Kadoyng
Entry updated 11 May 2026. Tagged: Film.
UK film (1972). Children's Film Foundation, Shand Pictures Ltd. Directed by Ian Shand. Written by Leo Maguire. Cast includes Stephen Bone, Teresa Cosling, Adrian Hall, Leo Maguire, Gerard Sim and David Williams. 60 minutes. Colour.
A professor (Sim) and his children are trying to prevent developers from building a motorway over their local playing fields and village green. As all seems lost, a Spaceship lands nearby, revealing an Alien with an antenna on his head (Maguire, also the film's screenwriter) who has been exiled from his planet for not being big or strong enough, along with his sentient but damaged craft. The children nickname him Kadoyng, and soon he is using his Telepathic powers to make the developers and local politicians look stupid. Kadoyng's attempts to use a potion to grow an impenetrable barrier between the diggers and the fields go wrong, but have the unexpected effect of sinking dignitaries into the mud at the ribbon opening ceremony, and the development is abandoned.
Kadoyng has all the elements of the Children's Film Foundation at its most endearing: plucky but realistic kids who sort out problems themselves, with a generally unsentimental view of childhood; broad comedy of the slapstick and fish-out-of-water varieties; bungling Villains who are entertainingly defeated; a positive moral message that is not too intrusive. The spacesuit and the interior of the spaceship were left-overs from Gerry Anderson's and Sylvia Anderson's UFO (1970-1973). [CWa]
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