The Wombles is a stop motion

Stop motion

Stop motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence...

 animated British television series made in 1973–1975. Further animated episodes were made in 1996–1997.

After the first Wombles

The Wombles

The Wombles are fictional pointy-nosed, furry creatures that live in burrows, where they help the environment by collecting and recycling rubbish in useful and ingenious ways. Wombles were created by author Elisabeth Beresford, originally appearing in a series of children's novels from 1968...

 book, published in 1968, was featured on the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

  children's television programme Jackanory

Jackanory

Jackanory is a long-running BBC children's television series that was designed to stimulate an interest in reading. The show was first transmitted on 13 December 1965, the first story being the fairy-tale Cap o' Rushes read by Lee Montague. Jackanory continued to be broadcast until 24 March 1996,...

.
, the BBC commissioned producer FilmFair

FilmFair

FilmFair was a British production company and animation studio that produced stop motion children's television series and animated cartoons from the late 1960s until the mid-1990s...

 to create a television series of the books. The series was produced by Graham Clutterbuck and directed by Ivor Wood

Ivor Wood

Ivor Wood was a prolific Anglo-French stop motion director, producer, animator and writer known for his work on children's television series....

 using stop-motion. The characters were all voiced by actor Bernard Cribbins

Bernard Cribbins

Bernard Cribbins, OBE is an English character actor, voice-over artist and musical comedian with a career spanning over half a century who came to prominence in films in the 1960s, has been in work consistently since his professional debut in the mid 1950s, and as of 2010 is still an active...

. Sets and model making were by Barry Leith. Two series of 30 five minute episodes were produced, with the first series airing in 1973, animated by Ivor Wood, and the second in 1975, animated by Barry Leith. In all, sixty episodes were made.

The original television series remained popular with children in the eighties. After FilmFair was acquired by the Canadian company Cinar Films in 1996, a new series of episodes was released in 1997, with a number of new Womble characters. In the UK, the series was purchased by ITV.

Series One (1973)

1. Orinoco & The Big Black Umbrella
2. The Rocking Chair
3. A Sticky Ending (or A Sticky End)
4. Great Uncle Bulgaria's Keep Fit Lesson
5. A Safe Place
6. Peep-Peep-Peep
7. The Purple Paw Mystery
8. Bungo's Birthday Party
9. The Invisible Womble
10. Orinoco Sees The Light
11. The Conkering Hero
12. One Pair Of Feet
13. Tobermory On Television
14. Crossed Lines
15. Blow The Womble Down
16. Madame Cholet Returns
17. Weighing In Time
18. Musical Wombles
19. Wombles And Ladders
20. Orinoco And The Ghost
21. A Game Of Golf
22. North, South, East, West
23. The Picnic
24. Games In The Snow
25. The Snow Wombles
26. What's Cooking?
27. Spring Cleaning Time
28. Marrow Pie
29. The Cement Mixer
30. The Circus Comes To Wimbledon

Series Two (1975)

1. Bungo Up A Tree
2. Time And Slow Motion
3. Tomsk In Trouble
4. The Largest Womble In The World
5. Running Out Of Steam
6. Orinoco's Midnight Feast
7. Speak Up
8. The Vanishing Pancake
9. Madame Cholet & the Blackberries
10. The Fruit Machine
11. Portrait Of Great Uncle Bulgaria
12. Very Behind The Times
13. Burrow Hot Line
14. Trunk Call
15. MacWomble The Terrible
16. A Single Piper
17. Porridge For Breakfast
18. Highland Games
19. Home Sickness
20. Goodbye MacWomble
21. Hiccups
22. Film Show
23. Pirate Gold
24. Warm & Cosy
25. Autumn Leaves
26. The Wombles Times
27. Operation W.R.A.P.
28. The Secret Snorer
29. Womble Fool's Day
30. Womble Summer Party