Nostalgia: Soep Opera

When I was about six years old, I was allowed to watch Villa Achterwerk on Sundays. The programme I looked forward to the most? Soep Opera.

Although the originally French ‘Soupe Opéra’ can’t really be called a programme. They are short films in which pieces of vegetables and fruit turn into animals accompanied by music.

The animals

Think of a rhinoceros made from an orange, with pieces of leek for legs and a piece of melon as its nose. Or a frog made from half an apple croaking on a water lily leaf made from a cross-section of a watermelon. A buffalo made from courgette strands with a head made from a kiwi? It’s perfectly possible. Sounds futuristic, but in the nineties it was a completely ordinary scene for every six-year-old on Sunday morning.

I can’t really explain why these fruit animals always made me so incredibly happy, but they did. Very little else happens in the films, and after about thirty seconds, the fun is over again.

For everyone who watched Villa Achterwerk in the nineties, a little throwback:

Okay, go on then, one more: