Smallfilms’ stop-motion oddity follows a family of armour-clad rodents on a hollow moon, their whistle-speak rendered by swannee whistles and narrated by creator Oliver Postgate. Peter Firmin built the craggy lunar set from chicken wire and found objects; his wife Joan knitted the Clangers’ dusty-rose bodies and Roman-style tin-lid armour. Each ten-minute vignette turns on gentle engineering crises: a Music Tree drops mis-tuned fruit, the Iron Chicken lays metallic eggs, or the Soup Dragon refuses lunch. Vernon Elliott’s bassoon-led score drifts through the vacuum like lullaby jazz.
The 1969–74 run totalled twenty-six episodes and a 1974 election-day special, “Vote for Froglet”, now preserved at the BFI. A 2015 revival kept the wool and wire but added Michael Palin’s narration and CBeebies’ larger budget, pushing the episode count to 104 plus two specials and winning the 2015 BAFTA for Pre-School Animation. The new series still shoots frame-by-frame in a Bristol studio, resisting the CGI that swallowed fellow revivals.
The creatures began as the tail-less Moonmouse in a 1967 Noggin First Reader book; Postgate simply snipped the tail and gave BBC1 a space age it could air the week Apollo 12 left Earth. The name itself is onomatopoeic: the metallic clang of a dustbin-lid hatch slamming shut against meteor showers and wayward television sets.
Production Details
BBC One / 2 Seasons / 26 Episodes / 1969
Created by: Oliver Postgate
Main Cast
Oliver Postgate as Narrator (voice)
