2023-10-26 11:02:00
Once upon a time there was a wild little man who we all fell for. It was small, wearing a yellow shirt and green pants and had fiery red hair on its head. Back in the mid-sixties, when Bibi Blocksberg didn’t exist yet and neither did Sams.
Bayern were not yet record champions. We didn’t even know Bavarian yet. We then learned that with the cassettes from Pumuckl, how we learned to play detective from the three ??? learned.
Under our Pumuckl blanket with the Pumuckl cup on the bedside table, we didn’t care as much about the fact that Pumuckl is the southern German cute form of Nepomuk (except the Pumuckl cheese, because it was really disgusting), as did our parents’ fear that we might spoil yourself.
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The goblin with the tummy – an invention of the writer Ellis Kaut and the illustrator Barbara von Johnson – fit perfectly into the time as a Bavarian Pippi, was anarchic, could not be contained and muddled the words in everyone’s mouths before they even noticed them lay on the tongue.
“What rhymes is good,” crowed poetry slammer avant la lettre in the wonderfully rancid backyard carpentry workshop of his master Eder. There could hardly be a better school for six-year-olds to think like dolls and go crazy with language.
That was fifty years ago. And because film producers, screenwriters and directors are gradually reaching an age where they realize that they have to explain to their children and grandchildren from scratch what has shaped them, because suddenly Winnetou’s adventures are being remade and those of the ???, The firehead is now blazing again through the former Munich working-class districts of Lehel and Haidhausen. And on the cinema screens and television screens.
34 years after the finale of the 52-part Pumuckl series with Gustl Bayrhammer as Eder and Hans Clarin as Pumuckl’s voice, after rather bad cinema films and countless radio plays and books, at the end of an endless Pumuckl exploitation chain.
The Klabauter’s Plautze
For the new adventures of the little screamer, which were filmed by Bavarian film expert and Pumucklian Marcus H. Rosenmüller, Eder’s original wood screwdriver establishment, which had long been demolished, was lovingly recreated. Every Boomer will immediately feel at home in the stories. And everything else was done to disrupt this feeling of home. You don’t have to send out trigger warnings.
That is not so obvious. On the one hand, there was an attempt to make Pumuckl slim, because he could be a role model for the children, and to retouch his clowns. On the other hand, not long ago Amazon Prime, where all of Pumuckl’s adventures were available to stream, issued a warning for children under twelve because the episodes involved drinking beer, swearing and fighting – in other words, normal Bavarian life took place .
Both of these things really enraged the anti-authoritarian Pumuckl community, which hates bans on thinking. Now everything is fine again. Prime relented. And the little yellow shirt still doesn’t adequately keep the little tummy in check.
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For the new episodes – the first three will now be shown one after the other as a movie, so to speak, a total of 15 have been filmed, they will be shown on RTL+ from November – Pumuckl was different from his good sister, Maya the Bee, and Wickie, the bold film history sibling the north, has not been subjected to any smoothing 3D treatment that makes everything appear sloppy. The Pumuckl, as he appears, disappears, hops around, still has the same wooden craftsman charm as he did back in the sixties.
The fact that we are in the present is unmistakable despite the slightly nostalgic milky colors, but is not unduly emphasized in the slow flow of the narrative. Franz, the master Eder, has been dead for 30 years (like Gustl Bayrhammer, who played him). The dusty workshop is now finally going to be sold (the fact that a property in Munich will be empty for more than thirty years is about as likely as the existence of basically invisible goblins or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but it doesn’t matter).
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Florian (Florian Brückner), Eder’s nephew, and his rather money-oriented sister are the heirs. But because there is obviously a haunting between the floorboards and the cobwebs and Florian, who saws wooden boards in the DIY store, rediscovers his love for creativity, nothing comes of the deal that would have made everyone (we are in the middle of Munich) fabulously rich.
And because Pumuckl was stupid enough to knock over a pot of glue, get stuck on the glue and get upset and become visible to Florian, he now has to stay with Florian – that’s what the goblin law says.
Hans Clarin will live forever
This gives hope for a number of new stories. The first three are about grief (when Eder Franz is at the grave, Florian tries to explain to Pumuckl where Eder Franz is now), about child anarchy and bureaucracy, about heirs and giving gifts.
Now we have almost forgotten the greatest danger of Pumuckl resuscitation. That’s much more important than the goblin belly, you can’t see it, you can just hear it. The Klabauter’s voice belonged to Hans Clarin, Hans Clarin was the Klabauter. He squeaked and whooped and played around between his head and chest voice with such virtuosity that a Pumuckl without Clarin wouldn’t be a Pumuckl at all.
However, Clarin died 18 years ago in Chiemgau. This is how the slightly snoring Bavarian carpenter magician became a pioneering project for artificial intelligence. In principle, the Bavarian cabaret artist Maxi Schafroth speaks Pumuckl – known from film and television and from the Lenten speech at the traditional Derblecken on the Nockherberg – and if you want, you can also hear him on RTL+.
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For the cinema and the second series soundtrack, Schafroth’s Pumuckl was sent through the AI’s acoustic sausage machine, with the aim of making Schafroth sound like Clarin lip-synced with the goblin. This works frighteningly well. Then the door to the chamber of horrors creaks open for the at least acoustic resurrection of all sorts of faded actors.
By the way, Hans Clarin’s heirs didn’t think that was a bad thing. They were asked. They weren’t trying to monetize their ancestor’s vocal footprint. They thought Clarin, open-minded to all things technology as he was, would have loved it.
Hurray, hurrah, the Pumuckl is back. May he stay a little longer.
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