Imagine a series combining the finer aspects of Doctor Who, Doctor Doolittle, Yellow Submarine, The Wind In The Willows and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and you've got Doctor Snuggles.This series is hard to find in the U.S. and I imagine a lot of fans of contemporary anime won't be able to get past its low-tech limited animation and corny-looking 1970s visuals. The scriptwriting (some of it by Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy author Douglas Adams) ranges from above average to brilliant, as is the soundtrack, which features the great Peter Ustinov as the voice of Snuggles and several other characters. The tone is laid-back, funny and just a little bit trippy, as you'd expect from the era.Despite his visual similarity to Mr. Pickwick, Snuggles is closest in spirit to the Doctor as played by Peter Cushing in the Doctor Who feature films of the 1960s. He's a lovable grandfatherly eccentric genius with a Tardis-like space shuttle named Dreamy Boom Boom and a variety of companions, mostly male and mostly talking animals, including an obnoxious mouse who provides the one note of rudeness in this otherwise fairly decorous series. He is eco-friendly and a bit of a bodhisattva in terms of his worldview but basically a sensible English gentleman ready to lend a hand to any living being in a predicament.

I watched this as a kid and I loved it. As an adult I re-watched this and still found Doctor Snuggles interesting. The show might seem old fashioned for now, but certainly it is not outdated. You can find a lot of Lewis Carroll in here, but also some Douglas Adams, who himself actually wrote a couple of the episodes. Doctor Snuggles is a synthesis of an old Victorian culture and the newer sixties psychedelic movement. The Doctor himself is a good natured philanthropist and inventing genius, who helps people, human-like animals, and monsters to overcome their unimaginable problems. The story runs in a colourful landscape where nothing seems to be what it first looks like. The solutions that Doctor Snuggles discovers are usually extraordinary, and that will keep even an adult viewer interested into the end of an episode.

Back when I was younger my parents borrowed an old Beta tape from my uncle which contained several episodes of Dr Snuggles. To this day that tape still resides somewhere in their house, along with the Beta VCR to play it. I used to watch that tape endlessly and could probably recite what happens in nearly every episode that was on there shot by shot.The show was inspiring and creative, with a real sense of adventure and wacky invention-based problem solving. The characters were all funny, but somehow quite believable. Likewise, the inventions, although impossible (a robot made of soup cans for instance), still made sense in the context of the show.I remember wanting to be an inventor when I was younger and this show really had me hooked on the concept. These days, while I'm not an inventor of rocket ships and soup can robots, I'd like to think that the creative direction my life has taken is, in part, due to growing up with Dr Snuggles.

I always really wanted to become an inventor after watching Dr.Snuggles in my childhood. He can create robots by connecting old marmalade cans, make them alive by inserting an old alarm clock and build every machine you could imagine by just combining simple parts.Not to forget the psychedelic parts of the series (well, I didn't really recognize them in my childhood :-). Flying marmalade-trees, every plant and animal is talking and most of them smile all the time, there is a camel living on a rainbow, there are salt and pepper mountains (where lives a witch riding on a motor-driven broom, invented by Dr Snuggles) and it's all very very colorful. Really a great series.