Episode order: 1-35

Before I started writing about Pat & Mat, I wanted to make a separate page with their filmography so far. This would be useful later on and there is no place on the Internet which has this information in complete or correct form. When talking about its preciseness, an important reservation must be mentioned. The production order of several episodes on my list is most likely wrong. To figure out how that is possible, we must first look at who originally published the episode lists in the first place and what's wrong within those lists. An important note: an official production list of the first series' episodes has never been posted! The first post will cover the episodes 1-35.

Episodes 1-35

The aiF Studio list

The first available list of Pat & Mat episodes, containing the first 50 episodes, looked like this:

Click for a better view - the original list published by the aiF Studio website, still accessible here.

Even though the list seems OK at first and follows the different stages of Pat & Mat series well enough, a more ardent view will spot some very obvious errors. They affect episodes here numbered 23, 24, 29, 32 and 35. They are completely out of place just by their production years alone. Gramofón is from 1981, yet follows an episode made in 1984, a year later than 24. 32 and 35 are from 1989, while the rest of the 30-35 section is from 1990. As such, those episodes are completely in the wrong order. (BTW, the aiF episodes seem to be in the correct order, which can especially be confirmed for the 1994 episodes.)

Even though this list had some serious errors, when Ateliéry Bonton Zlín brought the 1976-1990 episodes to DVD for the first time in the early 2000s, they took this order of episodes verbatim, leaving episodes here numbered 23 and 24 to languish on DVDs on which they did not belong.

Pat & Mat Fansite revisions

The first attempt at revising this list and sorting out obvious errors was made by Jürg Schaeppi of the great Pat & Mat Fansite. He simply moved the episodes in questions to the first places in the order of the year they were produced in, i.e. Gramofón as the starting point for 1981 and Telocvičňa as the first episode of 1983. The exception was Klavír, relegated to the back of 1984 instead of the beginning. Also, for unknown reasons, the episode Jablko was moved to occupy the last spot of the 1985 schedule.

Interestingly enough, his interventions have in the meantime become widely accepted - so accepted that his list is used in official listings, for example in a Pat & Mat TV package sold to Croatian markets. This alone shows how Internet has shaped these lists, while a more recent example will testify to it even further. This order has remained in place everywhere online up to this day.

My take on this

Schaeppi, of course, did a great thing by correcting the errors made in the original list. However, the question remains: is there some way we can reach even closer approximations of the order of the episodes? There is and it has been there all the time - the episode credits. 

The titles for all the episodes pre-2000s are unique as they were done by hand and then shot, meaning each change to the credits had to be undertaken by taking out the credits roll and substituting the animators', writers' or whoever's name had to be changed. The 1979 season had the credits on a simple one-color background, while this was changed for a more sophisticated one from 1981. Both sets were changed as sparingly as possible, meaning that the last component of the credits (with the studio details) received only one change 1981-1985 - the substitution of the last digit of the year, changed when production stepped into a different year.

Tapety credits

So, the best way to observe how the production order went on is to see which changes were made to the credits. This is how I approached the contentious episodes and how I placed them accordingly.

Gramofón - a common rule during many years of Pat & Mat production was that two animators worked at the same time, usually on different sets, producing double the amount of episodes. As such, the episodes should follow the Animator 1 - Animator 2 order for most of the time. This is a good rule of thumb and is followed completely in 1979, but also in 1992 and 1994. I originally put this episode after Grill because Jan Klos animated both Grill and the first episode from 1982, but the ČT TV airings list from 1982, available on Czech Wikipedia, confirms tihs episode was aired as the second episode from 1981.

Telocvičňa - this was a very, very hard choice to make. The episode was animated by Karel Chocholín, who handled most of the episodes at this time, so that couldn't help me. The credits were of no use as the episode crew remained consistently the same throughout this period, even though this episode had a unique Assistants credit. The background of the title card was the same or very similar to the ones used before Práčka. In the end, I looked up the records of the TV airings again and they showed that the episode was aired a day after Veľké pranie in 1986, so I placed it immediately after that episode. Interestingly, all three of the episodes I mentioned in this paragraph have noticeable film splices during the closing credits.

Klavír - This episode seems to have been perfectly moved to the end of 1984. It is obvious that the title cards for this episode and Korčule were made at the same time, so it could have been produced only before or after it. Another look at the Czech list confirms this episode was aired immediately after Korčule.

Jablko - the addition of V. Fixl's credit to the "spolupracovali" list shows that Hrnčiari, where it is not present, was definitely the first 1985 episode. The order of the other two is unknown, but only if you ignore the 1989 airings, when this episode was shown four days after Porucha. Whether this was the first airing remains unknown to me, although I suspect it wasn't, as some episodes were shown in 1986 as well.

the two 1989 episodes - of course, they were correctly moved to No. 30 and No. 31. Their placing seems to be correct as well if we follow the Animator 1 - Animator 2 rule.

Another episode's unclear status

There is another episode whose order in the overall production list is very interesting. Although TV records show it was originally aired the day after Voda, which is consistent with current lists, Skokani was preceeded in production by at least two episodes, Záhradka and Maľovanie, and possibly even three. A simple look at the credits shows major crew changes at this time - with Vladímir Malík replaced behind the camera by Jan Müller after Záhradka. Maľovanie's credits are unique and were sloppily put together with half of the writing skewed.

Maľovanie credits

After that episode, the editing and production credits also changed, the handwriting used on them being significantly different from the rest.

Editing and production credits Skokani-1985

A look at the scenery of the two episodes also shows Skokani could have only been produced after Pat & Mat's adventure with the dwarf. Záhradka shows Pat placing horseshoes in the garden,

... but they are already there in Skokani.

Whether you choose to base your lists on TV airings (which would be the first times these episodes were released to the public) or production order is a stylistic choice. My choice was to make a list based on production order as the TV airings sometimes go against the production order (a great example is the 2002 epizode Puzzle being aired after 11 episodes which had been made after it were broadcast beforehand). More about those episodes in the next post!