Description

The Magic Roundabout is an English-language children’s television programme that ran from 1965 to 1977. It used the footage of the French stop motion animation show Le Manège enchanté but with completely different scripts and characters.

Although the characters are common to both versions, they were given different names and personalities depending on the language.

The main character is Dougal (also known as Doogal) (Pollux in the original French-language version), who was a drop-eared variety of the Skye Terrier.

Other characters include Zebedee (Zébulon), a talking jack-in-the-box with magical powers; Brian (Ambroise), a snail; Ermintrude (Azalée), a cow; and Dylan (named after Bob Dylan) (Flappy), a hippy rabbit. There are two notable human characters: Florence (Margote), a young girl; and Mr Rusty (le Père Pivoine), the elderly moustached operator of the roundabout.

Other characters included Mr McHenry (Bonhomme Jouvence), the elderly gardener who rode a tricycle, and a talking locomotive with a 4-2-2 wheel arrangement and a two-wheel tender. Three other children, Paul, Basil and Rosalie, appeared in the original black-and-white serial and in the credit sequence of the colour episodes, but very rarely in subsequent episodes.

Dougal, Brian, Ermintrude and Dylan all reside in a place called The Magic Garden (Beautywood in the US version). The exact distance from where the roundabout and The Magic Garden are in relation to each other was never specifically stated, but, given Zebedee and Florence would always travel there by magical teleportation, it was either considerably far away or it was simply faster to get there by those means.

The show has a distinctive visual style. The set is a brightly coloured and stylised park containing the eponymous roundabout (a fairground carousel). The programmes were created by stop motion animation, which meant that Dougal was made without legs to make him easier to animate. Zebedee was created from a giant pea which was available in the animation studio and was re-painted.