1975 Secret Garden

I decided I wanted to watch something tonight and being unable to find anything I decided to try out that 1975 BBC version of The Secret Garden. It was entertaining. Like watching a taped live performance. You know, like a play. The sets looked to be entirely indoors, and kind of cheap. Like how when Martha grabs the railing and you see the entire thing shake and she steadies it so it won't fall over. Or how when Mary runs up some steps inn the garden you clearly hear that the grassy steps are quite wooden and hollow. But it is very faithful to the book, though I am disappointed the ivory figures room was left out.

One big thing I noticed is that the people at the imdb forums said it was about 3 or 4 hours long. Netflix says it's 1 hour and 48 minutes. How was this a tv show? Did it only run for 3 or 4 nights and that's where the confusion is?

A few things I would like to comment on:
When Nurse is laughing over Mary yelling at Colin if this were the more adult and humorous version I swear she would have actually said, "I don't know, I don't care, I've been into the sherry". I know that won't mean much to anyone who hasn't seen it but if I could have taped just those few moments I'd caption it and stick it on youtube for you but I don't know how to do that.

Colin is... cute. o_0 As in if I was 12 when I watched this I'd have had a crush on him. Bizarre. I looked him up on imdb and the actor hasn't done anything else since. Pity. Course I think a lot of the attraction is his hair. Suddenly I don't mind the Colin/Mary ship so much.

One observation about Colin though is that when he's first in the garden and ordering Dickon around my humorous version would have had him say, "Come here and **** me." Really, that was the look he was giving Dickon, like, "Well gosh, Mary wasn't kidding when she said you were an angel, and, well, I'm willing to go gay for you."

Loved how they used stock nature footage for the robin, that was fun. They're like talking to him and then suddenly it cuts to nature footage then back to the actors and it was amusing. I am glad they found an actual trained fox though. That was cute.

Also, I normally don't like it much when a normal movie has a musical part suddenly thrown in (unless it's tastefully done) but the India lullaby Mary sings is really good! It would almost make me fall asleep too.

Another thing I noticed is that Martha and John seem to like each other. In the book John was just some footman whom we see once or twice as he carries Colin to his chair. He's much more prominent in this movie. Martha also seems to be a lot older than I imagined. They altered Dickon's age too. He's supposed to be 12 but in the movie he's 13. I always assumed Martha was 16 or maybe 17 but in the movie she looked at least 20.

I don't remember the 1993 version so much but as compared to the 1975 one, I think I prefer the 1993. But that might just be cause I saw it as a kid. As for the 1989, I don't think anyone wants to watch that. I know a lot of people really like it but I hear they do some weird after-story about what happens to the characters during WWI and after that. I am glad to have seen this one though. Especially since it's actually a lot shorter than I'd thought it would be.