Saturday Morning Memories: Part 6

Lately out of sheer boredom, I watched two DVD cartoon collections from Mill Creek Productions I bought years ago at the upstate NY Walmart. They included several animated series I had totally forgotten. Some were hidden gems, others were so bad they were actually trainwreck watchable. Not all were on Saturday mornings. A few were syndicated and broadcast on our Philadelphia UHF channels (17, 29 or 48) while some were shown on local daily kiddie shows like Sally Starr or Adam Android which aired after school and after Dark Shadows (which played at 3:30pm on Channel 6, our ABC affiliate) and before the Mike Douglas Show. You notice there are no more kiddie shows with hosts and puppets showing cartoons? MeTV's Toon in with Me is a satire/parody and probably the only one. They've gone the way of Saturday morning cartoons in general since streaming and animated cable networks are available for adult and kid cartoon fixes 24/7. Here are some the rediscovered shows and a few others that resurfaced in my memory as a result.

Hoppity Hooper (1964-67): This amusing follow-up to Rocky and Bullwinkle from Jay Ward Productions

Waldo Wigglesworth, Hoppity Hooper
and Filmore the Bear

and Total Television was almost as clever as R&B. Like the flying squirrel and moose, it took place in a tiny Midwestern town (Foggy Bog, Wisconsin rather than Frostbite Falls, Minnesota) and follows the bizarre adventures of a diminutive hero (frog Hoppity) and a big, lumbering sidekick (Filmore the Bear whose voice was supplied by Bullwinkle's Bill Scott). The third recurring character was con man Professor Waldo Wigglesworth (Hans Conreid, who also voiced Snidley Whiplash in the Dudley Do-Right cartoons and played Danny Thomas' uncle on Make Room for Daddy) who claimed to be a fox but looked more like a wolf. Waldo's get-rich-quick schemes supplied the engine for the plots of the four-part stories. There were also occasional appearances by Waldo's girlfriend, the delightfully named Susan Swivlehips, who resembled a sluttier version of Underdog's Sweet Polly Purebread. Two segments began and ended each episode with the middle filled with repeats of Rocky and Bullwinkle features such as Fractured Fairy Tales, Aesop's Fables, Peabody's Improbable History and Total TV's Commander McBragg, The Hunter or Tooter the Turtle.

Hoppity's voice was done by actress Chris Allen. Back in the 1980s, I remember she gave voice-over classes in NYC. A friend took her class and Chris did Hoppity's voice for them.

I hadn't watched these stories in over 50 years, but they hold up. One particularly amusing sequence satirized the Twilight Zone with narrator Paul Frees imitating Rod Serling. The spoof was called The Traffic Zone and when Hoppity, Waldo and Filmore enter it, they are transformed into vegetables. To solve their dilemma, they, along with a female avocado, go off to see the Grand Asparagus rather than the Wizard of Oz. Another fun sequence had Hoppity in a blonde wig become a singing sensation as Baby Jane with The Croak. But then Susan knocks him off the charts with her own song, The Boing! (Come and do the Boing/It's not hard to loin.)

Clutch Cargo (1959-60): This animated comic strip does not hold up as well as Hoppity. The element that everyone remembers is the Syncho-Vox technique wherein the voice actors' moving lips were filmed on top of the characters' drawn faces. Decades later, Conan O'Brien parodied this method in comic bits on his talk show. I seem to recall there was a short-lived Comedy Channel show called The Higgins Boys and Gruber where they gained brief notoriety by showing episodes and then making fun of them. The premise involved the titular square-jawed hero adventuring with his ward Spinner, a typical fun-loving little boy, and their dog Paddlefoot. They never explained the relationship of unmarried Clutch to Spinner. Was he an uncle? Friend of the family? Random stranger?

Each story was divided into five brief episodes with a cliffhanger to be run each weekday during the syndicated kiddie cartoon show common to the period. We would watch Clutch on Sally Starr, a costumed cowgirl who had an afternoon show on Channel 6, the ABC affiliate. She also showed Popeye and Three Stooges shorts. Interestingly, I recently viewed a local PBS doc. about Philly area kiddie hosts and Sally said in an interview she never had a script. Amazing that she ad-libbed every show. None of her broadcasts were saved and there is no existing video of her thousands of hours of TV.

Space Angel (1962-64): Another Synchro-Vox series which ran on Sally Starr. But I seem to remember episodes running early in the morning, so maybe it was Captain Noah who had an AM show. I remember the ominous, ghostly theme music (it began with a harp glissando) playing before going to school. The background and characters were a lot more sophisticated than those for Clutch Cargo plus no annoying kids or dogs. Animation legend Alex Toth created the designs. For some reason, interstellar pilot Scott McCloud had a secret identity of Space Angel. There was never an explanation or justification for this dual identity.

You Are There (1971-72): A live-action series recreating historical events with Walter Cronkite hosting. This was part of the network's push to have educational programming amidst the violent and comedy cartoons. Other examples include ABC's Curiosity Shop and CBS' In the Know snippets in between superheroes and goofy teens like Archie and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. You Are There had been a long running prime-time series on radio and TV in the 1950s. This Saturday morning series had Cronkite hosting and real CBS news reporters interacting with performers playing historical characters. Clips of this 1970s version are nowhere to be found on YouTube. The one episode I can remember starred Colleen Dewhurst as Susan B. Anthony on trial for voting well before the 19th amendment granted female suffrage. It was before I'd seen her onstage and her distinctive voice impressed me.

Wacky Races (1968-69): A totally silly series with a bunch of loony race cars vying for first place. The main character was villain Dick Dastardly (and his mangy dog Mutley), whose cheating chicanery made up the plots. There were two spin-offs the following season: Dastardly and Mutley in Their Flying Machines and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. The latter was only interesting because of the presence of Paul Lynde as the Hooded Claw, a masked menace constantly placing the titular heroine in seemingly inescapable death traps. She was always rescued by the Ant Hill Mob, another set of characters from Wacky Races.

Cap'n Crunch, Quisp and Quake commercials: Watching Hoppity Hopper made me think about these breakfast cereal commercials which were sometime more fun than the shows they interrupted. Jay Ward (Rocky and Bullwinkle, Hoppity Hooper) also produced a series of highly entertaining ads for Quaker Oats breakfast cereals. Cap'n Crunch wore a 18th century naval uniform and commanded a ship full of kids plus a canine named Sea Dog. They often fought the pirate Jean La Foot. Quisp and Quake were basically the same cereal, but in different shapes. The gimmick was the two characters--a space alien with a propellor on his head and a massive coal miner with super strength, a light-helmet and cape--were constantly vying with each other over whose product was best. (William Conrad, of Canon fame, did Quake's voice)  I found many of these ads on YouTube and I'd forgotten some employed the cliff-hanger storylines of Rocky and Bullwinkle. They also ran these ads on Bewitched because Quaker Oats was a sponsor (this was in the days when TV shows had individual sponsors paying the bills in return for ad time.)

Nowadays I have oatmeal every morning. But these memories have given me a yearning for sugary treats like Trix (Silly Rabbit), Fruit Loops (Tucan Sam) or Fruity Peebles (Fred and Barney) drowning in milk. To hell with that healthy stuff. We also used to drink something called Instant Breakfast, a chocolate, strawberry, or vanilla-flavored powder supposedly chock full of vitamins and minerals you mixed with milk and there was your whole breakfast.