THE MOVING PICTURE BOY ARCHIVE

DE SCHIPPERS VAN DE KAMELEON

Title: De Schippers van de Kameleon
English translation: The Skippers of the Kameleon
Year of release: 2003
Directors: Steven de Jong
Country of Production: Netherlands
Genre: Adventure, Drama, Family
Length: 1 hour, 37 minutes
Language: Dutch
Availability: A DVD was released with English subtitles

Principal boy actors: identical twins Jos and Koen van der Donk (below, left) as Sietse and Hielke Klinkhamer respectively. Tom Kuipers (below, right) has a minor part as Kees Dijkstra, the miller's son.

Synposis
Hielke and Sietse, the blacksmith's identical twin boys, want nothing more than a boat of their own. When they get their wish, they paint their boat by mixing together leftover paints of various colours. The doctor, in gratitude to the boys for helping save his life, gives the boys his wrecked car, and the boys use the engine to transform their boat into a speedboat. The doctor observes that the paintwork on the boat seems to be iridescent, as a result of which the boys name it the Kameleon (Chameleon). With the help of the Kameleon, the boys are able to assist their village by catching a pair of young hoodlums.

This film was the most successful Dutch film of 2003, with 750,000 box office sales. A sequel, Kameleon 2, starring the same boys, was released in 2005. A further film, De Kameleon aan de ketting / The Kameleon Chained Up, a somewhat PC-looking affair which probably owes little to the original books, was released in 2021. Both these sequels were directed by Steven de Jong, as was a 2018 TV series Kameleon de serie.

Source material
The film was based on the 1949 Dutch novel of the same name written by Hotze de Roos (1909-1991). However, the 'boy next door', Cor Bleker, with whom the boys make friends in the novel, has been replaced in the film with a 'girl next door', Esther Bleeker, who also becomes a romantic interest for the boys by the film's end.

The book was the first in a series of Kameleon novels of which the first 60 were written by Hotze de Roos (with subsequent titles by other authors after de Roos' death), and some elements of the film come from later novels in the series; for example, the character of Kees Dijkstra actually first appears in Speurders met de Kameleon (Detectives with the Kameleon), which was the fourth title in the series, published in 1955.

The 1949 novel has been translated into Frisian and German, but has not, to date, been translated into English.

Screenshots