Skippy (5 Feb 1968)

John McCallum says he, Bob Austin met Lee Robinson making They're a Weird Mob. Wanted to make TV. Thought of a Weird Mob series but worried too insular.

May 1967 Skippy goes into production from Fauna Productis - see here Series sold overseas already and ordered 39 episodes. John McCallum and Bob Austin part of it. McCallum just left Williamsons (see here)

Sept 1967 Skippy premieres in French Canada see here.  Followed that month by commercial TV in UK then Japan in November. Article mentions director Eric Price leaving show.

Feb 1968 - Skippy starts in Oz see here. Nice review here

March 1968 - been 80 episodes and seen by over 300 million see here.  May 1968 another article here.

Skippy - July 1968 Skippy kidnapped see here

Nov 1968 won a Penguin Award see here. 

Jan 1969 starts in the US see here.

Dec 1969 film premieres see here.

Fauna made The Rovers, Barrier Reef, the Nickel Queen, Boney.

Moya Wood on writing for it:

I was very ambivalent about Skippy, I didn’t like Flipper and I didn’t like the talking horse thing, I just thought it was silly.  However I did persuade myself that … I found the feeling at the time which was kangaroos were pests pretty awful and I had a really strong feeling about that, they are native animals and things.  And I actually did scavenge around and find a lot of books about kangaroos before I convinced myself I was doing the right thing.  And I had this idea that maybe children would have a different attitude about kangaroos.  And plus the fact I mean I just liked the idea of it it was going to be all film and it was like I passed up the film continuity job in England this was the next best thing.  And also it was a huge prospect of learning from storyline to script to post production because we were right close to the editing rooms and we'd spend a lot of time in the editing rooms.  I had to do the release scripts, when they were selling the stuff overseas had to do frame by frame release scripts.  And also meeting writers of course, people who'd spent their life writing and some were named prose writers, short story writers.  But also they were all very leftwing, that was really exciting at the time.  We had all these years of conservative stuff and these people all had really different ideas.
Q    How did you work with them, you were young and some of them were quite experienced people?
A    I know, I thought I got on, it was easy.  But I sometimes got a feeling that maybe some of the older ones … I can remember one woman, she wasn’t that much older than me but she had been around the traps a bit, saying how can you do this you're only whatever, how can you do a job like this and being quite bewildered by the question really.  But in retrospect I think there probably were a few people who thought I've got to deal with this, I know I had that feeling myself in later years.  But otherwise it was fine, it was usually fun.
Q    Were there any limitations on it, because with the children’s show were there constrains on what could be done with it at that time.
A    There were constraints, we had to do this terrible what we called the washer with a little homily at the end which I hated it it was so American.  There was that but in fact there was some restrictions I thought should have been put on it that weren’t.  There were 26 scripts that I didn’t have much to do with, Lee had done a deal with a writer who was a nice man and very experienced radio writer and obviously he was one of those who thought I’m not going to listen to what she’s got to say I’ve been doing this for years so they did it together right from the beginning.  And there were two episodes that I actually kicked up a fuss about and one was a baby in a pram, it ran away without the mother realising it and was floating down the river and the kangaroo has to alert people.  And we had little kids, three and four year olds, who used to love and I said you can’t you know.  I did fight against that one.  Another one where the baddies strung wire across the path so that when Skippy … and I said you can’t do this.  Anyway I lost the fight.  And the phone lines, we had doctors, people ringing up, it was outrage, and children disturbed children.  So I always had my own rules and things.  But Lee set down certain rules what the boy could do or couldn’t do.  So that was alright just we kept the ground rules and know where to go.
Q    And it was very successful.  [interruption by third party]  Moya, Skippy was amazingly successful and went on and on and on in repeats and it’s probably still seen isn’t it?
A    Hmmm.
Q    What do you think was the secret to that success?
A    I’m sure the secret was the fact that it was film and we got this location and I don’t think television had seen so much of Australian bush and high blue skies and the freedom, the child was always running through the bush, and I think that had a huge impact.  In fact in the Skippy documentary that Germaine Greer who you would know would not like Skippy but couldn’t resist it because it made her homesick.  And I think that was a major factor. 
    One of the interesting things about it that I felt iffy about was the boy, they dressed the boy in blue jeans and sandshoes and striped tops so that he looked like an American child.  And I thought I don’t go for this really.  And we got letters from boys about how phony it was.  And he always wore shoes and it was before children started really to wear jeans.  And there were protests from Australian boys he’s not Australian enough.  Anyway it was pretty simple stuff.  I think it was mainly it was the outdoors of Australian life on television and there was so little on Australian television then of Australian accents.
Q    Probably some of the most successful Australian television has been for children hasn’t it?
A    Yes, yeah that’s true actually.
Q    A lot of we adults didn’t even notice that it’s there.  But did it make you a children’s expert, did you get that expertise?
A    No but that was also one of my interests.  I was always very interested in children’s stories, children’s things.  I was the eldest of four but I was raised at very close quarters with four cousins who were in the same age, compatible age, so we were a tribe of eight and we used to go away all together.  And I was very aware, because I was the eldest of the eight, of behavioural things and children’s things I think. 
..If you’re doing drama, any kind of drama, not to study or read as much as you can about human behaviour and the importance of early childhood in adult life I don’t think you can really do well with children’s stuff, or in fact have raised children and been a very observant parent.

ohnn McCallum profile in Bulletin - see here

“Skippy” evolved out of the set-up that was left when “Weird Mob” was taken off the drawing-board. Com- mercially, it has been the most impor- tant success in the short history of independent telefilm production in Aus- tralia. By pioneering sales of a product that doesn’t have a cent of foreign investment to a vast foreign market, McCallum and his Fauna Productions have earned the respect of the Aus- tralian industry and, no doubt, the modest gratitude of the Treasury. 

They made the pilot episode in October, 1966 a month after McCallum had walked away from Williamson. “Fee Robinson, Bob Austin and I had been talking about some sort of series ever since we’d begun to have doubts about doing it with the ‘Mob.’ We wanted to make something essentially Australian, and I’d been advised by a man I knew in London Tom Donald of Global Films to aim at the children’s hour. This appealed to us because we realised we couldn’t compete with the Americans on horse operas or the British on sophisticated comedy. We’d done some research and, whether you like it or not, had discovered that the two things people overseas most asso- ciate with Australia were the kangaroo and the Great Barrier Reef. So a kangaroo it was.” 

Ninety episodes later it is difficult to imagine that such a superficially modest venture created so many prob- lems. Money. Financing the production was a trial, selling the product was traumatic. “Initially, there were about five of us who put in a few thousand dollars each. You can’t make a good half- hour episode under $22,000 or $25,000, so we had to have many calls. The Bank of N.S.W. helped us and we got a few other friends in later. By now, everyone has got their money back and they’ve got 40 percent and they’ll get a lot more. But at first it was all very humble. The big problem in film pro- duction is cash flow; you have to keep ploughing money into making the product while there’s nothing coming in at all. On the strength of the pilot we sold the series to England, Japan, Canada in French and English and Australia, and then we had to turn round and complete the first 13 episodes. “We knew we wouldn’t start get- ting money in until we delivered the films, so we had to discount our con- tracts. For instance, we’d go to_ a bank in, say, Canada, and say, ‘Here’s a contract for the purchase of so many episodes of ‘Skippy’ by CBC at $5OOO each, or whatever, and as we \yon’t get this money for about a year we’d like you to cash it for us.’ We were usually able to do this, but we had to pay a pretty solid rate of interest. Things are much better now, because we’ve turned a lot of our profits back into the company, but in those early days throughout 1967 we had to have financial meetings every week, and we were very grateful to the TCN people, who used to advance out- payments a lot.” Even with sales in four countries, “Skippy” was still under-capitalised. It had to be sold in America, the big market where the cream is. It took five trips across the Pacific before Fauna Productions cracked the market. The United States has such an enormous film productivity of its own that has to be sold on the domestic market that foreign producers, especially those carrying no U.S. investment, can feel frozen just waiting in the outer office. Several agencies were willing to distribute “Skippy” throughout the U.S. for a crippling 40 percent, but John McCallum and his friends wouldn’t yield. “It took us a long time to get through. The ramifications of selling film in America . . . Lord, it’s an absolute jungle. I remember our first trip across. We had the pilot in the can, and they said how they liked the idea and how they needed pro- grams because television was such a voracious beast. And they sat us in a theatrette to screen the pilot, with us having high hopes for a sale in prime time and then they cut us down to size.” John McCallum shifts in his chair and enacts a scene in idiomatic American . . . “Oh hell no, we don’t want this - we can’t understand the acting . . . What’d he say then, Jerry? C’n you make that guy out? . . . Hell no, I dunno w’hat he said . . . Oh, that script . . . No, no, when they get on the boat something else should happen. He just got on the dam’ boat.” McCallum remembers squirming in his seat, collecting his can of film, and then standing down among the skaters in Rockefeller Centre, feeling pretty dispirited. He went back, demanded to see somebody else. “And there was this chap with his feet on the desk . . . you know, the ruder they are to you in America feet on the desk, paring their nails, that sort of thing the more chance vou seem to have of doing business with them. Someone once told me that if they kiss you in and kiss you out you’ve got no chance, but if they play hard to get they often end up chasing you.” 

It is rather difficult to imagine John McCallum, star of sophisticated comedy, tail-coated entrepreneur of grand opera, in such an alien predica- ment, but he lived a new role selling “Skippy.” And eventually he sold it direct to a U.S. sponsor (Kelloggs) through an advertising agency. A significant breakthrough. “Skippy the Bush Kangaroo” is now out of production but has been sold to a phenomenal 167 outlets, and is linked to a profitable character merchandising program of Disney pro- portions. It has been made in color and black-and-white and will be run and re-run through TV screens for years. A full-length feature film, “The Intruders,” has been spun out of the “Skippy” format and has just started to earn money. 

Fauna Productions are now in flood, “We’re filming a color series on the Barrier Reef called ‘Minus-5,’ which is aimed at a slightly higher age group than that for ‘Skippy.’ Sir Reginald Ansett I s a partner in this, so we’ve pre-sold it for television in Australia. And on the strength of a synopsis and our success with ‘Skippy’ we’ve pre-sold it in England, too. The Americans are very interested this time. It’s never easy to sell them, but I don’t think it will be quite so difficult now. They know we can make and make well and that we can deliver. They’ve always admired our technical quality, you know. And in September we plan to make a start on our ‘Bonaparte’ series based on the Arthur Upfield detective novels. We’ve already spent about $60,000 on that one. And then next year we hope to go with a big one something called ‘The Gladiators,’ which will be about Formula-One motor racing and which we hope to shoot all over the world.”  

John McCallum