AustLit

The president of Catalyst software company hires five high-school whiz-kids to help save her failing business.

The program's interest in artifical intelligence, the Internet, and the video-game industry was comparatively unusual for the time. As with other Australian Children's Television Foundation programs, the focus was on the child protagonists, all Melbourne high-school students with a keen interest in video gaming, who are recruited as games testers by Alexandra Davis, president of Catalyst, in the hopes that they will be able to revitalise her failing business.

Produced in association with the Disney Channel, Crash Zone was successful in Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as Australia.

Science fiction in a stricter (and less speculative) sense, Sky Trackers followed the adventures of a group of scientists' children living in a remote space-tracking station in the Australian outback. The program had the romantic component common to young-adult programming (with blossoming romance between thirteen-year-old Nikki and fourteen-year-old Mike), but also focused on such topics as ambition, future careers, and scholastic achievement.

A mixture of live-action, puppetry, animation, and documentary, Lift Off centred on a group of children who lived in the same neighbourhood and whose imaginations made their environment a world of fun and excitement. However, the program also explored issues such as pain, loneliness, jealousy, and anger. The program was aimed at three-year-old to eight-year-old viewers (as defined by Harvard University developmental psychologist Howard Gardner), and was linked to school curricula through the Curriculum Corporation of Australia.

The story of a Greek family living in suburbia. The two children win an unexpected prize that disrupts their lives, teaching them that it's not always easy when you get something for nothing.

According to Patricia Edgar, she and writer-director Paul Cox did not see eye-to-eye on the production:

He had spent twenty hours reshaping The Gift, following my viewing of his edit of the film. I found the film unstructured and lacking in the narrative core that most children need to understand a film. This had been a problem throughout the entire production of The Gift. Touch the Sun's distributor, Revcom, was very unhappy too, as it was worried about sales. I had introduced Jeff Peck to Paul Cox to give help with the script, but every time Jeff added to the script, Paul took his revisions out. By the time Paul shot the film, he did what he had wanted in the first place. When I saw the film in its final form I insisted on changes and Paul was incensed.

Source: Patricia Edgar, Bloodbath: A Memoir of Australian Television, Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2006, p.192.

In the Australian outback, a young boy becomes determines to help an old miser develop a proper sense of the Christmas spirit.

An anthology series of children's stories, mixing live-action episodes with animation, clay animation, and puppetry. The stories, aimed specifically at the under 10s, are drawn from a variety of sources, including children's books, fairy tales, myths, and original ideas. Some of the episodes have involved, for example, Snow White as a punk bikie and the seven dwarves as a motorcycle gang; a pet stegosaurus; a boy with wheels instead of toes; and Trevor the glider-plane-catching cat.

According to Patricia Edgar,

Thirty separate self-contained dramas of differing lengths were to be packaged into half-hour episodes. The project was designed to showcase new, creative talent in the television industry. Competitions were run at the Australian Film and Television School and Swinburne Institute of Technology for the best concepts suitable for inclusion in the Kaboodle package, with prizes of $1000 awarded. The Foundation sought promising but inexperienced writers, would-be producers, directors and even accountants who wanted to earn their first credit to enable them to find a future in the industry.

Source: Patricia Edgar, Bloodbath: A Memoir of Australian Television, Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2006, pp.175-76.

Kaboodle was produced in two series, the first of which included some live-action segements, but the second of which was entirely animated.

For a full list of episodes, see Film Details.

Episode listing for Kaboodle series two courtesy of the Australian Children's Television Foundation.

According to Moran's Guide to Australian TV Series, Holiday Island was something of an attempt to emulate the appeal of the American television series The Love Boat. Set on a tropical island holiday resort, the concept was, as Moran notes,

a good one with the potential for a continuous series of new characters in the guide of holiday guests, and the possibility of romance and other entanglements between them and the regular characters who worked at the resort. The opportunities for the intervention of nature in the shape of such happenings as cyclones and storms, and the appearance from time to time of more eccentric and enigmantic characters who had come to the island, offered promise.

But the program was broadcast without fanfare in the middle of the ratings season, to replace the poorly rating Bellamy, and only managed moderately good ratings. It was cancelled in 1982.