Magic Marble

[SoWat]

In my pre-teen years I was an avid ABC Saturday morning cinema fan (anyone remember the ABC members song?).

A lot of the films shown on a saturday morning were from The Children's Film Foundation, and were very good (to my young mind anyway).

One film that I always remember was about a magic marble. A group of kids found this, and had all sorts of fun with it (bit hazy about the whole plot). At the end the marble got crushed by a steamroller, then magically reassembled itself.

I have searched high and low for this title, with no luck. Has anyone (old gits) heard of this film, or can maybe recommend a site that might be able to find.

Just to complicate things, I'm not 100% sure it was a CFF title. It would have been released around the late 60's

 

[Tom]

I'd suggest looking through the biographies of the people who were regularly in those films, like Keith Chegwin (can't remember any others sorry).

 

[SoWat]

Did a search on Keith Chegwin's films without any luck. However one of the returned sites did mention a film called 'One Wish Too Many' about a young british lad who finds a magic marble. At the end of the film he turns a toy steamroller into a giant one, which then crushes his marble.

Sounds exactly like the film I was describing! It was released in 1956 though, and is only 55 minutes long. It could well be that my memory of the film, 35 years after watching it, is flawed.

Unfortunately it's not available in any format as far as I can see. The Children's Film Foundation have 3 DVDs out at the moment "Best of CFF". Hopefully it will come up in one of those in the future.

Some other people who starred in these CFF films include Phil Collins and Roy Kinnear.

This Internet thing is pretty useful

 

[whipped]

Nice link, I remember watching "The Boy who turned Yellow" in school one day when we were waiting to be picked up by parents as we had got snowed in

 

[SoWat]

I've found some other links to saturday morning pictures, and the memories are flooding back!

There was a guy ("Uncle" somebody) who used to get up on the stage before the main film and read out names of members' whose birthday it was (we were called ABC Minors). If it was your birthday you got a free pass for the following week, it was a huge diploma-like thing and it felt very special to get one. We had to stand on the stage and everyone would sing 'Happy Birthday' to us (with lots of Boo-ing and jeering!).


We also had ABC badges (lots of badges), and used to sing the "We're the minors of the A-B-C" every week.

"We like to laugh and have our sing-song

Just a happy crowd are we-e

We're all pals together

The Minors of the ABC!"

The words for the song were on-screen with a little ball bouncing along the words to be sung (yelled/screamed).

Without sounding like the old gits on Monty Python, My brother and I used to get Half a Crown (12-1/2 pence in todays money) every saturday morning. This would pay for our bus fare into town, get us into the pictures, buy sweets and a badge, and the bus home.



Innocent times