Hullaballoo

[Schfifty]

Somebody mentioned online this was a Jim Henson program, but I'm not 100% sure Henson was involved anywhere, so I'm placing this thread here in dubiety. If there's no Henson involvement whatsoever, this probably can be moved to the General Discussion board.

So, in the mid-1990's, there used to be a line of roughly 25-minute children's videos by Dorling Kindersley under the title "Hullaballoo". Apparently, it was also a television program broadcast in the United Kingdom on Channel 4, and was hosted by Floella Benjamin (who also created the program), Buddy (a blue cartoon elephant), and Pip (a brown cartoon mouse). They had different segments throughout the show, including the main parts with Floella and Ted Bear, a human-sized teddy bear, short animated bits with Buddy and Pip, story readings with book illustrations, a silent film-esque segment with a mime and his child assistant, and finally puppet skits.

What I find particularly noteworthy are the puppet skits. They had different types of characters, mostly humans and animals, and I think most of them were live-hand. However, the puppets weren't from the Jim Henson Company, but from (according to the credits in the videos) Hand Up Puppets, a very low-profile company which I think is defunct. Searching them online comes up with virtually nothing.

On the whole, hardly any information exists about this series, aside from the VHS release information on Amazon and library sites. I'm wondering why this series never got any DVD releases, or why the videos never got re-released on DVD. I've had three Hullaballoo videos since I was young, so it would be great to see the rest of the series on DVD format someday.

So, does anyone here remember this show? Here's a clip from the series to show what I'm talking about: