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Stories from GG’s Toy Box
By Grahame Grassby
Story 2 — Who Shot Mummy Babar?
In the first episode of the animated TV series, The Adventures of Babar, which premiered on ABC TV in 1990, the episode begins with Babar as a baby elephant playing with his mother and the other elephants.
Babar is happy and carefree but then, out of nowhere, Mummy Babar gets shot dead by a hunter… point blank dead… and in the preschool world around Australia, all hell breaks loose.
The ABC switchboard lights up with many calls of complaint from irate mothers who cannot believe an animated preschool TV show would show a mother being shot dead and wanting an explanation as to why the ABC would broadcast a show that has left their child crying their eyes out and not wanting their own mummy to die.
And thanks to a well-considered buying and marketing decision by the ABC Shops’ toy buyer, filling the front windows of every ABC Shop in the country are beautiful Babar soft toys – lots and lots of Babar soft toys, lovingly manufactured by Gund and carefully distributed in Australia by Jasnor – just waiting to be sold to the parents of happy Aussie pre-schoolers who love watching Babar on ABC TV.
The complaints about Mummy being shot dead in the first episode of the Babar TV show start filtering back through the ABC Shop managers to the Head of ABC Retail who summons the ABC Shop Buyer – which is me – to please explain: “What the hell were you thinking? Don’t you watch the shows before you buy the toys?”
Unfortunately, the unspoken answers to those two questions were: I wasn’t thinking – I was actually listening to Fred Gaffney, Licensing Agent extraordinaire, who told me that Babar was going to be the next big thing – a billion-dollar brand I remember him saying – and that he had negotiated with Noel Thurlow at Jasnor to give me a three-month exclusive window on the Babar toys if I could meet Jasnor’s minimum order quantities; And the answer to the second question; Of course I don’t watch the children’s TV shows before I buy the toys for the ABC Shops but there’s no need for anyone else to know that.
So unwittingly Fred Gaffney had given me a bit of a bum steer on what turned out to be not the next big thing – a lesson well learned that not everything Fred says is actually the next big thing or a billion-dollar brand – and that I had a lot of green elephants to sell. It seemed Fred hadn’t watched the first episode of the Babar TV series either – who’d have thought?
