Another Roger Mirams production, Professor Poopsnagle's Steam Zeppelin was a spin-off from Mirams's previous series, Secret Valley. In this series, Professor Poopsnagle, grandfather of one of the Secret Valley children, is kidnapped while working on a means of stopping air pollution. The children, in an effort to save him, complete his half-built steam zeppelin (a combination of an old bus and a hot-air balloon) and set off in pursuit of six golden salamanders: each salamander contains the name of a mineral, and the six minerals combined will complete the professor's formula.
The children are aided by the professor's friend, Doctor García, and opposed by the sinister Count Sator, a retired local land magnate. In the figure of the latter and in the concern with environmental destruction, Professor Poopsnagle's Steam Zeppelin (like Secret Valley) echoes the concerns of other children's programs such as Falcon Island and series one of The Henderson Kids.
The program also touches on the iconography of the then nascent genre of steampunk: though the program does not borrow the British Victorian or American Wild West settings associated with steampunk, the zeppelin itself is a distinctly steampunk device. Moran notes, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, that 'The effect of the flying bus was achieved through a combination of front projection photography, a double set of models, and front shots and interiors of a real bus hoisted on a crane'.
The program was successful on Australian television, and also aired in Switzerland, Finland, Spain, Greece, The Netherlands, France, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom (where, unlike Secret Valley, it was immensely popular).
Secret Valley
Ghost Town Gang
( dir. Howard Rubie
et. al. )agent
Sydney
:
Reg Grundy Enterprises
,
1984
Z1827220
1984
series - publisher
film/TV
Akin to other Australian television programs such as Falcon Island (1981) and The Henderson Kids (1985), Secret Valley revolved in part around the attempts of a group of children to protect a ghost town and its valley from the depredations of developers. In this instance, the children form the land into a weekend holiday camp, at which they both work and play; in this sense, Secret Valley is, as Moran notes in his Guide to Australian TV Series, something of a successor to Roger Mirams's first Australian production, The Terrific Adventures of the Terrible Ten. Another group of children, led by Spider McGlurk, also live in Secret Valley (in Spider Cave), leading to a number of confrontations.
Secret Valley began as a made-for-television film, and was expanded into a twenty-four-episode series.
Moran notes that the program 'wore its Australianness well, even down to having the Secret Valley soundtrack lyrics imposed on "Waltzing Matilda".' Despite being (in part) a Grundy production, the program first aired on the ABC in Australia, and was sold into Spain, the United Kingdom (where it was a commercial failure when it aired on ITV), and the Netherlands.
