Sandman turns 65 – Sandman: A pleasant anachronism

In enlightened times, even the civil eve on television is becoming a little more diverse. No soap opera without a gay couple, no hospital without a clinic manager. Black people investigate in the “big city area”, including at the Watzmann. And a real television fossil is now positioned across society almost as broadly as the reality around it. When we walk towards a prefabricated housing estate at 5.40 p.m., there is a girl in a wheelchair playing with friends who look far less German than has been the case in the longest-running children’s program for six and a half decades: the Sandman. More precisely: “Our Sandman.”

Already at its television premiere on November 22, 1959, the possessive pronoun brought the fairytale gnome – whose goatee was hardly reminiscent of Walter Ulbricht’s – into a brotherhood with the real socialist offspring. And he responded promptly. When their sandman fell asleep in public after work, numerous children offered him their own bed.

The TV connection between audience and program, known as corporate identity, worked perfectly from the start.

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The TV connection between audience and program, known as corporate identity, worked perfectly from the start. So good, in fact, that the silent figure in his fantasy vehicles occasionally served with the National People’s Army or with border guard pioneers and was still the most successful Western export of those cold war days. Just nine days after the DFF original went on air east of the Elbe, the SFB copy started west of it. All the more interesting that almost exactly 30 years later, it was not the FRG figure that survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, as usual, but the GDR model.

It was a late triumph for the legendary Defa animator Gerhard Behrendt, who had once created his star in less than two weeks and brought it to CRT screen maturity. The first celebrates this in a big way. On the one hand, with the big RBB documentary “65 Years of Our Sandman”, accompanied by repeats of older episodes in the ARD media library. On the other hand, with the birthday special “Journey to the Dream Sandmill”.

Narrated from the off by Florian David Fitz, Stefan Schomerus’ short film takes its very young audience from a dreary high-rise settlement into snowy mountain worlds, where the sandman grinds new sleeping sand with the help of restored equipment from the series inventor Behrendt’s collection. The secret of the program retains its magic even in our crisis-ridden era. Maybe even more than ever. Silent as always, the stylized garden gnome ultimately prefers to let images speak rather than words.

They are hand-made stop-motion works far away from the animated hustle and bustle of competing children’s channels from SuperRTL to Disney to Nickelodeon, in which even the youngest children can process split screens and fidget cuts. With the Sandman, on the other hand, not much happens in the opening credits from the GDR era, to which the RBB has now added eight newer versions, nor in the three-minute sketches afterwards.

Cartoon characters like the little raven Sock or hand puppets like the meerkats Jan & Henry are therefore particularly suitable for small children, but are not nearly as indestructible as Pittiplatsch and Schnatterinchen. They both received a fresh cell treatment for the Sandman’s 60th birthday. Albeit without the acceleration of similar series such as “Maya the Bee” or “Wickie”. While such seventies relics have long since been created on the computer instead of on the drawing board and have lost much of their old magic of elaborate uneventfulness, the only thing that has been changed for the goblin and his duck friend is the equipment.

Visually, much of what Studio Hamburg built on behalf of RBB is a bit more complex, more colorful and more professional. However, when the stress is exhausted in a rake that one of the cute animals steps on, it remains calm enough, almost 70 years after Pittiplatsch’s television debut, to amusingly make preschoolers sleepy, not awake, before bedtime.

“Our Sandman” is therefore a (n)ostalgic relic of the GDR, which in many places is only visible in a handful of surviving brands such as Halloren-Kugeln or “Polizeiruf 110”. But more than that, it remains the most pleasant anachronism in the reunited television land. This is also why an average of one million people from three generations watch it evening after evening, 365 days a year, on RBB, MDR or KiKa – the evening greeting has apparently only been canceled once in 65 years, on super state election Sunday on October 14, 1991.

“The Journey to the Dream Sand Mill”, 20-minute special, Friday, November 22nd, 5:40 p.m. (RBB);
“65 Years of Our Sandman – A Journey Through the Decades”, Saturday, November 23rd, 5:05 p.m. (RBB).