Watership Down (TV series)
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Watership Down is an animated adaptation for television of the novel of the same name by Richard Adams, co-produced by Alltime Entertainment of the United Kingdom and Decode Entertainment of Canada. The director of the feature film version, Martin Rosen, produced this series. Three series were produced, the first in 1999, although confusingly some sources merge the first two together as "series one" with the third being dubbed "series two". In this article, the adaptation will be considered to have three series.
The story was broadly based on that of the novel, with most characters and many incidents retained but with an increasing divergence as the series went on, and in later episodes especially some storylines and characters were entirely new. Stephen Gately sang a new arrangement of Art Garfunkel's Bright Eyes, which had been included in the 1978 feature film, while Mike Batt (who wrote Bright Eyes) and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra contributed a completely new score.
The adaptation was shown by CITV in the United Kingdom and YTV in Canada. It was generally rather poorly received in the United Kingdom, with many viewers complaining that it had lost the bite of the book thanks to its younger target audience. Some were also upset that Blackberry had been transformed from buck to doe, suspecting political correctness was at work. CITV showed only the first two series, but series three was eventually shown in Canada, and other European markets have also aired all three.
Some episodes from the adaptation were released on VHS over the years, but distribution was very uneven between countries. In October 2005, however, a Region 2 DVD box set of all three seasons was released, the first time that the third series had been made easily available to UK viewers.
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| Richard Adams' Watership DownEdit |
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| Novels: Watership Down - Tales from Watership Down |
| Adaptations: Feature film - TV series |
| Characters: Bigwig - Blackavar - Blackberry - Campion - Cowslip - Dandelion - Fiver - General Woundwort - Hazel - Kehaar - Vervain - Minor characters |
| Mythical/story creatures: El-ahrairah |
| Locations: Efrafa - River Enborne - Railway line - Redstone - River Test - Watership Down |
| Other: Chief Rabbit - Concepts in Watership Down - Lapine - Owsla |
