Horst in Translation ([email protected])
"Robbi, Tobbi und das Fliewatüüt" is a West German German-language mini-series from the early 1970s and next year it will have its 45th anniversary. The series was written by a handful writers and one of them was Armin Maiwald, who also directed all the episodes and he is known today mostly for his decade-long participation on the German children's television show "Die Sendung mit der Maus". This one here is an earlier career effort from him. It is the story of a little boy who makes friends with a robot and the two travel across the globe with a fictitious vehicle that can fly, drive and swim. On their travels, they have to solve several riddles as it is all a school project for the robot character. And these riddles take them for example to the Pole, to Scotland where they meet Loch Ness, to the sea (led by a hungry dolphin) and a very special lighthouse and eventually to a pretty dark place where they even manage to stop a criminal scientist in his bizarre attempts to turn silver into gold.There exist several versions of this one here. The overall duration from start to finish is more than 3.5 hours, so, with some patience you can watch it all in one sitting like I did. There is a version that consists of 4 episodes of about an hour and another one that consists of 11 episodes of slightly over 20 minutes. It is your choice which one you prefer. I believe the watch here is mostly for children, not too old ones actually, but I also think that grown-up who watched this fairly old series at some point in their childhood can have a good time again taking a look at it. It's tough to say what my favorite part is here, but if I had to, i'd probably pick the last one as the farewell between the boy (actually voices by a female) and the robot is pretty sentimental and somewhat sad, even if they stay friends of course. Robbi the Robot is also my favorite character here and I preferred him a lot over Tobbi, because the little robot had many involuntarily funny moments with the way he talked and what he said. I guess Tobbi is mostly in it, so that kids in the audience have somebody to identify with, but I myself enjoyed the robot way more. Then again, it's not really necessary to make a difference between the two as both are in this one in almost every scene from start to finish. The music is pretty good too. All in all, I enjoyed the watch here and I recommend checking it out, also because for younger audiences it is a really informative movie that will teach children more interesting stuff than any television series could.
