The Big Knights

The Big Knights

The height of two men...

The weight of four...

The strength of sixteen...

Sir Boris, the finest swordsman in the World...

And his brother Sir Morris, not the finest swordsman in the World...but the most enthusiastic...

And their noble pets. Sir Horace the dog...and Sir Doris the hamster...

The Big Knights!

And so begins the rather dramatically narrated (by Alexander Armstrong) 1999 BBC cartoon series that didn't last very long but has a cult following. Following the adventures of the rather incompetent but gloriously enthusiastic knights Sir Boris (David Rintoul) and Sir Morris (Brian Blessed) in the kingdom of Borovia. Borovia is run by the rather miserly King Otto (Timothy West), a kingdom where knights fight dragons, witches...and ogres...and where nuclear power stations, electricity and hydro-electric dams sit comfortably alongside each other. Well, not that comfortably
really as all have felt the clash of the Big Knights swords.

This release came to me on a DVD-R containing all 13 episodes but without a Play All function, which got a little finicky at times with each episode running at nine and a half minutes. Hopefully the retail edition will resolve that issue. The good thing about the retail release is that it is a DVD/Blu-Ray combo, which when you look at the price this is available at Amazon is a bit of a steal. I'm thinking of buying this for my son for Christmas and just pilfering the Blu-Ray disc for my own amusement.

Of particular note for those who have seen this before is that the series was initially delivered to the BBC in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio as this was the project delivery requirements for the BBC at the time. However, with widescreen TV's not being very prevalent at the time, the picture was cropped to 4:3. Not only that but the initial artwork was actually produced larger than 1.33:1 using vector files which can be scaled to whatever size you like without losing quality so that made the possibility of producing a high definition widescreen version quite an easy option.

I'd never seen this rather short lived series before but pleased to have at least found it now, albeit by accident. The writing is superbly comic and absurd, a series that both adults and children can enjoy as I can attest having sat through the entire series chanting the beginning narration with my five year old son and both going batty at the rather uplifting and dynamic theme tune by the Rostov Balalaika Orchestra. Amongst the five awards that recognised the quality of this Astley Baker Davies production was the Best Adult Animation Series in 2000, awarded by the British Animation Awards.

The style of animation is a quite simple 2D cardboard cut-out style but works wonderfully, especially with the quality of the voice acting, and quite frankly whilst the likes of David Rintoul, Timothy West and Prunella Scales are good, anything that includes the voice work of Brian Blessed is worth looking at. It is the combination of Blessed and Rintoul that carry this off and this series is high on the re-watchability scales.

A pure joy...