TV Characters We Hear But Never See - The Thing Upstairs – The Trap Door

Tweet

Voiced by Willie Rushdon, The Trap Door was a wonderful Claymation cartoon series for children from 1984, bizarrely influenced by the Cthulhu Mythos horror stories of H P Lovecraft. It centred on a Gothic Castle inhabited by mostly benevolent monsters working as servants to an unseen impatient master who would constantly insist on tidiness, food, and that they keep things quiet. Unfortunately, the cellar servant quarters has a large wooden floor hatch, the eponymous Trap door, through which other monsters, usually just a writhing mass of tentacles and chaos, emerged when Berk or Boni (just a disembodied humanoid skull) tried lazily sweeping detritus through the trap-door. The servant-creatures then spent the remaining part of the five minute episode trying to catch the monsters and shove them back through the trapdoor in time to deal with the ever-demanding creature upstairs. In later episodes (only twenty-five were ever made) the creatures under the floorboards started to find their own way out rather than having to be released by the incompetent servants who would desperately try to assure the Thing Upstairs that all was well. It was silly rather than scary, and still delights, thanks largely to Rushdon’s voice-work on most characters and the sheer amount of different things going on with the stop motion animation at any given time. The Thing Upstairs was always implying that it might be forced to come down and punish everyone, which seemed to scare the heroes more than the monsters under the Trap-Door. We get hints about the Thing having multiple heads, limbs, humps, tentacles, etc. In one episode one of his giant eyes is seen as the heroes struggle to save it from the trap-door creatures and the implication is that the eye can see everything they are up to before the trembling Berk takes it back up the stairs to return it to one of the faces of its rightful owner. Episode One on Youtube Arthur Chappell