Creepy Kids TV: The Singing Ringing Tree

Apparently as a back-lash against the amount of US TV shows for kids, in the 1960s and 1970s the BBC in the UK went for cultural diversity in its schedules and chose randomly it would seem to show the creepy classic from East Germany, The Singing Ringing Tree (1957). Cutting the movie into three parts and showing it under the innocuous title "Tales For Europe". This utterly surreal deeply disturbing  fairytale from the dark minds of communist East Germany has gone down in kids television folklore.

What promises to be a typical prince and princess fall in love tale quickly spirals into a darkly psychological tale, full of nasty unremitting creepy characters. There's the charming prince who turns into a horrible and angry kidnapping bear, that makes the Beast from Disney seem like a big soft cuddly teddy-bear. The shallow, cruel, arrogant and spoilt princess who turns into a hag. Oh and not forgetting the evil dwarf, that wouldn't seem out of place in a David Lynch movie. Oh and there's a giant flapping fish, that seems friendly enough (for a fish) but the animatronics giving it a freaky quality that just another level of weird to the already quite frankly mad movie. All presented in over saturated Technicolor, the Singing Ringing Tree has become legendary among those of a certain age who only whisper of it and shudder with the fear of repressed memories afterwards. Think a hardcore piece of German expressionist cinema for kids!

Weird Retro Fact: The BBC put an English voice-over narration track directly over the original soundtrack. The whispers of the original German could be heard throughout. Could they have made this thing any more creepier than it already was? The answer is yes! This is creepy kids TV turned up to 11.