Bleep and Booster was an animated children's cartoon series by William Timym (Tim) originally shown on the BBC's Blue Peter. Bleep is an alien from the planet Miron, and Booster is a young human who travels with Bleep performing galactic missions for Bleep's father.
The narrator of all the Bleep and Booster stories was Peter Hawkins, who also provided the voices for the Daleks and Cybermen in many Doctor Who stories in the 1960s, and you can clearly hear the Dalek voice in the Controller of Space Project X!
A total of 39 episodes were shown between 1963 and c1971. Each episode was sub-divided into five or six 5 minute parts, with a cliffhanger at the end of each part. The 313 mini-episodes were shown once, and never repeated. There is a regularly-updated Bleep and Booster FaceBook Group which has a lot more information and images, if you are interested in finding out more about this much neglected cult series.
Only 2 story arcs are known to have survived: The Giant Brain, and Solaron, though it is said the other stories are "gathering dust" in the BBC archives somewhere...). As well as 5 Bleep and Booster annuals, they also featured in 14 of the Blue Peter annuals from 1964 to 1977, leading some sites online to state that the TV show also ran for this period of time too, but this is certainly not the case!
I've not seen a definitive date, but the show almost certainly started in 1963, and ran until the very early part of the '70s, I'm guessing 1971. If you remember it on TV later than that, do let us know please!
The surviving two stories make up around 66 minutes of play time, and I have upscaled this footage to 1536 x 1152 resolution, and further enhanced it using Topaz Video Lab AI and PowerDirector 365.
Here is Part 4 of Solaron. The Solaron story aired between 14th and 31st October 1968.
I've divided the episode up into roughly 6 minute parts, ending each one where (I'm guessing) the original cliffhangers were [Edit: the story seems to have cliffhangers in odd places, making some episodes less than 4 minutes long]. The following mini-episode will be linked at the end of each episode. Part 1 can be seen here:
• Bleep and Booster "Sol...
In my mind, and others I've spoken to, Bleep and Booster ready did move, but actually they really did not! The show was not made with traditional animation, rather it employed animatic animation: the camera pans and zooms in and out of still images, giving the impression of movement.
7 сен 2024
