The Wombles are Britain's counterpart to the Smurfs, the Gnomes, the Trolls, and so on: in the 1960s and 1970s, every European country had its own cast of counterculture-influenced yet eminently franchisable creature cultures. The Wombles are hedgehog-like characters who live in burrows in parkland ("the Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we…") and clean up after thoughtless, littering humans. Though extremely influential in UK society (from fabulously nostalgic pop music to an ongoing association with local environmentalim) the franchise itself has lain fallow for more than two decades due to business missteps, intellectual property disputes, and tabloid fury at a black womble—originally added to the cast thirty years ago—appearing in promotional material for an aborted reboot a few years ago. Finally, though, it looks like something is happening!
When The Wombles team started to think about getting a new look and feel, they reached out to How&How, which has experience working with clean-tech and sustainably-focused brands. "We actually couldn't believe it at first. It was surreal…in a good way!" says the studio's founder, CEO and executive creative director, Cat How. Excitement rippled throughout the How&How slack channel at the prospect of working with such a cherished brand, and the added sustainability angle made it even more appealing. How playfully refers to The Wombles as "the UK's original environmentalists" and was glad to hear that the Wombles team wanted to "refocus the narrative once again around this core truth of the characters".
I like the charming, old-fashioned style of the illustration work here—compare to the instantly-dated CGI from the other efforts. And better still: the Wombles will return to the screen!
The TV arm of Altitude Media Group is forging a fresh version of the beloved animated British family series about a secretive group of furry creatures who live beneath Wimbledon Common, which is being co-produced with The Wombles production house and written by How to Train Your Dragon's Will Davies.
Based on Elisabeth Beresford's children's novels, the stop-motion show ran in the mid-70s on the BBC featuring the voice of Bernard Cribbins, was remade in the mid-90s for ITV and remastered earlier this year as it turned 50. Altitude didn't elaborate further on how it will be modernizing the classic.
Better than the Wombles, though, were the Borribles: a series of amazingly weird children's books published in the 1970s which parodied it. It was about tribes of punk elves, living in the run-down squats of South London, who go to war with the Wombles (barely veiled as "Rumbles") after they set out to gentrify Battersea. After defeating the Wom—sorry, the Rumbles—in the first story they go on to do battle with the Metropolitan Police in later installments. The books' uncompromising anti-authoritarianism and anti-establishment humor ultimately got the series memory-holed by its publisher in the Thatcher era. If the Wombles are truly back, the Borribles can't be far behind… with their slingshots and well-earned names and inconvenient truths for anyone who still hopes to save the world by recycling consumer goods.
