Bumper Films

Bumper Films (Welsh: Ffilmiau Bumper Cyf.) was a children's stop-motion animation studio and production company based in Weston-super-Mare that was founded by John Walker and Ian Frampton in 1982. It is best known for being the main studio creating and animating the original Fireman Sam from 1987-1994. It had also created other shows, such as “Joshua Jones” from 1991-1992, “Starhill Ponies” from 1998-2001 and “Rocky Hollow” in 1983. The company went defunct after production on Starhill Ponies ended and Gullane's purchase of a stake in Fireman Sam from S4C in December 2001.

Aside from Fireman Sam which is currently owned by Mattel, Hoho Entertainment owns the rights to their programming library after acquiring S4C's children's library in 2017.^[1]^[2]^[3]

Lists of Shows[]

Rocky Hollow - first aired 1983.
Fireman Sam - first aired 1987, the most well-known production from the studio.
Joshua Jones - first aired 1991.
Starhill Ponies - first aired 1998, it is also the last production filmed and produced at Bumper Films before its closure.

Trivia[]

In the end board from series 1 up to series 3, the Bumper films logo had a yellow flag with bumper films written in blue letters.
When series 4 came up the flag on the Bumper films logo changed to blue with white lettering.
When Hit Entertainment remastered the series 1 to 4 episodes the logo changed back to it's first design with its yellow flag and blue lettering.
According to Dave Jones, during the production of Fireman Sam's sister series Joshua Jones, the producers had no idea a similar canal-based children's series was being made for ITV at the same time, that being Rosie and Jim, which was almost identical and much more aggressively marketed by Ragdoll Productions (the company behind other children's shows like Brum, Tots TV and Teletubbies), swamping Joshua Jones and causing a lot of money to be lost on it.
Many props from the Bumper Films studio have been reused in the Siriol-animated fifth series. This can be seen on several sets of the series, featuring foodstuff and toy props used as scenery decoration and even a white van prop originally used in Star Hill Ponies which appeared as a background vehicle in Carnival of Junk.

Gallery[]

References[]

[1] ttps://www.animationmagazine.net/2017/10/hoho-rights-acquires-s4c-animation-catalogue/

[2] ttps://www.awn.com/news/hoho-acquires-s4c-animation-back-catalog

[3] ttps://www.hohoentertainment.com/hoho-rights/

[1]

[2]

[3]