Throughout my childhood I found this opening sequence incredibly frustrating. My colleague at primary School always used to object to the tone of outrage with which we are informed that the factory threw Superted away ‘like a piece of rubbish’. Do they want factories to supply defective toys to young children? In what sense was it not a piece of rubbish? More surprising is the fact that they send it to a store room rather than to land fill. But this is not the main problem. The whole sequence violates the basic rules of super-hero origin stories. What is supposed to happen is that a series of inherently plausible events unexpectedly lead to the extraordinary transformation of the protagonist into some sort of superbeing. For example, Peter Parker a mild mannered science student is bitten by a radioactive spider but instead of getting leukaemia he obtains the ability to stick to walls and the proportionate strength of a spider. Bruce Banner is caught in the blast of his own Gamma Bomb but instead of being vaporised he is mutated into a huge green monster. Reid Richards and colleagues are bombarded with comic rays during a failed space mission and are endowed with extraordinary powers etc. Here an alien for no apparent reason lands outside a warehouse and transforms a defective soft toy into a sentient rational being and then persuades a pagan goddess to endow this abomination with preternatural abilities (or a at least rocket boots and the capacity to skin itself alive on a regular basis without getting any smaller). We are told that a ’spotty man’ (which apart from being rude seems to assume that we have heard of the species before otherwise why not just ‘an alien’) arrived in the storeroom and brought Superted to life with cosmic dust. Why?! I concede the cosmic dust, such contrivances are a dramatic necessity, but what was an alien doing in the storeroom of a toy factory? No explanation is ever provided. Why was he bringing soft toys to life? Why this one? If Superted was previously inanimate how do we know his past history of automated rejection? Then the magic cloud is introduced. Not ‘the’ magic cloud mind you, ‘a’ magic cloud, as if such things are common occurrences. Then ‘Mother Nature’ is introduced without explanation and hands out superpowers. Why is she dressed as turn of the century grandmother? Where is Uranus? These devices receive no further elaborations in the series. Then there is the final conundrum of why Superted does not get smaller every time he assumes his alter ego? Most unsatisfactory.