Dutch educational TV programme Het Klokhuis (the apple core) has just replaced its old intro. The new leader was made by American animator and Oscar nominee PES (the stage name of Adam Pesapane).
Het Klokhuis is a daily educational programme for 8- to 12-year-olds which deals with a single theme each episode using both reporting, skits and songs. It was originally created in 1988 by the actors behind the Stratemakersopzeeshow, Aart Staartjes, Wieteke van Dort and Joost Prinsen.
(Photo: crop of the video. Video: YouTube / PESfilm)
Filed under: Shows,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:20 pm
After Dutch reality show Big Brother went galactic, the Dutch have been producing and copying other countries’ reality shows like there’s no tomorrow. However, this next idea is way out there — literally.
The man behind the Mars One idea is Bas Lansdorp who claims that in 2023 we’ll finally put people on Mars. Not only that, but he’s thinking, why not have a reality show on the red planet as well, while we’re there. What scares me as I write this is that he has devised a way to get there, costing about 5 billion euro, but no way whatsoever of getting back. It’s a one-way journey. Getting back is currently too complicated to work out, which sounds like every movie I’ve seen featuring Mars, and they end badly.
Only four people can go at once, a trip that lasts seven months. “We’ve had hundreds of people who are willing to go and settle Mars, even families with children.”
And why would this actually work? There has been plans galore to settle Mars. You have to read his reasons for yourself, it scares me too. Why would anyone want to leave this planet and go somewhere where you couldn’t see your friends or travel as you would on Earth? It sounds like a prison to me.
When I watch any space movie, I actually get freaked out by people dying of asphyxiation or being thrown out a space lock. Of course the idea of going to Mars is cool, but is it worth dying for, I wonder.
And then there’s this old Dutch beer commercial that echoes a Mars landing as well.
In 2010 a German octopus called Paul made worldwide headlines by correctly ‘predicting’ the results of South African football World Cup matches.
A petting zoo called De Pijp in Amsterdam (after the neighbourhood) is now trying to ride Paul’s famous name by organizing an ‘eviction show’ called Holland’s Next Octopus Paul in which twelve animals compete for the honour of being the most prescient.
The format is similar to a lot of reality shows. Animals have to predict the outcomes of a 2012 European Football Championship match by eating from a container with the flag of a competing country. The animal that gets it wrong, gets the axe—not literally, we hope. Parool reports that the contestants include a sheep, a horse, a donkey, a mouse, a cat, a guinea pig and a chicken.
The first predictions, for the Netherlands v. Denmark match, are now in:
A Dutch man who underwent hip surgery two years ago has appeared in a TV interview claiming he has not been able to stop laughing ever since.
According to Huug Bosse’s wife, her husband now spends his days laughing at everyone and everything and it all started when he had a hip replaced under anaesthesia in 2010.
Bosse (70) used to be a greengrocer in Krommenie, halfway between Amsterdam and Alkmaar. He was known for his cheerful disposition, but according to his wife Nolda, it has gotten too much: “If you are trying to have a conversation, and all you get in return is laughter, it starts to get annoying.”
The interview was shown in Man Bijt Hond, originally a Flemish programme of which this is the Dutch version. Dutch television, or rather Christian broadcaster NCRV, likes its eccentrics—Showroom (1977-1982) and De Stoel (1990-2004) focused exclusively on them.
Filed under: Shows,Weird by Branko Collin @ 12:50 pm
We suggested last month that politician Rick Santorum may have broken the world record on bald faced lying in his weight class when he talked about the horrors of the Dutch health care system.
If anything Santorum’s statements left Dutch pundits flabbergasted. Yesterday US comedian Stephen Colbert came to the rescue of every confused Dutch person and explained why Santorum says just the darndest things. The part about the Netherlands starts at 2:58.
“Evidently Santorum’s comments about the Netherlands were yanked out of … his nether parts.”
Stephen Colbert is a comedian who pretends to be a right-wing blow-hard pundit styling himself on the likes of Bill O’Reilly.
Three friends from the Eindhoven University of Technology run a website to crowd source the detection of pretty girls behind popular TV anchor Matthijs van Nieuwkerk.
The interface to hetmeisjeachtermatthijs.nl is very simple. It presents you with a screenshot of last night’s episode of talk show De Wereld Draait Door, covered in squares that any visitor can click on. Just click the square that covers the pretty girl, in your opinion, and your vote is recorded.
According to Bright, the site has been up for about 18 months, and drew 10,000 visitors last year.
“Part of the fun”, founder Teun Vinken told the tech site, “is that the girls are blurry. Half the time you cannot even be sure they are really that pretty.”
Filed under: Comics,Shows by Branko Collin @ 8:43 am
Is it possible to speak of the advantages of a dying medium? Right now comics don’t seem to be in particularly good shape. Where magazines like Eppo and the new Dutch Mad used to be made for kids, they now appear to be produced mainly for the grown-ups that used to be kids when they last read those magazines.
On the other hand, a mature audience for comics can lead to mature comics. A good TV series about comics did not seem viable one or two decades ago (Han Peekel made a valiant but ultimately not too successful attempt with Wordt Vervolgd, To Be Continued), but last Saturday cartoonist Jean-Marc (Fokke & Sukke) successfully took up that dusty gauntlet and started a new documentary series about comics called Het Beeldverhaal (The Comic). In this first episode he introduced us to the world of the Dutch autobiographical comic, talking to Jan Kruis, Gerrit de Jager, Maaike Hartjes, Barbara Stok, and others.
Van Tol’s boyish enthusiasm works infectiously. In the seventh episode, he is full of admiration for Willy Linthout whose Jaren van de Olifant (Age of the Elephant) is a personal comic about the death of his son. In the episode about superheroes, he is surprised to learn that a copy of the first Superman story was sold for more than one million dollars.
One of the advantages of having Van Tol as a presenter is that he knows what he is talking about, being a comics artist himself. “Many of the authors we talked to thought that was refreshing,” says [editor Pieter] Klok.
Seven more episodes have been produced that discuss amongst others Belgian comics, superhero comics, manga, newspaper strips and underground comics.
Contestants on the one-off game show from the public broadcaster VPRO, part of an annual week of experimental programmes, comprise five asylum seekers who have exhausted legal avenues to stay in the Netherlands and await imminent deportation to their country of origin.
They compete in a quiz about Dutch culture, history and language, with the winner awarded €4,000 (£3,500) to help cushion them when they are expelled. Consolation prizes include a bulletproof vest.
Excellent write-up, though I am not sure about the description of the “mini-skirted pastiche of air cabin crew uniforms”. To me those outfits look like sexed-up customs uniforms.
The paper quotes VPRO head Frank Wiering: “These days many asylum seekers who are being expelled have children who have lived in the Netherlands for eight years or more. They have had a good education, speak perfect Dutch and have only seen their country of birth on television. We believe it’s time to stop and think about this.”
Science fiction blog IO9 noticed the new Raveleijn attraction at Efteling in Noord-Brabant, and the steam-punkiness of it all.
The show tells the story of the evil count Graveheart who has his subjects building mechanical creatures that destroy the land. It is up to the ancient Order of Ravens, a order of magical knights, to stop the threat and return, er, order. Six shows are performed each day in the new, 35 million euro Raveleijn compound, and there is also a spin-off TV series.
Both the back-story and the TV series were written by hit children’s horror story writer Paul van Loon, who lives just around the corner from Efteling in Drunen. He is a serial winner of the Nederlandse Kinderjury award, a literary prize awarded by children. Van Loon usually swipes the awards for the younger age group, with Francine Oomen ‘owning’ the 10 to 12-year-olds. Remarkably, when the children were asked in 2002 what the best children’s books of all time were, it was J.K. Rowling who took off with most of the prizes instead of Oomen and Van Loon.
(Photo by Wikimedia Commons user Arch who released it into the public domain)
Filed under: Shows,Sports by Branko Collin @ 2:06 pm
A program like Holland Sport is something you’ll never see on commercial television channels, which is what makes it a pity the publicly funded programme will stop after 8 successful years. Holland Sport was a show that mixed interviews of athletes with silly game elements, in which members of the audience got to pit their skills against the show’s guests.
Although the interviews were not as deep as they could have been (the show was, after all, intended as light entertainment), they did provide an alternative view into the lives of top athletes.
As an example of the sort of things a programme like Holland Sports could afford to do, here is a video poem Rob Hodselmans made for the show last week, covering the cobblestone-filled Paris – Roubaix bicycle road race.
Between 2003 and 2008 the show was hosted by presenter Matthijs van Nieuwkerk and comedian Wilfried de Jong. When Van Nieuwkerk quit due to other obligations, De Jong carried on solo for a couple of years.
The animation is similar to the previous title sequence which was made by Irish animator Johnny Kelly according to Animated Review. You can see all the previous intros at the Klokhuis website.
In 2010 a German octopus called Paul made worldwide headlines by correctly ‘predicting’ the results of South African football World Cup matches.
