Little Red Tractor is a British stop motion animated children's television series produced by The Little Entertainment Company and was co-produced by Entertainment Rights for the first two series. The ten-minute episodes were broadcast in the United Kingdom by the BBC on the CBeebies channel. Produced in stop motion model animation, the series is mainly aimed at preschoolers and features unusually detailed sets and models. The series features the popular voices of Stephen Tompkinson and Derek Griffiths. The characters are based on the books by Colin Reeder, which were narrated for video in the mid 1990s by Brian Glover and Richard Briers.

History

Little Red Tractor Projects Limited owned the original Little Red Tractor video series. Although it didn't have television exposure, Little Red Tractor broke into the top ten children's videos and stayed there for several weeks. In total, the original series sold over 300,000 copies. Contender the distributor wanted to duplicate that success. However, the television rights were sold to Keith Littler's Little Entertainment Group because Peter Tye, the director/writer of the series, preferred their expertise in stop frame animation and empathy with the original. Despite losing the television rights to Little Red Tractor, Contender went ahead and produced their similar series, CITV's Tractor Tom. Despite apparent similarities to Tractor Tom, Little Red Tractor has a completely different style, with more realistic story-lines, a larger human cast, and no surreal livestock behaviour.

Characters

Episodes

Series 1 (2004)

Series 2 (2005)

Series 3 (2007)

Home Media

Several DVD releases of the series have been released. The first five releases were also on VHS as well.