The Fox Busters
by Dick King-Smith (1978)
Endemic to an era when it was de rigueur for children’s authors themselves to be literate, this story remains a high-spirited classic: skills honed by natural selection, farmyard fowls fight to outwit then turn the tables on the foxes who hunt them.
The Goodies, Series 1
by Graeme Garden & Bill Oddie (with Tim Brooke-Taylor) (BBC 1970)
In 1970 comedy trio the Goodies arrived under their own names, riding a trandem bicycle and pioneering a freeform sitcom where they claimed to do anything, anytime. Exuberant, irreverent, chaotic: Tim, Bill and Graeme soon found themselves (to quote their song) needed.
Star Wars: Splinter of the Mind’s Eye
by Alan Dean Foster (Del Rey, 1978)
Set and first published between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, Foster’s hurriedly written, workmanlike tie-in novel sends Luke and Leia on a meandering, curiously pointless quest, before pitting them (belatedly) against an ineffectual and always-likely-to-be canonically suspect Darth Vader.
The Two Ronnies, Series 1
(BBC, 1971)
Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker reigned for fifteen years in iconically uncool glasses, starting in 1971 with their trademark fast wordplay (the acme being episode five’s spoonerisms sketch) and a touch of the risqué, interspersed with novelty and (now passé) musical acts.
Flatliners
dir. Joel Schumacher (1990)
Twenty-five years on, Flatliners’ ensemble all-star cast looks to have injected water from the fountain of youth. This shadowy supernatural film hasn’t aged either, suspense levels and consequences spiking as five medical students kill then revive themselves in search of the afterlife.
Red Dwarf VI
by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor (BBC, 1993)
After a stellar run from 1988-1992, Red Dwarf returned in 1993 as a caricatured shadow (almost a parody) of its first five seasons, stripping the crew of all seriousness and sacrificing thematically self-contained episodes for cheap laughs and a token story arc.
Batman
dir. Tim Burton (Warner Bros., 1989)
By far the pick of the franchise pre-Nolan — albeit not as funky as Prince’s soundtrack would intimate — the original Batman soared, giving us Jack Nicholson as a whimsically understated over-the-top Joker and Michael Keaton as the most beguiling Bruce Wayne of all.
Howard the Duck
dir. Willard Huyck (Lucasfilm, 1986)
Though not the outright flop of lore, this hand-me-down from George Lucas’ Star Wars clique prevaricates disastrously between child-orientated performances and inexplicably adult humour. It remains a must-see film, however, if only for Jeffrey Jones as a demonically possessed Ed Rooney cross-pollination.
Monkey Goes West
dir. Ho Meng-Hua (Shaw Brothers, 1966)
[released with three sequels under the umbrella title: Monkey – Journey to the West, Siren DVD, 2008]
Based on Wu Cheng’en’s Buddhist quest novel Journey to the West, this meandering film-cum-musical seems almost entirely without point or consequence… except to establish prototypes of nearly all those iconic visual elements featured subsequently in the 1978-1980 TV series Saiyūki (aka Monkey).
The Great Piratical Rumbustification (& The Librarian and the Robbers)
by Margaret Mahy (J. M. Dent, 1978)
Two stories by New Zealand’s doyen of children’s books: the second, a quietly subversive extolment of libraries; the first, a droll yet puckishly young-at-heart parable on quality of life, with bonhomous pictures by Quentin Blake and an endearingly rumtiddlyumptious neologism to boot!