The Wombles was adapted as a British children's television programme, The Wombles, a series of five-minute stop-motion episodes produced by FilmFair for the BBC and voiced by Bernard Cribbins. The first series aired in 1973 and the second in 1975, sixty episodes in all. In 1977, a feature-length live-action movie Wombling Free appeared, starring David Tomlinson and Bonnie Langford. The Wombles were re-invented from 1998 as a cartoon after FilmFair was acquired by the Canadian company Cinar Films in 1996, a number of new geographically-named Wombles were introduced. The original television series remained popular with children in the eighties. However, the original "green" message backfired: newspapers reported at the time that children were deliberately throwing litter onto the real Wimbledon Common in the hope of seeing a Womble emerge to pick it up.
