Little Miss (1983)

First episode title: Little Miss Tiny

How familiar with the show am I?: I definitely watched some of this as a kid, although I can't remember which episodes.

Is this the first episode?: Two things to consider here. In some places, the Little Miss show was combined with the Mr. Men show, which began in 1974 and so is out of range for Debutniverse. But they are definitely different shows, so I am counting Little Miss on its own. The other thing is that different sources disagree on the order of the episodes - I've ended up following Wikipedia's lead on this one.

We have covered a Roger Hargreaves adaptation before in Timbuctoo, but now we're on to his best known work - the Mr. Men and Little Miss. As I said above, though, the Mr. Men had already had their own adaptation before the Little Miss books existed, so this one focuses on the Little Miss characters. Regardless, the show is about simplistic-looking characters of different colours and shapes who are each named after a major trait of theirs.

---

The opening sequence in this show has the same song in each episode but a different animation sequence taken from the episode in question, ending with the title of the episode - in other words, this is a very rare instance of a show that doesn't actually display a title card for the title of the show (although, of course, "Little Miss" does appear in the episode title). So, the title card here just says Little Miss Tiny.

The artwork here looks just like the books - that is, very simple and colourful, sometimes just on a white background if the location isn't relevant. The episode starts off showing us a building while a narrator tells us that Little Miss Tiny was extremely small. You know, just in case you didn't get the gimmick of the characters' names.

Then he says that she was so small that she didn't live in a house, and instead lived in a mousehole in the dining room of Home Farm. I'm pretty sure that technically means she does live in a house. And he says that she could be comfortable in the mousehole because farm cat Ginger always chased all the mice away.

Now we see Little Miss Tiny for the first time, a pink oval with a face and limbs and a bow on top, sleeping in a matchbox, as the narrator explains that, because Tiny was so tiny, no-one knew she lived there, so she was always very lonely. Oh... that's pretty sad.

She wakes up and the first thing she says is that she wishes she had someone to talk to. She has a high-pitched voice (as expected) with a Scottish accent (less so).

Narrator: One day, she was feeling so lonely, she decided to be very brave and go out for a walk.

Relatable. She looks at herself in a hand mirror which is like a full-length mirror to her, and then leaves the mousehole. When she gets out of the dining room she reaches the hallway, which the narrator says is like a field to her. Weirdly she seems surprised by its size, even though you'd think she would have passed through these places to get to the mousehole. But really, her whole existence and situation is a bit inexplicable. Did she ever have a family? Were they just as tiny? Did they have any friends? What was the rest of her life like up until now?

She gets out the front door through the cat flap and reaches the even larger area of the farmyard. Still, she's walking along perfectly happily until a worm pops out of the ground. The worm says good morning to her (status of animals in this world: talking, so far), but she's terrified by this "monster" and runs away, leaving the worm looking annoyed. How has someone of her size never met a worm? Has she never gone outside? Which brings us right back to the logic of her past again.

Tiny rushes under the door of a nearby enclosure and comes face to face with a pig, which towers over her of course. The pig snorts at her (status of animals in this world: some of them cannot talk) and moves closer, and Tiny is of course scared again and runs back out of the place. Tiny keeps using phrases like "oh, my knocking knees" when she's scared like this. It's cute.

She climbs on top of a rock - very big compared to her - to try and see whether the pig had followed her, only for the rock to move and reveal itself to be a snail. The snail jokingly asks for fares as if he was a bus driver. So far I'm getting the impression that "bug"-scale animals can talk but larger ones can't.

Tiny runs around to the back of the pigsty but she still isn't safe - Ginger the farm cat shows up right in front of her! The point of view we see Ginger from makes his body shape look really weird, not helped by the fact that his entire body appears to be pulsating. Tiny screams that "It's a lion", as if she doesn't know what size she is, as Ginger grins at her menacingly, purring. He's non-speaking, so I'm pretty confident in my assertion now!

Quite abruptly, the show cuts to Mr Strong, who is a red square character with a hat.

Narrator: Every day, Mr. Strong went to Home Farm to buy some eggs. He liked eggs. Lots of them. And that particular day, he was walking home across the farmyard when he heard a very tiny squeak.

Mr. Strong sees what's happening to Little Miss Tiny and tells the cat to shoo. He picks up Tiny, the narration says "very gently" but he's actually lifting her by the bow on her head - if that's attached to hair then that looks pretty painful!

Safely in Strong's hand, Tiny introduces herself and explains about how lonely she is, and so Strong says he will find some friends for her to talk to. Tiny sounds really adorable when she thanks him.

And so the narration tells us that, every day from then on, Strong would pick up Tiny when he went to get his eggs (carrying her in his basket), and take her to visit someone. One time it was Mr. Funny, who told her lots of jokes according to the narration, although he isn't voiced here and we just see him dancing madly around.

Then Mr. Greedy, who describes his favourite breakfast to her. In between other breakfast foods, he keeps listing more and more slices of toast. When Tiny says all that would be too much for her, he says that for her she'd have to divide it all by a hundred. But that still sounds like it would be too much for her to me, since Greedy is meant to be greedy for his size and I'm pretty sure he's over a hundred times the size of Tiny.

Next Mr. Silly teaches her how to stand on her head. The way Mr. Silly stands on his head isn't how a human would do it, as his arms don't even reach far enough - instead he just balances on his hat! Tiny says that what he's doing is very silly and Silly takes it as a compliment, of course.

And last of all, she meets Mr. Small, who the narrator says has become Tiny's special friend. I'd ship it. Small is surprised to meet someone even smaller than he is. Tiny jokes "Just you wait till I grow up" and they laugh about it, and Mr. Strong winks at the camera.

There's a regular ending sequence that I believe was shared with reruns of Mr. Men to tie the shows together, which lists a lot of the characters in song, and then the credits themselves are accompanied by a "Goodbye, Goodbye" song by what sounds like a John Lennon impersonator.

Well, this was a cosy and adorable little show. Little Miss Tiny herself is especially cute.