This Australian children’s show featured the titular Captain – a large, fluorescent-pink bird with prominent white teeth, bulging eyes, and a yellow beak – and the most incredibly irritating high-pitched voice and laugh, and a crazy green snake named Boomerfang, which once swallowed a boomerang and now had problems hiccupping.
The show combined animation, puppetry and documentary, and each week, Captain Cookaburra and Boomerfang were joined by a host of guest stars such as Dishy Doreen (with her half-baked cooking stories), Spotty Ron (with his fumbling facts on fitness), Mind Boggler (the world’s most user-friendly computer), and Million-Year-Old Fred, the world’s most experienced newsreader (who had been reading the news for 999,980 years and was at the scene of some of the world’s greatest scoops, like the invention of the wheel and the arrival of the Mayflower.)
Mixed in with all this chaos were short stories such as Tales of Old Boots (the tale of a sad boot which belonged to a one-legged pirate who always took the other boot for a walk) and bad jokes.
Snippets of information informed young viewers about the kangaroo, the weather, and how people are fed on an aeroplane. There were also brief “advertisements” urging kids not to smoke, to brush their teeth, and to wash their hands.
The show aired at 4.30 pm on weekdays on ABC TV. It was devised and co-written by UK-born writer and illustrator Grange Calveley, who was renowned for creating the innovative British children’s television series Roobarb before moving to Australia in 1977 and creating Captain Cookaburra’s AustraliHa (1983) for ABC TV.
