In the 1973 Flemish-Belgian TV series "De Kat" (Dutch for "The Cat") a company called Af-Val (as in "afval", literally "Trash") is responsible for high-level pollution of a river near a small Flemish town called Holebeek.
One guy decides to take up the fight against this company - just talking to them apparently doesn't help - and becomes a sort of eco-terrorist/vigilante, trying to bring them to their senses and do something about the pollution. To keep his real identity secret, he calls himself The Cat, and wears a superhero-like outfit with a stylized cat mask. Think Batman, but without the cape. Or Robin! Uhm, anyway...
This was a pretty popular series on Flemish TV, of of several penned by writer/screenwriter Lode De Groof, and through reruns over the years, generations of people grew up with it.
This series was ahead of its time! Environmentalism, making people aware of the problems and dangers of industrial pollution, and the search for solutions, making life better for everyone.
To its credit, the baddies weren't cardboard 2-dimensional. (Well, not all of them anyway, but I'll get back to that.)
The initial bad guy of the story, the company's boss, a man called Oskar Dias, is initally very much opposed to The Cat and everything he fights for. However, as the series progresses he is forced to re-evaluate his views, and eventually reluctantly makes peace with The Cat and his growing group of merry rebels, after first his niece - and later on his own wife -willingly join them.
Unfortunately the series is dumbed down somewhat by the inclusion of Dias' Bumbling Henchmen(tm). While originally conceived by the series' writer as the company's strong-arm squad, some of these thugs are pure comic relief, and often seem barely able to tie their own shoe laces, let alone catch any intruders. Only on accasion do they shown signs of actual intelligence, and actually manage to accomplish their objectives.
Although the series supposedly took place in this nondescript Flemish rural town, in reality it was filmed on location somewhere in the sunny south of France. So what you see in the series is a Flanders that never existed, lending an almost surreal quality to the series.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0231882/
No comments:
Post a Comment