Some one-shots/small series I remember.

I remember this show so fondly...not quite so much for the puppet segments, which were nice enough but a bit derivative of Sesame Street, but for all those British and European cartoons.

Of course, there are the shorts/series of shorts that everyone remembers...Hattytown, Bagpuss, the Mole, Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings. And I have this series to thank for my love of Paddington Bear.

But there's also some more obscure ones that, for some reason, have stuck with me. (One part of why they have is the background music...some of these had lovely orchestral scores.) Some of these actually go back to the earlier years of the show, during Nickelodeon's Mime Years.

The ones that crop up in my memory (mainly cartoons, either cel or stop-motion) are:

Several shorts about a small green elephant and his nemesis, a small black ink blot. No, I am not kidding. What dialogue there was, was mainly vocal sounds and what may have been a foreign language. One that sticks out to me was one where the elephant built a spaceship and landed on the moon, with the blot stowing away. I don't know what had happened to the ship (it was still intact), but by the end, they were acting as if they were stranded there together, no longer fighting, looking wistfully back at Earth.

One with a really lovely orchestral score, where a European village bedded down for the night during winter. More snow fell, then some snowmen built themselves and proceeded to form a choir and whistle a catchy tune together.

One very poignant one where a bird helps an overworked, mistreated donkey escape from a cruel master. They travel together for a while, but the donkey wants to fly like his friend. The bird somehow, through some sort of magic, helps the donkey get his wish, turning his ears into wings. What I really remember is the melancholy, haunting flute theme that was part of this.

One stop-motion one about toys that came to life during a moonlit night. This had a very lovely, dreamlike atmosphere, helped by a beautiful, ballet-like score.

There was a series with stop-motion mice in many different colors, one of whom was apparently the "brains" of the outfit since he wore glasses and helped the other mice figure out problems. This was wordless (as many of the European cartoons were).

But there was also a different stop-motion one-shot with different mice...this one was about mice who built themselves an entire city out of cheese. It was strictly forbidden to eat any of it, but you can guess how long that lasted.

There was also a rather surrealistic take on the Tortoise and the Hare fable, all scored to what I now know to be Rossini's overture from La Cenerentola.

Another one featured British narration (it may have been Bernard Cribbins, who did the Simon series) about some sort of mushroom-dwelling, mouse-like creature named Bolly. (I don't think it was a series; I only saw the one.) He was visited by an alien that looked like a smaller version of him, and taken to his planet to help them with some sort of crisis.

A couple different ones had the same sort of animation...a sort of "moving cutout" style. One dealt with animal friends (Bushy the vixen, Carrots the rabbit, Grizzle the bear and Singapore the cat) and their various travails. Another, with the same kind of animation, dealt with a brother and sister and various crafts they made for fun. They'd recap the craft and how to make it at the end of each short. One of them was a sundial you could make with cardboard and a needle.

Then there was one (British or Australian) with a little girl and her sentient toy train engine. She received a present (from, I think, her father who was traveling) of a state-of-the-art toy train from Hong Kong, which could outrace her engine and climb walls and fixtures. The engine grew quite despondent over this...he couldn't climb stuff like his new rival could. He got sick from brooding and the girl took him to a doctor (people in this short were about as shocked by a sentient toy train as the Londoners in the Paddington books were by a talking bear). Finally, the engine came upon a shoemaker who put nails in the engine's wheels so he could race and climb as well as the newer train.

So...any of these ring a bell to you? What do you remember most?