Walter Ulbrich was a German film producer primarily known for writing and/or producing 10 of 16 four-part adventure mini-series made for West German TV in the 1960s and 1970s. Mostly based on classics of world literature such as Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe that was first published in 1719. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and...

or The Sea Wolf, these West German/French co-productions traditionally premiered on West German public-service television in December and are therefore also known as Weihnachtsvierteiler (Christmas four-parters). The series have been dubbed into a variety of languages and also became popular outside Germany, especially in France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, the UK, and Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

.

His work and influence on European TV productions

As a writer, Ulbrich saw scriptwriting as an important process and tried to make sure his productions were true to the books, yet at the same time exciting. The latter sometimes necessitated including plots or characters from other novels or inventing them outright, which has garnered his adaptations some criticism. Because a script had to be arrived at that satisfied both German and French production partners, the scriptwriting stage could be lengthy, and so in the case of Two Years' Vacation it took four years from first draft to airing, because of script development as well as financial problems (on the French side).

Differences between e.g. the English, German, and French versions of a series often comprised more than just a different dub and titles: e.g. Two Years' Vacation has different scores (German score by Hans Posegga, French score by Alain Le Meur) and the German cut adds an extended introduction set in Peru that shows the—purely MacGuffin

MacGuffin

A MacGuffin is "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction". The defining aspect of a MacGuffin is that the major players in the story are willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to obtain it, regardless of what the MacGuffin actually is...

—gold treasure being stolen, but misses a few scenes at the end where the youths are reunited with their families. Also, the German version has narration by the character Dick Sand as an adult, which brings out some of the elements of the story which Ulbrich perceived as class warfare

Class conflict

Class conflict is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests between people of different classes....

. The French cut lacks that added social comment. Generally, the German versions tend to focus more on action scenes (because they were also intended for prime-time adult audiences) and have more experimental/contemporary-sounding scores than their French counterparts.

On April 27, 1970, Ulbrich founded his own production company, Tele München Gruppe (TMG), which is still active today. In 1980, Concorde Filmverleih was founded as a distributor.

Ulbrich's productions were all done in cooperation with the ZDF

ZDF

Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen , ZDF, is a public-service German television broadcaster based in Mainz . It is run as an independent non-profit institution, which was founded by the German federal states . The ZDF is financed by television licence fees called GEZ and advertising revenues...

 public-service television channel and other international partners, especially from France and Romania

Romania

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

. Their success prompted the other German public-service channel ARD

ARD (broadcaster)

ARD is a joint organization of Germany's regional public-service broadcasters...

 to emulate the formula, leading to adventure series such as Huckleberry Finn and His Friends (1979/80) and Captain James Cook (1987). Ulbrich may not have invented international TV co-productions, but his series demonstrated the feasibility of high-quality TV productions using an eclectic mix of nationalities in front and behind the camera.

Selected filmography

• Under the Bridges (1945)
• Seven Years in Tibet
  Seven Years in Tibet (1956 film)
  Seven Years in Tibet is a 1956 British documentary film directed by Hans Nieter. It's based on the book of the same name. It was entered into the 1956 Cannes Film Festival....
  
  (1956)
• The Sins of Rose Bernd (1957)

Four-parters with Ulbrich as writer and/or producer

#		Title	Year	Film gauge Film gauge Film gauge is a physical property of photographic or motion picture film stock which defines its width. Traditionally the major film gauges in usage are 8 mm, 16 mm, 35 mm, and 65/70 mm...	Notes
1	W	The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (TV series) The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was a French children's television drama series made by Franco London Films . The show was first aired in Germany in October 1964 under the title Robinson Crusoe as four 90 minute episodes by co-producers ZDF television, and syndicated in the USA the same year...	1964	35 mm	Black-and-white Black-and-white Black-and-white, often abbreviated B/W or B&W, is a term referring to a number of monochrome forms in visual arts.Black-and-white as a description is also something of a misnomer, for in addition to black and white, most of these media included varying shades of gray...
2	P	Don Quixote	1965	35 mm	Starring Josef Meinrad Josef Meinrad Josef Meinrad was an Austrian actor.Josef Meinrad was born Josef Moučka in Vienna, as the fourth and youngest child of the tramdriver Franz Moučka and his second wife Katharina. For his secondary education, he received a scholarship in a school run by Redemptorists in Katzelsdorf near Wiener...  as Don Quixote. Black-and-white
3	WP	Treasure Island Treasure Island Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, narrating a tale of "pirates and buried gold". First published as a book on May 23, 1883, it was originally serialized in the children's magazine Young Folks between 1881–82 under the title Treasure Island; or, the...	1966	35 mm
4	WP	The Adventures of Tom Sawyer The Adventures of Tom Sawyer The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is an 1876 novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River. The story is set in the Town of "St...	1968	35 mm
5	W	Leatherstocking Tales Leatherstocking Tales The Leatherstocking Tales is a series of novels by American writer James Fenimore Cooper, each featuring the main hero Natty Bumppo, known by European settlers as "Leatherstocking," 'The Pathfinder", and "the trapper" and by the Native Americans as "Deerslayer," "La Longue Carabine" and...	1969	35 mm
6	WP	The Sea Wolf	1971	35 mm	Starring Raimund Harmstorf Raimund Harmstorf Raimund Harmstorf was a German actor. He became famous as the protagonist of a German TV mini series after Jack London's the Sea-Wolf and starred later on successfully in another German TV series after Jules Verne's Michael Strogoff.- Life :Harmstorf was the son of a medic from Hamburg...  as Wolf Larsen Combination of The Sea Wolf, The Road, The Cruise of the Dazzler, and several other works by Jack London Jack London John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...
7	W	Two Years' Vacation Two Years' Vacation Two Years' Vacation is an adventure novel by Jules Verne, published in 1888. The story tells of the fortunes of a group of schoolboys stranded on a deserted island in the South Pacific, and of their struggles to overcome adversity...	1974	35 mm	Combination of three Jules Verne Jules Verne Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...  novels with added elements (such as the treasure hunt) by Ulbrich
8	WP	Burning Daylight Burning Daylight Burning Daylight, Jack London's fictional novel published in 1910, was one of the best selling books of that year and it was his best selling book in his lifetime. The novel takes place in the Yukon Territory in 1893. The main character, nicknamed Burning Daylight was the most successful...	1975	16 mm	Based on several works by Jack London Jack London John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...  about the Klondike gold rush Klondike Gold Rush The Klondike Gold Rush, also called the Yukon Gold Rush, the Alaska Gold Rush and the Last Great Gold Rush, was an attempt by an estimated 100,000 people to travel to the Klondike region the Yukon in north-western Canada between 1897 and 1899 in the hope of successfully prospecting for gold...
9	WP	Michael Strogoff Michael Strogoff Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar is a novel written by Jules Verne in 1876. Critics consider it one of Verne's best books. Unlike some of Verne's other famous novels, it is not science fiction, but a scientific phenomenon is a plot device. The book was later adapted to a play, by Verne...	1976	16 mm	Again starring Raimund Harmstorf
10	W	Kidnapped Kidnapped (novel) Kidnapped is a historical fiction adventure novel by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. Written as a "boys' novel" and first published in the magazine Young Folks from May to July 1886, the novel has attracted the praise and admiration of writers as diverse as Henry James, Jorge Luis...	1978	16 mm	Starring David McCallum David McCallum David Keith McCallum, Jr. is a Scottish actor and musician. He is best known for his roles as Illya Kuryakin, a Russian-born secret agent, in the 1960s television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., as interdimensional operative Steel in Sapphire & Steel, and Dr... . Combination of the novels Kidnapped Kidnapped (novel) Kidnapped is a historical fiction adventure novel by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. Written as a "boys' novel" and first published in the magazine Young Folks from May to July 1886, the novel has attracted the praise and admiration of writers as diverse as Henry James, Jorge Luis... and Catriona Catriona (novel) Catriona is a novel written in 1893 by Robert Louis Stevenson as a sequel to his earlier novel Kidnapped... . Also known for its Gaelic Gaelic music Gaelic music is an umbrella term forthe folk music of the Scottish Highlands and of Ireland . It has also been used for any music written in the Gaelic languages of Scottish Gaelic and Irish. Gaelic music could thus be seen as a type of Celtic music.... -inspired main title theme (David's Theme) by Vladimir Cosma Vladimir Cosma Vladimir Cosma was born April 13, 1940 in Bucharest, Romania, into a family of musicians.His father, Teodor Cosma, was a pianist and conductor, his mother a writer-composer, his uncle, Edgar Cosma, composer and conductor, and one of his grandmothers, pianist, a student of the renowned Ferrucio...  which has been covered by folk music artists such as the Kelly family The Kelly Family The Kelly Family is an Irish-American-European music group consisting of a multi-generational family, who play a repertoire of rock, pop and folk music. They have had chart and concert success in Europe and other parts of the world, especially in Germany, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia, Eastern...  (1979) and Declan Galbraith Thank You (Declan Galbraith album) Thank You is an album by singer Declan Galbraith, released on 1 December 2006 in Germany.It is Galbraith's second album, a compilation of classic songs assembled and sung by him.-Track listing:# "An Angel" – 3:44# "Love of My Life" – 2:36...  (2006) as David’s Song (Who’ll Come With Me).

W: as writer, P: as producer

Ulbrich also re-edited the French-produced Joseph Balsamo (1973, 16 mm, starring Jean Marais

Jean Marais

-Biography:A native of Cherbourg, France, Marais starred in several movies directed by Jean Cocteau, for a time his lover, most famously Beauty and the Beast and Orphée ....

) for German TV, renaming it to Cagliostro, reducing its running time from 360 minutes to 255 minutes, and changing the plot substantially.

See also

• The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (TV series)
  The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (TV series)
  The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was a French children's television drama series made by Franco London Films . The show was first aired in Germany in October 1964 under the title Robinson Crusoe as four 90 minute episodes by co-producers ZDF television, and syndicated in the USA the same year...
  
  

External links

• Tele München Gruppe official web site