moon to save the local cat hospital.

This was another one of those crazy shows that we had at the time. The whole thing made very little sense, but it nevertheless entertained everyone! The authors of both this 'Doctor' and 'Professor' Balthazar's show seemed to understand very little, if anything, of science. In both shows, where even logic is challenged continuously, all sciences are treated as something very close to magic and most of the time not really essential to the resolution of the episode's central conundrum.

What was really at the center of the show was its heart: the idea that everyone contributing their individual talents to the group would always result in a solution to any problem.

Back when I was younger my parents borrowed an old Beta tape from my uncle which contained several episodes of Dr Snuggles. To this day that tape still resides somewhere in their house, along with the Beta VCR to play it. I used to watch that tape endlessly and could probably recite what happens in nearly every episode that was on there shot by shot.

The show was inspiring and creative, with a real sense of adventure and wacky invention-based problem solving. The characters were all funny, but somehow quite believable. Likewise, the inventions, although impossible (a robot made of soup cans for instance), still made sense in the context of the show.

I remember wanting to be an inventor when I was younger and this show really had me hooked on the concept. These days, while I'm not an inventor of rocket ships and soup can robots, I'd like to think that the creative direction my life has taken is, in part, due to growing up with Dr Snuggles.

I watched this as a kid and I loved it. As an adult I re-watched this and still found Doctor Snuggles interesting. The show might seem old fashioned for now, but certainly it is not outdated. You can find a lot of Lewis Carroll in here, but also some Douglas Adams, who himself actually wrote a couple of the episodes. Doctor Snuggles is a synthesis of an old Victorian culture and the newer sixties psychedelic movement. The Doctor himself is a good natured philanthropist and inventing genius, who helps people, human-like animals, and monsters to overcome their unimaginable problems. The story runs in a colourful landscape where nothing seems to be what it first looks like. The solutions that Doctor Snuggles discovers are usually extraordinary, and that will keep even an adult viewer interested into the end of an episode.

I always really wanted to become an inventor after watching Dr.Snuggles in my childhood. He can create robots by connecting old marmalade cans, make them alive by inserting an old alarm clock and build every machine you could imagine by just combining simple parts.

Not to forget the psychedelic parts of the series (well, I didn't really recognize them in my childhood :-). Flying marmalade-trees, every plant and animal is talking and most of them smile all the time, there is a camel living on a rainbow, there are salt and pepper mountains (where lives a witch riding on a motor-driven broom, invented by Dr Snuggles) and it's all very very colorful. Really a great series.