Charly and The Giddy Delights of Toytown Techno

1992 saw the rise of a peculiar phenomenon known as "toytown techno", whereby the cartoon tunes of yesteryear were given a modern electronic makeover for consumption by the rave music scene that was on fire at the time. "Charly", a 1991 hit for The Prodigy, is often credited with starting the craze, although we can trace earlier examples still in Mark Summers' 1990 record "Summer's Magic", which gave the theme tune to BBC children's series The Magic Roundabout a particularly funky spin, and novelty dance record "Thunderbirds Are Go!" by FAB feat. MC Parker (also 1990), which sampled music and dialogue from 1960s marionette action series Thunderbirds. But the success of "Charly" certainly gave the green light to a wave of copycat records that plundered artifacts of 1970s childhood for raw sampling material. Not everyone was so thrilled by the sudden desire to get back to Toytown. Dance music magazine Mixmag famously accused "Charly" of "killing rave", with editor Dom Phillips condemning the record as "a million nightmare novelty that countless grinning [Top of The Pops] goons have introduced over the years." The Prodigy responded with the proverbial middle finger, by torching a copy of Mixmag in the video to their 1992 single "Fire". Good call. If Mixmag weren't hip enough to understand the appeal of combining that yearning for a bygone childhood with cutting-edge electronica, then that's probably the best use of their pages. Would these people seriously sooner have lived in a world without Shaft's charming reworking of the Roobarb and Custard theme? The farts. But whatever its merits, it was not a phenomenon built for longevity. By the autumn of 1992, Toytown had all but petered out. It was to prove as exhilarating and ephemeral as childhood itself.

Reflecting on "Summer's Magic", Summers commented that the success of toytown techno was linked to the fact that childhood innocence and rave hedonism were not, in practice, all that far removed: “The illegal substances people were taking at raves at the time made them feel happy and light. I suppose when they heard something like Summers Magic, that sense of euphoria comes flooding back, [reminding] them of that bygone age when they were innocent.” With "Charly", though, there was inevitably a more sinister undercurrent, pertaining to the source of the sample, a series of animated public information films produced in 1973 to advise children on various aspects of everyday safety. The track incorporated audio of what was supposedly a cat meowing (in actuality, disc jockey/comedian Kenny Everett doing his finest cat impersonation), followed by the voice of a child working translation duties: "Charley says, always tell your mummy before you go off somewhere." In the PIFs, Charley was a wise, if rather accident-prone cat, who would regularly dispense cautionary pointers to his owner, a young boy named Tony (Tony was apparently voiced by the child of somebody who knew the producer; I'm not sure if he's ever been identified by name). The series was structured around the likeably ludicrous premise that Charley's mews were unintelligible to the viewer, but Tony was fully capable of discerning pearls of wisdom in that barrage of feline gibberish. There was a total of six "Charley Says" films in general, never more than a minute in length, with each following one of two formulas - either Charley would fall victim to some kind of mishap and learn a valuable lesson which he then shared with Tony, or Charley would discourage Tony from doing something seriously stupid. In the most infamous of the six, Charley prevented Tony from disappearing with a predatory prowler who attempted to lure him from the safety of the playground with the promise of puppies. Like any PIF, the darkness in the "Charley" series came from the juxtaposition of the horrific with the mundane, although the stranger installment particularly stands out for conveying a sense of childhood innocence on a knife edge. The evocation of this sensation in the Prodigy track struck a nerve with some listeners, including Jeremy J. Beadle (no, not that Jeremy Beadle), author of the 1993 book Will Pop Eat Itself?: Pop Music in the Soundbite Era, who notes that, "by an unpleasant quirk of coincidence (at least one hopes it was), "Charly" made a remarkably high chart debut (Number 9) in mid-August, the week after a series of grisly child abductions and murders had figured in the headlines." (p.214) In actuality, though, the sample used in the Prodigy track came not from Tony's brush with a suspicious-sounding stranger, but from by far the least threatening PIF in the series, in which Tony is again tempted to go astray, not by an ominous interloper, but by a couple of perfectly benign peers, Vera and Dave, who invite him to join them on a picnic. The fly in the ointment here is Charley's reminder that Tony should never up and leave without first telling his mother where he is going. This ends up throwing a wrench into Tony's plans, for it takes him so long to attract his distracted mother's attentions that Vera and Dave eventually decide that he's not coming and go on their way, whereupon his mother compensates by taking Tony and Charley on a picnic with her instead. The PIF ends with Tony addressing the viewer with the following statement:

"Charley says, always tell your mummy before you go off somewhere, so she knows who you are with."

This is the most genial of all the "Charley" films, as Tony and Charley are not implied to be in any danger at any point. The kind of threat that Tony unwittingly came up against in the "Strangers" PIF very faintly rears its head in Tony's closing words, but from a safe enough distance. Telling your mother where you are going is a good idea, presumably so that she can prevent you from wandering off with anyone inappropriate (especially if you don't have a talking cat to act as your guardian). Alternatively, the lesson could be interpreted as being more for the mother's benefit than Tony's own, so that she doesn't freak out when she realises that Tony is missing. There is perhaps also an implicit, unintentional message to be gleaned from this scenario by the more rebellious viewer - namely, that adherence to authority comes at the expense of your own personal enjoyment. It's because Tony and Charley follow the rules that they don't get to go on a picnic with Vera and Dave, and while a picnic with Mummy is accepted as an excellent alternative, the film does arguably end up reinforcing the idea that the "correct" way to do anything is always under the watchful eye of authority. There is an obvious subversion on this very theme in the Prodigy's use of the sample (which excises the final part of Tony's statement, thus diminishing the closing assurance of safety), raves representing the kind of forbidden venue that Mummy probably doesn't want to hear you're going off to. The suggestion of darkness and danger, conjured up by the use of the PIF, is in this context thrilling, while the sonic strangeness of Charley's disembodied meows adds to the record's sinister ambience, so that Charley, the supposed voice of wisdom and adversary of suspicious strangers, here seems unnervingly alien; familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The track transforms the sample into an ironic celebration of those rebellious souls who have evaded parental (or otherwise) authority and embraced the wilderness. In a total inversion on the intention behind the "Charley" films, the track seems entirely in love with the seductive nature of danger (a mood reflected in the record cover to "Charly", which showed a facial close-up of a very different, considerably less benevolent-looking cat, baring its teeth in what looks like an almost demonically malevolent smile). To that end, it fulfills a similar function as Bam Bam's amazingly nightmarish 1988 acid house track "Where's Your Child?", which I can only assume was conceived in response to those "Do You Know Where Your Children Are?" PSAs that were commonplace in US television throughout the 1980s.

The subversiveness does not stop there, however, as there is an additional joke in the track's appropriation of all these repeated references to a character named Charley, "Charlie" being a common street name for cocaine. This is a joke that Beadle is wise to, and finds wholly objectionable: "The use of the "Charly" sample was simply a clever way of advertising what the raves at which the record was so heavily featured were really about." Rave records were hardly shy about flaunting their association with recreational drugs culture (to a point that all but reached self-parody a year after "Charly", when The Shamen delivered a highly commercial, controversy-baiting track in which they sung the praises of an individual with the ridiculously unsubtle pun-tastic moniker of "Ebeneezer Goode"). In "Charly", the drug and and the (indirect) voice of authority are blended to a seemingly incongruous degree, which is perhaps made all the more unnerving for the fact that it is conveyed through the voice of an actual child (one presumably as naive as Tony as to the true nature of the dangers he was talking about). The combination of drug and authority suggests usurpation; the drug becomes the new voice of wisdom, its suggestion that we always keep Mummy up to speed what we are doing being immediately followed by an invisible wink. The voice of Tony, meanwhile, suggests both the imperiled childhood innocence present in the original PIFs, and a sort of smirking, child-like love of testing one's boundaries. The marriage of drugs culture and kids' entertainment at first glance seems at odds, but it is perhaps an entirely appropriate and affectionate acknowledgement of the incredibly off-the-wall nature of such entertainment. After all, what kind of drugs would you have to be on to think that your cat was lecturing you about stranger danger?

(As a side-note, there are sometimes even benefits to not being in on the joke where these sample-heavy dance records are concerned. I used to think that the man ranting the titular phrase throughout Praga Khan's "Injected With A Poison" had THE COOLEST VOICE EVER, but it turns out that he's a televangelist. Bummer.)

This was a marriage that permeated Toytown Techno at every turning, from the suggestive title of Urban Hype's "Trip To Trumpton" to the music video to "Sesame's Treet" by Smart E's, which included a run-down of the alphabet in which the letter E was pointedly absent (although very much visible in the name of the act). In the case of "Summer Magic", the track wasn't so much subverting the intentions behind the source of its sample so much as tapping into the pre-existing lore surrounding the characters. It certainly didn't require the creation of a quirky rave record to draw an association in the public's mind between The Magic Roundabout and drugs use. Anybody with even the vaguest knowledge of old-school BBC children's programming knows that The Magic Roundabout was really the UK retooling of a French series, Le Manège enchanté. When the BBC acquired the series in 1965 they chose, for whatever reason, not to translate directly from the French original, but to use the footage as the basis for their own original scripts and stories (similar to what Saban Entertainment did with Samurai Pizza Cats). The series gained a cult following among adult viewers, and a popular fan theory persisted that the English dub had deliberately reinterpreted the series as a commentary on the contemporary drugs culture, with each character representing a different kind of drugs user. Dylan, the rabbit, was obviously a stoner, but I've heard mixed interpretations as to what Dougal's sugar cube addiction was intended to signify.

As an epilogue, Charley did make a small comeback in 2014, when Electrical Safety First released two new films featuring Charley and Tony, exploring different aspects of electrical safety around the home. The revival made the puzzling decision, however, to have Tony voiced not by an actual child, but by TV personality David Walliams, which changes the tone of the films significantly (Walliams also provided the voice of Charley - Everett, sadly, died in 1995, although I'm not sure what prevented them from using archived audio to recreate the role). The result is an unmistakably adult voice disturbing the sense of childhood naivety that the originals pinned down so hauntingly. As such, it's rather hard to distinguish between the new revived Charley and the glut of online parodies that were fairly common in the 2000s (there was one in particular that made the rounds in the mid-00s, a re-dubbed version of the "Strangers" PIF narrated from the playground predator's point of view, in which we discovered that he at least had good taste in naming his dogs, and which now seems to have vanished without trace). As they say, you can't go home again. Every now and then, though, perhaps you can answer the seductive call of Toytown as it beckons you from off in the distance.