If you were French you may have known the background to this card immediately, and maybe have been transported back to a time when this character was the highlight of your week`s television viewing - but I had never heard of any of it!
So, if you are in the same boat as me, the little human on this card is a character called Joe, and he was the star of an animated television series produced in 1960, called "Joe chez les Abeilles". Now that translates to `Joe at the home of the bees`. In charge of the directing, producing, and also the writing, of the film and the television series was Imre Hadju, a Hungarian-French director, producer, and script writer, who used another name, Jean Image.
The basic story was that Joe comes across two young men trying to steal honey from a hive. He manages to get them to stop, and then the Queen Bee comes out and thanks him, by miniaturising him to the size of a bee, and allowing him to enter her world, where he makes friends with a bee called Bzz.
In 1973, there was a film, an hour long, known as "Joe Petit Boum Boum", which doesn`t really translate to anything, or at least not to anything sensible, only `Joe and the Little Boom Boom". Mind you in England it was known as "Johnny the Giant Killer". The story of that is slightly different, it revolves around some boys, including Joe, who are out camping and come across a castle. When they go inside they are captured by a giant, who puts them in a machine and shrinks them. Joe manages to escape and then he saves the hive, with the ending being his convincing the bees to storm the castle and rescue his friends. Our version of the title makes it sound like the giant comes to a sticky end too.
The most intriguing thing about this card is the issuer, for it is our old friend Au Bon Marche who we are much more likely to associate with gilded chromos. However, it appears that they moved with the times, and embraced modern culture, even if it was as radically different as this card was. They also issued albums for the cards, which is where we get the title above, as the first wording, top right, is "las aventures JOE", or the adventures of Joe. These albums seem not to have taken the entire set, only one of the episodes, because if you look at the cards they have "JOE" at the top and then another title, namely
- JOE chez les abeilles
- JOE captif des guepes
- JOE Le Justicier
- JOE et la fete des abeilles
- JOE a la fete foraine
and each of these fits into a separate album with spaces for the first two cards in that group being stuck on the front cover beneath a heading that has the separate titles above.