So, happy 41st birthday, Murun Buchstansangur, one of the strangest cartoon characters ever to grace a screen, who made his debut on Channel 4 on this day in 1982.
Murun was one of those things that those of us who were teenagers in the 1980s would discuss, usually in a conversation along the lines of
Have you seen that Murun Bucksnumsnungnum thing?
Fucking weird, isn’t it?
Well, it’s Channel 4
Murun was an odd, small blue/grey creature with arms sticking out of the side of his head, feet coming directly out of his neck, a mop of hair, a smelly home in a crack under a kitchen cupboard, and an incongruously jaunty theme tune.
You can find out more, and hear that theme tune, on this site, which describes the first episode in which Murun — invited to two events he doesn’t want to attend — decides to “do neither as that way you avoid the possibility of making the wrong decision”.
Life. Goals.
There’s even a site which has tried to rank every episode (of the first series, at least) when most people have never sat through a whole one:
You can find more Murun content here:
…and here, in a rundown of all the deeply weird animated stuff C4 showed in its early days.
Someone even managed to track down the writer/director to ask him about it, and he seemed remarkably well-adjusted.
(Pedantry: Wikipedia said Murun debuted on 13th, but it links to the tv listings in the Glasgow Herald’s Sat 13th edition, which say he appeared the following day. So, unless that was just Scotland, it was Sunday 14th. I’ve ‘corrected’ Wikipedia, but if you know better, please tell me, and/or feel free to change it back.)
