Magic from the East
Pan Tau Conquers West German Screens
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
The congenial children’s hero Pan Tau was the most important export product of socialist Czechoslovakia. In the early 1970s, the series revolutionised West German children’s television. With its mixture of everyday life and fantasy, it offered entertainment suitable for children and cinematic quality. Above all, however, it was considered critical of consumerism, anarchic and subversive – at the time attributes held in the highest of esteem. Simultaneously, it fulfilled, in Prague fashion, the canon of humanistic moral conception and complied with socialist state ideology.
(Osteuropa 5/2007, pp. 69–82)