Button Moon

A firm favourite of mine during my nursery school years, 'Button Moon' had a large following of fans in those who were tots in the early Eighties. It was a very low-budget show with the characters were put together using wooden spoons and tin cans but it worked when complimented with simple story-telling and a solid musical score.

There was something very surreal about 'Button Moon' that I loved as a child (although I could see why people now link it to a drugs' trip!) but it was a show that proves you don't need high-quality CGI to keep small children (and adults!) entertained. Upon viewing it recently, after a friend bought the DVD, it certainly brought back memories and would no doubt be equally as popular with today's toddlers as it was with kids in the Eighties.

Yet another programme from my wasted youth, 'Button Moon' maintains a weird power all these years later. As with all the best kids' shows, 'Button Moon' was dedicated to helping its young audience's imaginations sprout from the normalities of everyday life. All the world was a potential playground. Thus, kitchen utensils become the restless Mr Spoon and his family, baked bean tins become spaceships, cardboard boxes become houses. All good staples of a healthy child's imaginative development.

However, this same approach helped give the show a very weird, very trippy atmosphere, ensuring it cult TV status years later. It looks as if it were literally filmed in a dustbin. Bananas fly through the sky with green bean wings; party dresses suffer from depression; umbrellas play golf. In one particularly inspired sequence, Mr Spoon, trapped on top of a squealing Royal Jelly, is rescued by a small army of gingerbread men wielding a ladder constructed from chocolate finger biscuits.

Ineffably English - check out the thinly disguised Heinz logo on the baked-bean tin spaceship, for instance, or the cockney troll in the 'Little Goats Gruff' episode - it features terrific narration by Robin Parkinson, and a theme tune that will haunt you till your dying day. 'Button Moon' is surely the pinnacle of early 1980s English children's psychedelic sci-fi puppetry weirdness.

This was on of the oddest kids programmes from the early 80's. Mr Spoon (a wooden spoon with a big nose) and his wife and child lived under the gaze of Button Moon (a large yellow button) which they went up to in the space ship that our hero Mr Spoon had made. Basically it was hand held wooden spoons over a black velvet backdrop being moved about with a narration , and i know that i was too old to be watching it when i did but it was hypnotic. A very strange one indeed that has to be seen to be believed.

i love button moon i have all the videos. there was not a better tv show than that. Captin Pugwash came close. but i love button moon. although the guy behind the black sheet might as just gave a big smile and waved we could see him moving around. but i dont care I LOVE BUTTON MOON.

I can safely say that Button Moon was my most favourite piece of children's television ever to have graced our great screens. All I remember from my childhood is sitting close to the TV and watching every single (short but worth it) episode and dreaming of flying off to my own big button in the sky... and it was all low budget too! forget your expensive production line 'toons that kids are entertained with nowadays, nothing beats a baked bean tin and the contents of your kitchen drawer! Even years later, I can still say it is incredibly entertaining, as while drunk at the beginning of my uni years myself and the guys next door lay giggling in my room watching the amusing vacuum cleaner and his "vvmmvvvmvvvvvm" speech, completely in hysterics at the wobbly jelly, our friends teddy, rag doll and lest not forget the army of bottles! Trippy as it was, button moon RULED - as it still does!