Watership Down And ‘Bright Eyes’ – It Was 35 Years Today

Thirty five years today, Art Garfunkel’s ‘Bright Eyes’ song from the animated movie Watership Down. climbed two places to reach number one in the British Singles charts.

In the year when more singles would ever be sold in music history, it would go on to be the year’s biggest seller, staying six weeks at the top.

A reshot video had to be made for the premier music chart TV show Top Of The Pops because the original video footage – as seen above – was deemed too frightening for younger viewers by the BBC, even though the film was in the cinemas with a U rating: one of the British Board of Film Classifications mos contentious decisions as complaints poured in from irate parents whose children had left the cinema in tears.

At the box office, Watership Down was out finally after much stop-start-stop delay over distribution. It had been aimed at first the Halloween and then the Christmas 1978 market and indeed posters advertising it as a forthcoming feature had been up during those holiday seasons – but the cans containing the film never arrived until the following spring. In the end it was fortunate: the ‘Winter of Discontent’ led to disastrous returns for all post-Grease movies in 1978 bar Superman.

The new distributers, Cinema International Corporation (a flag of convenience for Paramount and Universal to circumvent cinema monopoly rules which proved ironically invaluable for small studio independents to get into the major chains like the Odean), pegged it in time for Easter, so doting mums and dads could take their darling children to see a cute film about bunny rabbits going hoppity-hoppity-hop before being garrotted by snares, gassed, shot, and ripped apart by dogs, but only when they weren’t tearing one anothers throats out in one blood spattered scene after another.

As the BBFC acknowledges on their own website, ‘The BBFC has received complaints about the suitability of Watership Down at U almost every year since its classification.’

No wonder so many children of 1979 grew up to be goth teenagers in the late 1980s!