Little Mole's Legacy

In November last year, Zdeněk Miler the creator of Czech cartoon character Krtek (Little Mole) passed away at the age of 90. His little red-nosed creation with the easy smile charmed television audiences across much of Europe and Asia. Now Miler's 21-year-old granddaughter plans to market the mole for tablets and smartphones. Why bother?

Little Mole is hardly in the same vein as the crazily popular Angry Birds game. In fact in over 40 episodes Little Mole never loses his temper or has a bad word for anyone. (True, he doesn't speak, but instead makes do with shrill bursts of laughter and friendly mutterings.)

Little Mole on an Ipad may introduce him to a new generation, but won't some of his original innocence be lost? After all, he never caught on in the USA where the show's unashamed celebration of nature was totally lost on an audience more used to Disney's cheap gags and slapstick set ups like in Donald Duck and Tom and Jerry (merely a milder version of Itchy and Scratchy).

Any traveller who has passed through Vaclav Havel Airport will know that there is already an amazing amount of Krtek merchandise from stuffed toys of various sizes, bags, stationary and even books (do people still read on paper?!). So launching various mole apps and ebooks merely continues the trend. But very soon the original artistic idea is totally buried under a pile of digital detritus.

From the very first episode 'How the Mole Got His Trousers' (1957) creativity and flights of fancy offered viewers relief from a life governed by perpetual bureaucracy. Little Mole gets help from his friends: a frog soaks the material, spiders spin the yarn, ants weave the cloth and a crayfish cuts the fabric to measure.

Miler said he got the idea for the character when he stumbled over a mole hill whilst walking in the woods. The most likely thing a young man of today will stumble into, as he is reading his Ipad, is a lamp post. Sadly, the Little Lamp Post is an unlikely candidate for a world famous cartoon character. But considering the state of pop culture these days, you never know...

Links:

The Wall Street Journal, 'Czech Cartoon Goes Digital Through iPad Apps, E-Books'

The New York Times, 'Zdenek Miler, Creator of Krtek the Mole, Dies at 90'

Krtek ve Městě (The Mole in the City) 1982 on youtube - a heartrending tale of deforestation

Welcome to Vaclav Havel Airport

According to a recent poll 49 per cent of Czechs are against naming Prague Airport after Vaclav Havel. From an international point of view, you have to ask what is wrong with naming your capital's airport after a dissident and intellectual who spearheaded the collapse of communism in Czechoslovakia and the break-up of the Soviet Bloc?

Just look at the guest list of Havel's funeral in Prague last year to see how influential he was: the Clintons, Lech Walesa, Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron, John Major and most European foreign ministers. Looking at that list it's not hard to guess which side of the political spectrum Havel's detractors come from. Unfortunately, there is still a sizable number of hard-line leftists in the Czech Republic, who stayed away and tried to forget Havel.

But even some Havel admirers object to renaming the airport after him. They say that he never liked flying and would not have wanted to be remembered in this way. This all sounds rather petty. It's as though they're in some kind of competition to tell everybody what Havel would and would not have liked best. 'Oh, I knew him better than you', 'Oh no you did not, I knew him better than anybody else' and so on and so forth.

I don't think Havel would have minded. It would probably suit his sense of humour, to see all the foreign tourists struggling to pronounce his name correctly as they arrive in the Bohemian lands.

Overall, it's a good way to remember the man who gave birth to the idea of 'the power of the powerless' which is still used by people fighting oppression the world over today. Although he is a major political figure, he still lacks the fame of JFK and John Lennon, who probably did not need airports named after them to be known and remembered. And how come there's no Winston Churchill airport in London. Imagine that!