Subscribe!The Amazing Adventures of Morph (1980)
Originally posted on 14 March 2026First episode title: How It All Began
How familiar with the show am I?: I know the character of Morph from his appearances on the art show SMart, but I don't know if I've seen any of this show specifically.
Morph is an orange plasticine stop-motion character whose whole gimmick is exactly that - he is made of plasticine even in-universe and can re-shape himself as he likes, and lives on a desk alongside his similarly-made friends. He sometimes interacts with his live-action creator, Tony Hart.
This episode is about Grandmorph, i.e. Morph's grandfather, getting a delivery of some kind of giant (from their point of view) word processing machine, which Morph decides to use to write a book about himself, that paradoxically tells the very story we're watching.
All of the characters in this speak in high-pitched gibberish, while Tony Hart's narration tells us what they're saying when appropriate.
This is a very short show so there's not much to say about it, but let's go through the characters. Morph himself seems very self-centred, immediately wanting to make everything about him as soon as the machine arrives - we never even find out what Grandmorph wanted it for!
One of the characters is a larger blue plasticine figure called Gillespie. He's the one who goes to get the delivery when there is a "knock at the door" (no door is visible), so he could just be a friend or maybe he could be some kind of servant? He's the only character with eyebrows. Morph comically jumps into his arms when the machine makes an unexpected noise.
Grandmorph is orange like Morph and has a grey beard but is bald on top. It is funny how, when your default character design has no hair, adding some hair can give the impression of a character being "balding". He gets around on a skateboard which is pretty cool.
Best visual gag of the show: when Morph gets "struck by an idea", literally.
There is also a female plasticine figure called Delilah, and... ugh. She seems to be a horrible stereotype of feminists, wanting to use the machine ahead of Morph and then calling him a chauvinist when he refuses.
Also amongst the friends is a pale figure who otherwise looks just like Morph. I believe he's called Chas in future, but a visible page of the book seems to refer to him as Lum, unless I've misunderstood something. And there's a pet dog in the show which is actually just a board scrubber that somehow moves around independently and barks despite no visible orifice from which to do so.
The machine is a "super-micro-electronic word processing machine". When Morph actually puts it to use, he does so by talking into a microphone to dictate his book. As it turns out, all this does is that a girl made of tinfoil inside the machine types up what he's saying! It reminds me of the various kinds of technology in Discworld that just have a little imp inside that's trained to perform the relevant function.
Most of the work then gets done by the rest of the gang, who have to do the actual process of turning it into a book. Maybe all the stuff they use is meant to have come with the machine, because otherwise it seems like the machine itself isn't a very big part of the process!
I guess they didn't have either the technology or the budget to overlay stop motion footage onto live-action footage, so whenever Tony Hart and Morph are on screen at the same moment, the human moves as though he's stop motion too! Most of their interactions are instead achieved by cutting between them to make things smoother.
Speaking of their interactions, there is a bit of weird time-bending to make them work, as Hart is reading the story from the very book that they're making even while those events are happening around him!
Overall, the presentation and idea of this show is very creative, but the story could have been better.
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