“5.20 MURUN BUCHSTANSANGUR. Original animated series featuring a smelly, disgusting, but irresistible creature that lives in a crack beneath the kitchen cupboard.”
If you know what “Murun Buchstansangur” is at all, you know that it’s a series of five minute cartoons made between 1982 and 1988 for Channel 4 in the UK, and it stars a weird and somewhat unappealing blue blob man. The show itself is also weird and somewhat unappealing, and that’s why it’s so fascinating.
It takes the form of a children’s cartoon, but it isn’t for kids at all; yet neither is it something that could logically be shown on something like Adult Swim. It’s too early eighties British, too unsettling in a way that doesn’t lend itself easily to memes and posts on the socials (other than the usual “Bri’ish” stuff – the meme equivalent of nervous laughter). If the creators of Mr Pickles took one glance at this, they’d have an existential crisis.
The first episode went out only 12 days after Channel 4’s launch, at 5:20pm on a Sunday. The following episodes were repeated for many, many years, long after production had ceased. Eventually I started to wonder – when did it exit the schedules? It must have been the 90s, right?
Well, yes, I was right – Murun Buchstansangur’s last air date, as far as I can tell, was on Tuesday July 30th 1996, at 5 minutes to 6 in the evening. It followed the airing of a Terrytoons cartoon, perhaps further emphasizing that Channel 4 probably never bothered watching a single episode of it themselves.
1996 was perhaps the last year you could argue that Channel 4 was still at some level “Channel 4”, in the original Red Triangle / alternative comedy / “Channel Swore” meaning of the name. But by this point the schedules were very different. Despite Murun being followed by a repeat of The Avengers (as in Mr Steed and Emma Peel, not Marvel), which also graced the fourth channel in 1982, another programme that had been on earlier was Ricki Lake’s talk show. The following morning would feature Rocko’s Modern Life, The Secret World Of Alex Mack, and of course The Big Breakast.
Embarassingly, while I do remember seeing the title of the programme in TV listings back in the 80s, I didn’t watch it due to a typical childhood misunderstanding. My small brain thought that “Murun Buchstansangur” must be something in a foreign language, and therefore I wasn’t allowed to watch, as that would break the law or something. A related bit of confusion happened with The Hitman And Her, which was on well after my bedtime in 1989 – I assumed it must be a thrilling American import about an assassin who now has to work for the cops, and who gets partnered up with a tough street-smart female detective (the “Her” of the title).
Anyway, not too long ago I uploaded a painstakingly compiled video of the first 13 episodes of Murun Buchstansangur to this channel, and it’s embedded above. For more info on the programme, I highly recommend this review / ranking of these same first 13 episodes, courtesy of The Anorak Zone.
