The puppet series Mekk Elek the Jack of All Trades is featured on Magyar Posta’s numbered special souvenir sheet on the theme of cartoon and fairy tale characters. Forty thousand copies of the souvenir sheet designed by the graphic artist István Weisenburger were produced by the banknote printing company Pénzjegynyomda Zrt.
The puppet film series Mekk Elek the Jack of All Trades was first broadcast on the Hungarian state television channel MTV in 1974 and the series ran until 1975. The protagonist is Elek Mekk, a goat who advertises himself as a handyman. His house is adorned with 13 trade signs, showing the jobs that he is skilled at. He then makes a mess of the jobs he is given one after another and sometimes even causes damage while doing them. The animals are enraged by Mekk Elek’s behaviour and tear down the sign for each trade he is found to be unable to do one by one. In the last episode, only one sign remains, that of a tailor, which he manages to keep as this is the only trade the characters in the series considered him capable of.
The script was written by József Romhányi, and the set and the characters were designed by Iván Koós. The music of the series was composed by György Ránki. The characters of the tale are among the immortal figures of Hungarian puppet film history. József Romhányi wrote brilliant texts for the story, choosing witty, rhyming names for the animals in Hungarian, such as Nyihaha Manci the horse, Komondor Andor the dog,Kakas Konrád the cockerel, and Tehén Helén the cow, not to mention the main character, Mekk, which is the sound a goat makes and is echoed by the Hungarian boy’s name Elek. The episodes were shown on MTV1, MTV2, Duna TV and Duna World in Hungary.
On the three stamps of the special souvenir sheet, the figure of Mekk Elek is depicted in typical poses, which in the sequence they occur are trying to be clever, doing the job and getting out of a tight spot. The frame of the souvenir sheet shows the master workman being watched and encircled by the characters from the episodes. On the first day cover, Mekk Elek and Florian the Parrot are depicted. The main element in the imprint of the special postmark on the first day cover is the jack of all trades sign of Mekk Elek. An interesting feature of the souvenir sheet is that further information about the topic can be accessed after scanning the QR code on it.
