Back in bloom
Holiday ‘Magic Garden’ will sprout again on WPIX IT’S A miracle on 42nd St.
The long-unseen Christmas episode of WPIX/Ch. 11’s beloved “Magic Garden” children series has magically reappeared and will air Christmas Day at 6 p.m.
“We’re beyond excited,” says Rolando Pujol, the station’s executive producer of digital, who also with licensing producer Joan De Jesus discovered the show in a forgotten subbasement at the station’s E. 42nd St. offices earlier this year.
The show first aired on Dec. 13, 1981. It may have had a re-airing a year or two later, but then it disappeared. It turned up among several hundred vintage WPIX tapes in a long-ignored room, says Pujol. Most others were movies and syndicated shows, though there was a flurry of excitement over a reel marked “Clay Cole Show.” No copies of that famous live New York music show are known to have survived — and this one hadn’t, either. Another program had been taped over Cole.
But the “Magic Garden” special was intact — and turned out to be a much cleaner copy than the one owned by Carole Demas and Paula Janis, who created “The Magic Garden” in 1971.
Friends from Brooklyn’s Midwood School, Carole and Paula built the show on music, accompanied by Paula’s acoustic guitar.
It was set in a colorful garden, perhaps influenced by Beatles animation, with a cast that included Sherlock the squirrel, Flapper the bird and giggling flowers (the ladies called it the Chuckle Patch).
Paula and Carole acted out children’s stories i n the garden, often in costume.
They taped 52 episodes, mostly in 1972 and 1973, and WPIX ran them regularly until 1984. There have been a couple of retrospectives since then, but none of the episodes have aired regularly.
Pujol said if Wednesday’s special does well, there has been discussion about bringing the show back to the schedule.
Demas and Janis went on to become teachers. They still perform songs together as “Carole and Paula:
Friends Forever.”