Lift Off is an Australian children's television series developed and produced by Patricia Edgar. It was broadcast on ABC Television from 1992 until the series concluded in 1995.

Each episode featured a live-action storyline about a group of young children and the problems they encountered while growing up, including interactions with their parents and various social issues.

Episodes also included segments of short animation, puppetry, and documentary footage, as well as songs, stories, and word games. Aimed at 3- to 11-year-olds, the series was linked to school curricula through the Curriculum Corporation of Australia. Different episodes used stories and locations to explore subjects such as jealousy, loneliness, and anger. The puppet characters were designed by illustrator Terry Denton and constructed by sculptor Ron Mueck.

Plot The program focuses on child actors aged between four and ten. Coming from different cultural, social, and familial backgrounds, the small group of seven children approach their environment with a sense of adventure, fantasy, and inquiry.Australian Children's Television Foundation, (1991). Australian Children's Television Foundation Annual Report 1990-1991. A.C.T.F. Productions Limited. Their play and interactions form the theme around which each episode revolves. These children feature in the drama elements of the program but serve as the departure point for all other elements.

The show's cast also includes adults, puppets, and live and animated performers. The main characters' parents appear in every episode, and their interactions reflect a variety of family situations.

A major fantasy character in Lift Off is "EC", a sentient rag-doll puppet with an amorphous head barely suggestive of facial features, which serves as a confidante and friend to the children.

Another main character is a lift named Lotis. Located in the apartment building where two of the families live, Lotis appears to adults as a normal, everyday lift. It takes people to their desired floors, greets them vocally, and occasionally frustrates them with its unreliability. To the children, however, Lotis is a friend, mentor, and fellow explorer of their world. Lotis is an artificial intelligence with a computer matrix screen on her back wall that displays clues, questions, diagrams, and games. She can take the children anywhere in space or time, sometimes opening her doors onto the surface of the Moon, a beach, or the bottom of the ocean.

Other puppets include Rocky, a frill-necked lizard who is an anthropologist and documentary cameraman seen fleetingly on location gathering material about the program's human characters. His humorous documentary films are shown to an audience of frill-necked lizards towards the end of each episode and reflect on the folly of the "two-footers".

The "backsacks" are another species of regular puppet characters. Travelling on the children's backs, these limbless eccentrics have a very different outlook on life, primarily because they spend their time being thrown on the ground, hung on pegs, or stuffed full of items, which affects their attitude towards their owners. They are the unrecognised workers of the puppet world.

Beverley and her Patches sit in the foyer of the building where most of the children live. Beverley is a potted plant with a very long stalk and a single eye on the end that surveys the world. This is her link to the natural environment; through her eye, viewers see the world.Australian Children's Television Foundation, (1992). Australian Children's Television Foundation Annual Report 1991-1992. A.C.T.F. Productions Limited.

The Patches have lives of their own. They can break away from the pot and become animated shapes that form and reform to create other shapes, or move to certain rhythms before jumping back onto the pot.

Documentary segments present specific skills, potentially involving acrobats, gymnasts, or dressage events, modelling a range of skills to intrigue and challenge children.

Segments The two main animation segments are "The Munch Kids" and the animated "Feature Story". "The Munch Kids" is a three-minute segment featuring edited discussions with children tackling topics related to the episode's theme. The resulting voice track is presented to animators who visually interpret aspects of the discussion.

Lift Off features a major puppet segment titled "The Wakadoo Café". Directed by Paul Nichola and written by Bob Ellis, Tony Watts, and Nancy Black, the café is a dynamic, busy social hub filled with fascinating characters and unusual guests. The drama is occasionally broken by performances from various guest artists, musicians, and performers.

Lift Off features a wide range of documentary material, including original footage of Aboriginal children shot in Arnhem Land by Stephen Johnson, showing children engaged in skilled activities and play. It also explores different environments, worlds, peoples, animals, and plants. The world is presented as an accessible and exciting environment requiring understanding and care.

History During its development, the aim for Lift Off was to address the challenges of shaping a children's program for the 21st century, considering contemporary knowledge of children's minds and the future interests of Australian culture. Lift Off broke with the conventions of its time in many ways. The program's inclusion in the school curriculum, through the Curriculum Corporation, was a world first. Lift Off acknowledged no accepted wisdoms about the extent or limits of children's abilities, operating on the belief that those limits had not yet been gauged.

Development of the series commenced in December 1988 with the intention of creating a program that would foster competent and autonomous children. Although not specifically curriculum-driven, Lift Off aimed to stimulate all aspects of a child's development. Loosely based on the "multiple intelligences" theory of Harvard University's Dr. Howard Gardner, the program combines elements of animation, drama, performance, puppetry, and documentary. Each episode is thematically driven rather than adopting a magazine format. Links are established between elements to provide an episode structure.

Early in 1989, an initial research phase commenced. Early childhood specialists, academics, and practitioners from fields including early childhood development, language and literacy, literature, music, play, artistry, movement, child care, personal development, and psychology were consulted. In July 1989, the Foundation conducted an intensive three-day series of seminars at Erskine House in Lorne, Victoria. The 62 participants came from every Australian state and territory, as well as the US, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. Their diverse skills and experience encompassed children's social and emotional development; early language, literacy, and literature; logical-mathematical and philosophical thought; environment, health, and technology education; children's play, folklore, and culture; and creativity and artistry. Participants discussed the development of children aged 3–8, the potential value of Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences framework (the project's proposed basis), and proposed content strands. From this seminar emerged a detailed statement of the program's philosophy, aims, and objectives.Australian Children's Television Foundation, (1989). Australian Children's Television Foundation Annual Report 1988-1989. A.C.T.F. Productions Limited.

In November 1989, 45 creative personnel specializing in writing, direction, animation, puppetry, performance, illustration, music, and movement—including ACTF staff—met for another series of seminars. The major focus of this four-day conference was formulating a program concept for the Lift Off series, including character development, episode structure, and the curriculum.

Howard Gardner visited Australia in July 1991 to examine the Lift Off program and its development to date. During the visit, he wrote a short paper explaining the link between his theories and Lift Off: "It seeks to bridge the gap between our understanding of children's mental processes and our understanding of what moves, excites, and engages them; and it seeks to blend our insights about television which entertains and television which educates.

"From all that I have learned about Lift Off, it has been conceived and launched in the most impressive and mindful way. Engaging characters, appealing milieus, powerful story lines have been mobilised in the service of a world view in which it is natural to use one's mind. The playful and yet mindful stance, the respect for thinking in any medium, the irreverence for pomp or prejudice, the links between activities that children enjoy carrying out and the filling of important and needed social roles, the willingness to discuss serious issues and not to jump to premature or canned answers—it is these features which set the program apart far more so than any particular educational philosophy, or any particular educational philosopher.

Problems of change

"Individuals, be they parents, teachers, or even young children, are very difficult to change. Inertia operates with full force and even the most exciting educational innovations have rarely if ever yielded demonstrable long term effects. Indeed, in the US, despite massive reform efforts over the century, most classrooms are not much different than they were a century ago!

External involvement

"Efforts are being initiated to help parents and teachers and children draw on Lift Off in ways in which they have rarely approached television: rather than sitting back and viewing the shows, viewers will have the opportunity to examine (and re-examine) individual segments so that they can become the centrepiece of educational discussion, just as magazines and kits for home use will help ensure that the programs become a stimulus to, rather than a toxin against, mindfulness.

"There is now talk in Australia about producing a society with clever children. If I were asked how one might fashion a society where the mind of the child is treated with the seriousness which it merits, and where the most powerful medium of our time were yoked with the other principal forces in the country, I could think of no better example than the efforts of the past three years to develop the Lift Off series....Lift Off is an experiment. I would add now that it is an important experiment, not just for Australia but for the entire world. It deserves—ardently—to succeed as a genuine educational innovation, and I am cautiously optimistic that it will." The 26 Feature Stories were written by some of Australia's top children's writers, illustrators, and animators, including Paul Jennings, Terry Denton, Peter Viska, and Pamela Allen. These three-minute stories were produced by a mix of animators who had worked on Foundation programs before, alongside talented newcomers.

Criticism Alan Kendall (Executive Producer of Play School) strongly criticized Lift Off'''s principles as an educational show for 3- to 10-year-olds. In 1991, when the ACTF was pitching Lift Off to the ABC board, Kendall argued that "Lift Off misses the point of television," claiming it was dogmatic in its approach and would "threaten the security of three- to four-year-olds and create jagged attention patterns like Sesame Street".

Response to criticism Those who had attended Lift Off workshops (see Production section) explained to the Australian government and the ABC board how the show would carve a new path and curriculum for juvenile education. Lift Off was subsequently approved and purchased by the ABC. A few years later, the ABC described Lift Off as "the most outstanding children's programme broadcast by the ABC in 35 years of television".

Production In 1988, Patricia Edgar, director of the ACTF, decided to develop a program for 3- to 10-year-olds aimed at fostering children who: