In the mid-1980s, the Central Office of Information were in search of a new trusted figure to educate children on the importance of keeping their wits about them when crossing the road. They settled on SuperTed, eponymous star of a popular Welsh cartoon about a defective teddy bear who became the galaxy's saviour thanks to the interventions of a spotted extra terrestrial and a personified Mother Nature. The upshot was that Ted received his own public information film, "Super Safe With SuperTed", in which he took a break from battling power-hungry Texans and effeminate skeletons to take on something more nefarious - Earth traffic (identified by Ted as being the worst in the galaxy), which he must teach his absent-minded sidekick Spotty how to navigate, following a narrowly-averted disaster on the Planet Spot.
SuperTed started life as a series of books written by Mike Young (inspired by a bedtime story he'd devised to help his son overcome his fear of the dark), before an animated adaptation was commissioned in 1982 by budding Welsh-language public broadcast channel S4C (Warner Brothers were also apparently interested in acquiring the film rights, but Young preferred that his intellectual property remained in Welsh hands). The series was produced by the Cardiff-based Siriol Productions (founded by Young with his wife Liz) and proved such a hit in its native Wales that an English-language dub was created and aired on the BBC in 1983 to similar success. It followed the heroic exploits of a teddy bear (voiced by Geraint Jarman in the Welsh original and Derek Griffiths in the English dub) who was discarded by the human world but found valuable allies elsewhere, being granted life by way of the cosmic dust of an alien named Spotty (Martin Griffiths/John Pertwee) and special superpowers courtesy of Mother Nature (Valmai Jones/Sheila Steafel). Whenever trouble reared its head, SuperTed would activate those powers by whispering his secret magic word (which he never confided with anybody, so it can be as filthy or outlandish as your imagination wants it to be), typically to fend off his recurring nemesis, the conniving cowboy Texas Pete (Gari Williams/Victor Spinetti), and his bungling henchmen Skeleton (Emyr Young/Melvin Hayes) and Bulk (Huw Ceredig/Roy Kinnear). The premise of a crime-fighting teddy bear might have been goofy as hell, but the characters were colourful, the tone was earnest and legions of hearts had warmed to the plucky ursine as the hero the 1980s urgently needed. People so looked up to SuperTed that they manufactured a line of children's vitamin supplements in his image. A turn in a public information film was all but inevitable.
For myself, the secret ingredient to the show's success, and the element that continues to make it such an enduring classic, is the touch of melancholy that was often so palpable throughout. The opening sequence is one of those early television memories that's always haunted me - the coldness of Ted's abandonment (emphasised by the bombast of Peter Hawkins' narration), followed by the vividness of the unlikely solidarity that came with Spotty's appearance. Equally stirring was the closing theme that signed off each adventure, with its awe-struck yearning for a hero with "A scarlet suit, a flowing cape, a magic word, a super change." The music, composed by Chris Stuart and Mike Townend, was totally captivating. The English dub is the version I grew up with, so I can't attest to Jarman's characterisation in the Welsh original, but there was something so endearingly poignant about Griffiths' performance as SuperTed. He sounded honest, stout-hearted and resolute (all of the nice characteristics you would expect from a heroic teddy) but also kind of mournful. His was a voice that conveyed the sadness of the universe, as if he'd never quite gotten over the horror of being thrown away like a piece of rubbish into that old dark storeroom. That same melancholy was successfully captured in the public information film, which rounds out with SuperTed making about the glummest observation possible, particularly in light of the fact that it effectively functioned as the series finale. It wasn't the last we'd be seeing of Ted and Spotty - Hanna Barbera would revive the franchise three years later with a sequel series, The Further Adventures of SuperTed - but this is where the original Made in Wales era wrapped, and what an engagingly solemn note to conclude on.
"Super Safe With SuperTed" was initially presented as a five and a half minute short, though this included the usual opening and closing titles; the PIF itself amounted to three minutes and forty seconds. It was broadcast on BBC One on 26th March 1986, before receiving a home video release on the Children's Video Library VHS The Magic of SuperTed (and later on the 1994 Tempo release The Biggest Ever SuperTed Video). In it, SuperTed discovers that Spotty's comprehension of road safety is not up to snuff, and with help from Spotty's sister Blotch (Wendy Padbury), takes him to Earth (specifically to Cardiff) for a demonstration of the proper crossing procedure. A shorter edit, clocking at a minute and twenty-two seconds, subsequently did the rounds as an ad break filler; this focussed on the later portion of the story, with Ted, Spotty and Blotch safely traversing the roads of Cardiff. Excised was the narrative build-up, in which Spotty first demonstrates his crippling lack of road sense via a computer simulation, and then nearly gets himself mowed down by an alien motorist, prompting SuperTed to activate his powers and pull off a dramatic rescue.
The short opens on the Planet Spot, where Spotty is playing a characteristically 1980s-looking video game that involves guiding a pixilated chicken across a road. Alas, Spotty has no natural flair for chicken protection, and we see him guide the sprite directly into the path of a car and to an instant Game Over. Ted helps Spotty get a better hang of the game by explaining the rules of road crossing - find a safe place to cross where you can see clearly both ways, don't stand too close to the road, look and listen carefully, then cross while it's all clear, while still remaining alert to any incoming traffic. Using these principles, Spotty is able to lead the chicken to safety and earn his first victory screen after 503 occasions of being bested by SuperTed. He is, however, unable to apply those same principles to real life, when he and Ted are out roaming the Planet Spot and notice Blotch waving to them from the other side of a road. Spotty rushes out to greet her without looking and finds a Spotty Rocket hurtling in his direction; thankfully, SuperTed is able to speak his secret magic world and save his friend in the nick of time. In spite of all his prior training with the video chicken, Spotty remains confused about road safety, and gets offended when Ted suggests he look for a zebra crossing, possessing an automatic disdain for things with stripes (is that a by-product of coming from a spot-orientated culture?). Ted hits upon the idea of taking a trip to Earth to give Spotty a full-on demonstration with that infamously awful Earth traffic; Spotty reveals himself to be just as disdainful of Earth's residents (whom he identifies as the worst in the galaxy), but he complies. With prompting from Ted and Blotch, Spotty becomes a proficient road crosser, even while inclined to make every mistake in the book (crossing out from behind a bus, standing right at the edge of the kerb, running across the road instead of walking calmly).
Although the sequence in Cardiff seems gentle and non-threatening (compared to the drama of that prior sequence on Planet Spot where Spotty nearly becomes road pizza), hawk-eyed viewers might notice that two of Ted's enemies, Texas Pete and Bulk, make stealthy cameos as motorists. There's nothing to indicate that either is up to anything malevolent, but it adds a suggestion of hidden danger, as though the potential for calamity is always there, lurking below the seemingly untroubled surface, even if it can't be immediately perceived. The real kicker, though, comes at the end, when SuperTed's kindly reassurance that, "If you remember these rules, you will be safe crossing the road anywhere in the universe", is immediately followed up with the sombre reminder that, "I can't be there to save you...especially on the planet Earth." As noted, these were Ted's parting words to his fans, as he finished up his original run, and they took the form of a haunting allusion to his own unreality. A world in which an animate teddy bear could become a superhero and save you from all potential harm made for a delightful fantasy, but a fantasy was all that it was. The viewer now had to wake up and acknowledge that they lived on Earth, where such things did not happen, but where danger and terrible outcomes were very real possibilities. Ultimately, the viewer was on their own, their survival dependent on the honing of their own wits and judgement. It adds an extra sting to Spotty's prior remark about Earth having the worst people in the galaxy, if this innately hostile world is the one we have to figure out how to live in.
Even so, there's the lingering prospect that SuperTed hasn't left us for good, and might one day return to share his wisdom with the 21st century. What with the current cultural obsession with superheroes and nostalgic reboots, there has been intermittent talk of bringing the series back for a new generation. This is something Young has been endeavouring toward since the 2010s, and every now and then we get word that progress has been made, although the end-product has yet to materialise. Young has indicated that we shouldn't expect it to return in quite the same form, and that the villains in particular would have to undergo an extensive retooling; he noted in a Radio Times interview given in 2014 that, “In SuperTed, we had a gun-slinging cowboy, a flamboyantly gay skeleton and a fat guy who had jokes made about his weight and all these things you just wouldn’t do today,” Okay, I get why the guns and fat jokes wouldn't be on the table nowadays, but what was wrong with the flamboyantly gay skeleton? Don't you think that Skeleton was an icon? Kudos to Young for giving us official confirmation of his sexuality, though.