Badmovies.org Forum

Hello everyone. I was a long time reader of this site (15 years or so I think), and I finally registered to ask this question.
In the late ninties (1996 or 1997) I saw one of the strangest children's show I have ever seen. Below is a list of events that occur in this enigma of a production. I have made many attempts to apprehend the title of this show, but as far as I can tell no one else has witnessed this...thing and saw fit to include it on their lists of weird stuff. So on with the list:

1) I recall it starred a boy and a girl. They meet some sort of leprechaun type character that transports them to a "magical" world, but it is revealed that this "leprechaun" only has a limited number of spells with which to enact his magic, and so they must enlist the help of some other magical entity to return the children home after their small and bizarre adventure in this magical realm.
2) The magical realm appears to in fact be the world your local garden where most of the denizens are insects and such, the spell actually shrinking the children.
3) There is a particularly terrifying/mind****** scene where the children are brought to what is told to them to be origin of magic, which is a giant pit with dry ice smoke rising out of it with a giant paper mache sphere with a face on it that spews out sparkles at a crowd of various "insects and magical denizens" (i.e. people in colorful and crappy costumes) to their reverence and cheers. Then seemingly by accident one of the members of the crowd falls into the pit to the terror of the audience, after which the "person" who fell in flies out as some sort of anthropic butterfly. It doesn't sound like it here, but the entire scene was actually somewhat disturbing and is the primary reason I remember it.
4) The other "magical entity" mentioned in 1) turns out to be some hairy dude with a dog, the dog actually being a "magical" dog; i.e. a person dressed in a dog-like costume. The hairy dude has 2 spells left and so, they enlist him to use one of his spells to get the children back home, and the other to get the magical people back home.

I have a sneaking suspicion that it was foreign, perhaps French or German and dubbed over. If my memories are correct this little wacky gem would easily be in the running for weirdest kid show ever made, for its enigmatic plot, cheesiness and absolutely incoherent presentation. If anyone has seen this..."thing" please tell me where to find it, as I need to see the scene with the paper mache sphere thing again to know why it has bugged me for so long.

Go ahead and move this to SOLVED. I finally got it figured out by remembering that the Leprechaun was played by Michael J. Anderson. It is "The Great Land of Small". Now I just have to watch it again to figure out why I seem to feel traumatized by this shlocky kids show.

Glad you found it, sounds interesting. I'll move this post.  :cheers: