Little Red Tractor is a British stop motion animated children's television series produced by The Little Entertainment Company and was co-produced by Entertainment Rights for the first two series.^[2] The ten-minute episodes were broadcast in the United Kingdom by the BBC on the CBeebies channel.^[3]

Produced in stop motion model animation, the series is mainly aimed at preschoolers and features unusually detailed sets and models. The series features the popular voices of Stephen Tompkinson and Derek Griffiths. The characters are based on the books by Colin Reeder, which were narrated for video in the mid 1990s by Brian Glover and Richard Briers. The show is mainly aimed at preschoolers.

History

Little Red Tractor Projects Limited owned the original Little Red Tractor video series. Although it didn't have television exposure, Little Red Tractor broke into the top ten children's videos and stayed there for several weeks. In total, the original series sold over 300,000 copies. Contender the distributor wanted to duplicate that success. However, the television rights were sold to Keith Littler's Little Entertainment Group because Peter Tye, the director/writer of the series, preferred their expertise in stop frame animation and empathy with the original. Despite losing the television rights to Little Red Tractor, Contender went ahead and produced their similar series, CITV's Tractor Tom. Despite apparent similarities to Tractor Tom, Little Red Tractor has a completely different style, with more realistic story-lines, a larger human cast, and no surreal livestock behaviour.

Characters

• Stan (voiced by Stephen Tompkinson) is Little Red Tractor's driver and constant companion. Stan lives at Gosling Farm, and keeps two cows Daisy and Veronica, and two pigs.
• Little Red Tractor (leader) is a small and old but reliable red-coloured farm tractor, mute but capable of expressing emotions. Stan restored him to his farm as in new condition.
• Patch is Stan's dog. In the 2004 series, Patch is depicted as a male, whereas in the original stories, Patch is depicted as a female.
• Mr. Jones (voiced by Derek Griffiths) is Stan's neighbour and owner of Big Blue Tractor and Harvey. He often appears selfish, materialistic or otherwise antisocial, but tends to be socially inept or smug rather than actually unpleasant. His first name is revealed to be Jasper and he lives at Beech Farm.
• Big Blue Tractor (co-leader) is a large, updated, blue-coloured farm tractor owned by Mr. Jones. He has no humanised traits, but can blow his horn by himself. In the original stories he was named Big Fred.
• Harvey is an orange-coloured combine harvester owned by Mr. Jones but sometimes borrowed by Stan.
• Thomas is Mr. Jones' nephew who comes to stay at Beech farm with him on occasion since Mr. Jones' sister moved back from the city to the country. Thomas is learning to like the country life which he initially thought was smelly, dirty and not as good as computer games.
• Stumpy (voiced by Jimmy Hibbert) is the miller. He appears friendly, mildly eccentric and clumsy. He drives his quadbike, "Nipper" very badly. Stumpy plays in Walter's band.
• Elsie is Stumpy's wife.
• Nipper is a purple-coloured quadbike ridden by Stumpy.
• Ryan is the youngest neighbour of Stan. He and his sister like to play with Little Red Tractor and help out.
• Amy is Ryan's sister.
• Mr. Turvey (voiced by Jimmy Hibbert) is Ryan and Amy's father. He likes to run and plays keyboards in Walters band.
• Mrs. Turvey (voiced by Shireen Shah) is Ryan and Amy's mother. She likes to paint and does arts and crafts.
• Walter (voiced by Derek Griffiths) is an African-British mechanic who runs the Babblebrook garage and likes to play rock and roll. Walter is easily led astray. Walter is lead singer and plays the guitar for his band called Walter and the Wolverines.
• Nicola (voiced by Shireen Shah) is Walter's daughter who also runs the garage. She tends to be far more sensible than her father. Nicola also plays an instrument in her father's band.
• Leo is Walter's nephew, becomes a friend of Ryan and Amy. He is a more than competent drummer who stands in for Nicola in Walter's Band.
• Sparky is a yellow and blue-coloured tow truck which Nicola and Walter drive.
• Rusty is Walter's burgundy-coloured unreliable car and restoration project who unfortunately breaks down regularly.

Episodes

Home Media

Several DVD releases of the series have been released. The first five releases were also on VHS as well.

References

External links

• Little Red Tractor at BBC Online
• Little Red Tractor at IMDb
• Little Red Tractor at The Big Cartoon DataBase
• Little Red Tractor Stories at The Big Cartoon DataBase