A group of children who travel on a canal barge attempt to stop a gang of criminals from smuggling Yen-Yen, the world's only captive Yeti, out of England. After they hear that Yen-Yen has been stolen from the London Zoo, the children track the thieves to a canal boat and discover that they have Yen-Yen onboard and are planning to make their escape that very afternoon!
The Zoo Robbery is a fun little 64-minute film produced by the Children's Film Foundation in 1973. It features a motley group of youngsters; there is the young girl who operates the narrowboat that the children use as their detective "headquarters", a bespectacled scientific boy who uses a ham radio to contact "Shore Patrol" (a brother-sister duo of detectives), and two other boys who handle the mooring of the boat and the periscope. After watching this film, I would imagine that most of the audience went home to plan out how they could buy their own canal boat to turn into a secret headquarters. It sure beats a tree-house!CFF produced a number of entertaining children's films in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Many of them - like The Zoo Robbery - have been released on DVD so a new generation can discover them. This film is a cut above the rest because it features some genuinely tense moments and an exciting canal boat chase at the end. I only wish that the screenwriters had chosen a panda, zebra, or even a giant sloth as the animal that gets stolen from the zoo instead of that hideous candy-munching Yen-Yen! The children seem taken by him but he would have been better off left in the Himalayas. Too bad Jim Henson wasn't in England in the early 1970s, his puppet skills could have been put to use in making a cuter critter for the children to chase down. The Zoo Robbery is available on BFI's Children's Film Foundation Bumper Box DVD set along with 8 other films. You can also watch it on Youtube.
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