Karl Svoboda

Karl Franklin Svoboda (born March 23, 1962, in Belleville, Ontario) is a Canadian former rugby union footballer. Svoboda began his rugby career as the Belleville Bulldogs hooker and then played representative rugby with the Ontario Junior XV. In 1981 he scored a try in the final of the Canada Summer Games. He then played with the Ontario Senior Men's Rugby XV, captaining many of the games. Two notable victories came in the national championship over the British Columbia Provincial XV in 1982 and 1995. In 1995, the Ontario Provincial Rugby Team, with Svoboda as captain, was named co-winners of the Ontario Provincial Team of the Year, along with the Toronto Blue Jays.

Svoboda also captained Canada for two Test matches in 1993, the most notable being the victory over an England XV. During this same year, Svoboda's brother Paul captained the Canadian National Rugby League Team.

Svoboda played in the first three Rugby World Cups (1987, 1991, 1995), and amassed a total of 24 International Caps between the years 1985-1995. He went on to play for Oxford University at the dawn of the professional rugby era in 1995, gaining his full rugby Blue. Svoboda also gained a Blue at Oxford by playing defense in ice hockey during the Varsity match against Cambridge University in 1996. He also played for the Penguins Rugby Football Club, touring Hungary and the Czech Republic with them in 1996.

Karel Svoboda

Karel Svoboda (19 December 1938 – 28 January 2007) was a Czech composer of popular music. He wrote music for many TV series in the 1970s.

Works

Karel Svoboda was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now in the Czech Republic) and began his career as a pop composer after abandoning medicine in his third year of university. He became a member of the rock band "Mefisto" in 1963 where he played piano. Later, he composed music for the Laterna Magica theatre in Prague and for many Czech singers. In 1969 he wrote Lady Carneval for Karel Gott, a major Czech pop star. Svoboda wrote a total of 80 songs for Gott.

Svoboda composed TV scores for the German channel ZDF for over 30 years. He wrote the scores to many TV series in the 1970s that a whole generation of Europeans grew up with. Some examples of these TV series are Vicky the Viking, Maya the Bee and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. He also composed the score for the movie Three Wishes for Cinderella.

Svoboda wrote scores for almost 90 films and TV series.

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (orig. Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige, Nils Holgersson's wonderful journey across Sweden) is a work of fiction by the Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf. It was published in two books, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils in 1906 and Further Adventures of Nils in 1907. These two are usually combined into a single book called The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, although that name could also describe the first book only.

The background for publication was a commission from the National Teachers Association in 1902 to write a geography reader for the public schools. "She devoted three years to Nature study and to familiarizing herself with animal and bird life. She has sought out hitherto unpublished folklore and legends of the different provinces. These she has ingeniously woven into her story." (From translator Velma Swanston Howard's introduction.)

Selma Lagerlöf, like many leading Swedish intellectuals of her time, was an advocate of Swedish spelling reform. When published in 1906, this book was one of the first to adopt the new spelling mandated by a government resolution on April 7, 1906 (see Svenska Akademiens Ordlista).

Tři oříšky pro Popelku

Tři oříšky pro Popelku (German: Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel, English: Three Nuts for Cinderella, Three Gifts for Cinderella [UK title] and Three Wishes for Cinderella) is a Czechoslovak/East German fairy-tale film from 1973.

It was directed by Václav Vorlíček in co-production between DEFA-Studio für Spielfilme and Barrandov Studios. The story was based on a fairy tale written by Božena Němcová (a Bohemian variation of the classic Grim brothers' Cinderella fairytale). The main roles were played by Libuše Šafránková and Pavel Trávníček. The film was shot at the DEFA studios in Babelsberg (Brandenburg), in the Barrandov studios in Prague, and various places in Bohemia in what was then Czechoslovakia, like the Švihov castle in western Bohemia, and the Bohemian Forest, as well as the Schloss Moritzburg in Saxony.

The film was released in a Czech and a German version. The ensemble was composed of Czech and German actors all speaking their native languages. In the respective editions, they were dubbed to Czech or German. The film had its international première in East Berlin in 1973.