A Fond Look Back At ‘Soupe Opéra’, The Nightmarish Kid’s Show That Turned Fruit Into Animals

If you ever watched cartoons on ABC growing up, you’ll likely have a faint memory of fruit and vegetables scrambling out of a basket on a black screen.

In two minutes of stop-motion footage, a basket of produce would magically chop and change itself into different animals. But if you don’t remember the visuals off the top of your head, hearing the words “SOUPEEEE OPERAAAAA” sung out will jog your memory instantly.

For many Aussies who grew up in the ’90s and ’00s, the “fruit animal show” was never really known by name. And without a title, trying to explain the show to those who had never seen it felt like sheer insanity, a real fever dream.

See, the problem was the show had no real defining elements beyond: fruit, vegetables, animals and that one French lyric that sung over the produce. But, even though we didn’t realise it at the time, Soupe Opéra was high art — the muted colour palette, the lack of any real actors, the nightmarish opera music paired with your run-of-the-mill fruit and veg? Art.

The French stop-motion short would air between longer shows on the ABC network, working to fill in the gaps of the programs that didn’t reach their 20-30 minute running time. But unlike everything else on the kids channel, Soupe Opéra didn’t give a fuck about capturing the attention of children with bright colours and happy music.

The creators of Super Opéra said fuck the kids and gave us the most unintentionally horrifying show imaginable. With the opera tunes, heavy beats, black backdrop and fruit animals that came to life after being assembled like some kind of Frankenstein-style experiment gone wrong, Soupe Opéra really gave zero fucks.

“Hey kid, do you want a giant rabbit made out of violently shredded radish, apple, pear and onion? No? Well too fucking bad, you’re getting the scary rabbit and you’re going to enjoy it,” — the creators of Soupe Opéra, probably.

After we grew out of the ‘cartoons after school’ stage of life, a lot of us forgot about the iconic show — and with good reason. Buried in the back of our brains alongside stories of the boogeyman and the memory of low-rise jeans, Soupe Opéra stayed dormant for years.

But the BOM BOM BOM BOM BOM show has had a sudden resurgence, with heaps of Aussies remembering the haunting sounds of the stop-motion classic. In particular, millennials on TikTok have started to unlock memories of Soupe Opéra en masse.

The unassuming soft intro, the gurgling noises during the transitions, the strange beat boxing, and the deep “bom bom” sounds have now turned Soupe Opéra into a (well-deserved) Australian cult classic.

While the show sadly finished production back in 2000, you can still find clips of Soupe Opéra randomly all over YouTube — except for the 1992 cabbage bat episode, which allegedly gave a bunch of kids seizures from its rapid wing flapping. I told you, it’s haunted.