r/ForgottenArchive

 

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📁 ARCHIVE RECORD | METZ — “JUDDERMAN” > * First Documented: 3 February 2000 > * Creator / Company: Bacardi Martini / HHCL & Partners > * Category: Forgotten Adverts > * Key Material / Feature: A Gothic forest television commercial in which the Judderman lures a lone traveller with Metz > * Status: Campaign introduced in 2000; Original Metz’s eventual discontinuation date is unconfirmed

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📝 Overview

Bacardi Martini’s Judderman campaign for Metz was created by HHCL & Partners in 2000 and centred on a Gothic forest television commercial shot in Budapest. The production used an existing film set transformed into an eerie, enchanted woodland, with deliberately old-fashioned camera techniques helping evoke early European Gothic cinema. Jonathan Burley was the copywriter, Ian Williamson the art director and Enda McCallion the director. Later advertising catalogues identify the film as Forest or Forrest, although an original 2000 title for the commercial has not been independently verified.

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💡 Why It Mattered

Its deliberately unsettling approach made an alcoholic drink seem like the bait in a folkloric cautionary tale, not a conventional refreshment. With puppet transformation, rhyme-led storytelling and creature-centred imagery, the campaign took a conspicuously cinematic risk in the competitive early-2000s flavoured-alcoholic-beverage market.

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💬 Archive Memory Check

Do you remember seeing the Judderman on television, and did it make Metz seem more intriguing or more sinister?

👇 Primary sources, technical records, and historical breakdown in pinned comment.

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🔗 Related Archive Links

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📣 Forgotten Adverts

📚 Forgotten Archive Index

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Forgotten things are still part of history.

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> ### 📁 ARCHIVE RECORD | THE POGLES > * First Documented: 1965 > * Creator / Company: Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin / Smallfilms > * Category: Forgotten Television > * Key Material / Feature: Six-part black-and-white stop-motion story featuring a sinister shape-changing Witch > * Status: Ended after one series / Reworked as Pogles’ Wood

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📝 Overview

The Pogles was a six-part BBC children’s series created by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin’s Smallfilms and first broadcast in 1965.

The story followed Mr and Mrs Pogle, whose quiet woodland life was disrupted by an abandoned baby, a silver fairy crown and a sinister shape-changing Witch determined to steal it.

The original characters were physical stop-motion puppets — and remarkably, the Witch puppet itself survives today, preserving one of the series’ most unsettling characters.

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💡 Why It Mattered

The Pogles was considerably darker than the Smallfilms programmes that followed. The Witch kidnapped the baby, imprisoned the Pogles and repeatedly threatened them throughout its continuous fairy-tale story.

Considered too frightening for its young audience, the series did not receive the regular repeats of later Smallfilms productions.

The concept was softened, the Witch disappeared, and the baby became Pippin.

In 1966, the Pogles returned as the much gentler Pogles’ Wood.

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💬 ARCHIVE MEMORY CHECK

Did you ever see the original The Pogles, or do you remember only the gentler Pogles’ Wood?

👇 Primary sources, production records and historical breakdown in the pinned comment below.

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🔗 Related Archive Links

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📺 Forgotten Television

📚 Forgotten Archive Index

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Forgotten things are still part of history.

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