Child Of The 1980's

The Shoe People was, as if you couldn’t guess, a cartoon series about a group of shoes.  Sounds pretty unlikely I know, but these shoes were ones that had been taken to be repaired by the Shoe Mender (not sure why he wasn’t called a Cobbler?).  For one reason or another these shoes were not able to be fixed, and obviously being a sentimental sort the Shoe Mender couldn’t bring himself to throw them away, so they were put in his back room instead.

Now, as luck would have it, every night some magic occured in the back room.  The back wall faded away to reveal a small village called Shoe Town, and the odd shoes came to life and lived out adventures within the town.  Perhaps this explains why sometimes when you wake up in the morning you can only find one shoe in the place you left them (though this probably has more to do with anything you may have consumed the night before).

Anyway, as you might expect the shoes of Shoe Town are a varied bunch, each with its own distinct personality related to the type of shoe they were.  There was P.C. Boot, the town policeman who was obviously a police officers boot before being relegated to the Shoe Menders back room.  Charlie was a long oversized clown shoe, whilst Trampy was a worn out old boot with holes, that for some reason had an Irish accent.  Margot was a soft and kind shoe, perfectly befitting the fact that she was a ballet shoe.  I’ll leave you to ponder on exactly what kind of shoes Baby Bootee, Wellington and Sneaker might have been.

The cartoon was obviously aimed at the younger viewer, and the stories normally involved one of the shoes having a problem which the other shoes then pulled together to help solve.  For some reason Charlie the clown shoe was always particularly good at finding rather lateral solutions to these problems.

The show was created by James Driscoll in 1987 and was originally shown in the UK as part of the breakfast kids line up on TV-am.  It was a very popular show and has been shown in no less than 62 countries, and had the honour of being the first western TV show to be shown in the Soviet Union, where it was so popular over 25 million tie-in books were sold.

Search for The Shoe People items on Amazon.co.uk

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This entry is filed under TV - Cartoons and was posted on January 13th, 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.