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| https://museumofuncutfunk.com/2011/12/07/harlem-globetrotters-cartoon/ |
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2896 - Twenty Great Cartoons that Modeled on SCOOBY DOO
A simple and quick share building off yesterday's post. Still in catch-up mode. Seven days behind. Writing from January 29th. One more somewhat "original" post tomorrow and then a week of REPRINTS!!
https://comiclists.wordpress.com/category/1970s/
It Really Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery
20 Animated Series That (Ahem) Borrowed Elements from Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby-Doo
1. Harlem Globetrotters (1970)
No one can say Hanna-Barbera didn’t know a good thing when they saw it. While the animation studio had found success in the 1960s with animated sitcoms (The Flintstones, The Jetsons), funny animals (The Yogi Bear Show), and superheroes (Fantastic Four, Birdman and the Galaxy Trio), it was 1969’s Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! — their wildly popular show about a quartet of mystery-solving teenagers and a cowardly Great Dane — that set the standard for Hanna-Barbera (and the American animation industry as a whole) for the following decade. Overnight, it seemed like every Hanna-Barbera show had to feature wacky humor, anthropomorphic sidekicks, and characters solving mysteries or fighting bad guys wherever they went. Case in point: Harlem Globetrotters, one of the first animated series influenced by Scooby-Doo’s success. A cartoon based on the famed exhibition basketball team was always going to have comedy in its DNA; what wasn’t as expected was the addition of Granny, the team’s manager, and their mascot, Dribbles. A typical episode would find the team getting involved in a local conflict and using their basketball skills to save the day; the bad guys might try to cheat, but the Globetrotters always found a way to even the odds. In total, CBS aired 22 episodes over two seasons, not counting the team’s three appearances on The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries shortly after their show was canceled. Granny and Dribbles didn’t show up for those Scooby-Doo outings, but it didn’t take much effort for the Globetrotters to fit right in with their hosts’ brand of humor.
2. Josie and the Pussycats (1970)
First introduced in a 1962 issue of Archie’s Pals ‘n’ Gals, Josie debuted in her own comic, She’s Josie, in 1963. For all intents and purposes a female version of Archie, klutzy and kindhearted Josie enjoyed typical teenage adventures with her friends until 1969, when her book was renamed Josie and the Pussycats with issue #45, possibly to capitalize on the success of The Archies both as an animated series (their Filmation show debuted in September 1968) and as a band (“Sugar, Sugar” topped the Billboard charts in September 1969). Now an all-girl band (featuring Valerie, the first female African-American to be a regular character on a Saturday morning cartoon), the Pussycats, along with Alex (their manager) and Alan (their roadie), spent each episode traveling to some exotic locale for a gig and getting mixed up in some mystery-solving adventure along the way. Adding to the antics were Alex’s scheming sister, Alexandra, and her snickering cat, Sebastian, who shared a voice actor (Don Messick) with Scooby-Doo. That wasn’t the only Josie/Scooby connection, either: both Alex and Shaggy (who could outdo each other in a cowardice competition) were voiced by Casey Kasem, and the Alan from the comics was clearly redrawn for the show to resemble Fred from the Scooby gang. Sixteen episodes aired on CBS before the show was re-conceptualized to go in a whole new direction (namely “way up”; see entry below).
3. The Funky Phantom (1971)
It’s an immutable law across the Scooby-Doo franchise: the shows that present their monsters and supernatural spooks as fake are good, while shows that present the supernatural as something that’s real are not. (Sorry, 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, but you know it’s true.) So where does this leave ABC’s The Funky Phantom? While trying to find shelter from a storm, April, Augie, and Skip (the latter voiced by Micky Dolenz of The Monkees fame) come across a spooky house with a dusty grandfather clock; setting the clock to midnight frees the Revolutionary War-era ghosts of Jonathan Wellington Muddlemore (“Mudsy” to his friends) and his cat, Boo. True to his early American origins, Mudsy helps the kids solve mysteries involving the ghost of Jean Lafitte and the Headless Horseman, though they also made time for marsh monsters and other creatures that could just have easily bedeviled the kids at Mystery Inc. In a cheeky bit of recycling double-dipping, Daws Butler gave Mudsy the exact same voice and speech patterns of his earlier Snagglepuss character, right down to ending his sentences with the word “even.” Though the show only ran for 17 episodes, the gang has popped up from time to time, including an episode of Scooby Doo and Guess Who? (where Velma refuses to believe Mudsy is a real ghost) and a memorable outing in Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, where we finally learned the answer to what makes this Funky Phantom smell so funky.
4. The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan (1972)
Created in 1925 by author Earl Derr Biggers for a popular series of mystery novels, the fictional Chinese-American detective known as Charlie Chan also found in novels, comic strips, films, radio dramas, and a syndicated TV show that aired during the 1950s. The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan introduced a new generation to the crime-solving sleuth, though it took a few liberties with the source material. For starters, while the original novels described Chan as a widower with three children, the cartoon jacked that number up to 10: Henry, Stanley, Suzie, Alan, Anne, Tom, Flip, Nancy, Mimi, and Scooter. (A notable omission was “number one son” Lee, an ironic absence given that the cartoon Chan was voiced by Keye Luke, who played Lee in about a dozen Charlie Chan films.) Then there was the Chan Van, a vehicle built by Alan the teenage inventor, which could transform itself into anything with the push of a button, and the fact that the kids had a music group (who didn’t in the ’70s?) called The Chan Clan that performed a song in each episode. Together with their dog, Chu Chu (which could make sound effects like police sirens), Mr. Chan and his kids travel the world solving mysteries and catching master criminals. Total number of episodes: 16, which is about 15 more than the number of adventures I think I could handle with 10 kids and a dog in tow.
5. Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space (1972)
“Josie, in outer space/Pussycats are all in place/Blasting off on another chase/Mars, stars, the Milky Way/When they’re groovin’, who can say…?” After 16 episodes of having Josie and the Pussycats encounter more super-villains and mad scientists than any bubblegum rock group should reasonably expect to come across while on tour, Hanna-Barbera sent the kids into outer space. Why? Why not? The whole gang is along for the ride, with the addition of a cute and fuzzy alien named Bleep as their “kooky guide.” Cat-people, Amazon warriors, and space pirates are just some of the crazy sights the kids see before making their way back to Earth — which we know they did at some point, because after the show completed its run of 16 episodes they made their final Saturday morning appearance as guest stars on a 1973 episode of The New Scooby-Doo Movies. No sign of Bleep, though, and no explanation for his sudden absence from the group. Odd, that. Odd, and — one might even dare to say — vaguely disturbing.
6. Super Friends (1973)
When Hanna-Barbera acquired the rights to DC’s superheroes, it was expected that the studio would change a few things to make them a little more kid-friendly for Saturday morning audiences. One big change was that the violence of the comic books was toned down considerably, with the heroes often talking the villains (who often weren’t that bad, just misguided) out of whatever mad scheme they were attempting instead of just punching them. Again: entirely expected. What wasn’t expected was that someone in the studio’s boardroom would look at a show that brings together Superman, Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman and think, “Yeah, yeah, sure, we’ve got some big names in here, but do you know what the kids really go for these days? Teenagers! And comedy relief dogs! Put some of that in there!” And so were born “those three junior Super Friends” named Wendy, Marvin, and Wonder Dog, three characters whose obvious indebtedness to Scooby-Doo was played up in the Super Friends opening credits. After 16 episodes and a few appearances in the spin-off Super Friends comic, the trio went to that place where all ironically remembered comic characters go, and when the show retooled as The All-New Super Friends Hour they were replaced by Zan, Jayna, and Gleek — a duo of shape-shifting alien teenagers and their space-monkey. Opinions differ on whether it was an improvement.
7. Speed Buggy (1973)
Who said cute cartoon sidekicks had to be animals? Voiced by Mel Blanc (who recycled a voice he once used for the Maxwell automobile on Jack Benny’s radio program), Speed Buggy was an anthropomorphic dune buggy who took Tinker, Mark, and Debbie around the world to participate in races either before or after stumbling across bad guys and evil geniuses with names like Dr. Meangreen, Beefinger, and Baron Vulch (the latter being the creator of “Mata Cari,” a car that Speed Buggy takes a liking to — opening up all kinds of questions about how sentient cars would do certain things). Although it lasted for only 16 episodes (September 8 to December 22, 1973), it’s one of the rare shows of the time that ended up airing on CBS, NBC, and ABC at various points in the ’70s, thanks to all three networks purchasing the syndication rights and using Speed Buggy to plug holes in their schedules that were left by other quickly cancelled shows. As a result, it found a wider audience than most other short-lived shows from that decade, and it’s still fondly remembered by a lot of Gen X types who remembered when those three networks were their only Saturday morning options.
8. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids (1973)
“Traveling around all over the world/Solving every mystery/Putting it together with the Sundance Kids/You’re something else, Butch Cassidy…” Having already put together Scooby-Doo clones starring an all-girl band and an all-sibling band, Hanna-Barbera went back to the well with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids, a show where any similarities to the 1969 Western starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman began and ended with the title. Featuring two guys (frontman/guitarist Butch and drummer Wally, another character voiced by Micky Dolenz), two girls (Stephanie on bass and Merilee on tambourine) and a dog named Elvis (voiced, to no one’s surprise, by Don Messick), the band jetted around the world playing concerts and solving crimes, with a computer named Mr. Socrates helping them with the latter. Things that were never explained in the show included how the band got into the crime-solving business, who created Mr. Socrates, or why a computer would exhibit allergy symptoms around dogs. No matter: with only 13 episodes to strut their stuff, the band didn’t have a lot of time to explain much of anything, though they did manage to get four songs from the show released as singles.
9. Goober and the Ghost Chasers (1973)
Easily the most shameless of the Scooby-Doo clones, Goober and the Ghost Chasers also features a group of teenagers (Ted, Gilly, and Tina) driving around in a van and solving spooky mysteries with their Afghan hound-like dog named Goober. There were some differences, though; the trio had jobs (writers for Ghost Chasers magazine) that justified their mystery-solving, they often found supernatural beings that were real (and sometimes helped the gang defeat the fakers in their midst), and Goober — who spoke more clearly than Scooby-Doo, but only to break the fourth wall — had an honest-to-goodness super power in that he was able to turn invisible (although he couldn’t control when it happened). As if all that wasn’t strange enough, the series also shoehorned four of the kids from The Partridge Family into half of the show’s 16 episodes (with Susan Dey, Danny Bonaduce, Suzanne Crough, and Brian Forster providing the voices for the cartoon versions of their sitcom characters). And did you know basketball star Wilt Chamberlain owned a dude ranch? Well, that’s where the Ghost Chasers went on their third outing and met Wilt the Stilt (voiced by the NBA legend himself) while chasing the Galloping Ghost. And you thought Shaggy and Scooby’s instant costume changes were weird.
10. Inch High, Private Eye (1973)
Comedian Leonard Weinrib patterned his voice for Inch High, Private Eye after Maxwell Smart, the bumbling secret agent played by Don Adams in the 1960s sitcom Get Smart. No surprise, that wasn’t the only show that Hanna-Barbera pilfered for ideas. Joining Inch High in his mystery-solving were his niece, Laurie, her musclebound friend Gator (who also drives the Hushmobile, a super-quiet futuristic car), and their St. Bernard dog, Braveheart, whose defining characteristic was struggling to stay awake while on guard duty. Rounding out the cast was Mr. Finkerton, the head of the detective agency that employs Inch High and constantly dreams of firing him, and his wife, Mrs. Finkerton. Unlike the Scooby-Doo villains who tended to masquerade as ghosts and ghouls to hide the evidence of their criminal activities, Inch High’s crooks tended to be thieves and kidnappers who were quite upfront about their larcenous acts… which is probably why the show only lasted 13 episodes, given how it’s hard to imagine kids getting excited about watching smugglers and rogue fashion designers be bad without even trying to put on at least one swamp monster or ghost pirate costume.
11. Dynomutt, Dog Wonder (1976)
“What if Scooby-Doo were a superhero?” is probably how the very short brainstorming meeting for this show went. Borrowing elements from both Scooby-Doo and the Batman TV show from the previous decade, Dynomutt, Dog Wonder centered on Blue Falcon and Dynomutt, a Batman-esque hero and his cybernetic sidekick who protect Big City from the likes of Fishface, Queen Hornet, and the Red Vulture. Like the following decade’s Inspector Gadget, Dynomutt wasn’t too bright and could produce a seemingly infinite number of mechanical devices from his body, though none of them ever seemed to work the way they were intended whenever Dynomutt or “B.F.” needed them. Furthering cementing the bonds between Dynomutt and Scooby-Doo was the fact the two co-hosted The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour — the show in which Dynomutt debuted — in 1976, and Dynomutt’s very first episode guest-starred the Scooby gang, who team up with the costumed heroes when they discover they’re all on the trail of the mysterious Mr. Hyde. Like other cartoon superheroes at the time, no explanation was ever given for how Blue Falcon got into crime-fighting, or where Dynomutt’s robotic form came from; that was rectified in a 2012 episode of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated.
12. Clue Club (1976)
“There they go and on the double/To the spot where there is trouble…” Hey, if teenagers can solve mysteries with the help of one dog, why not give them two? That seems to be the thinking behind Clue Club, which introduced Woofer and Wimper to Hanna-Barbera’s pantheon of talking dogs (though they didn’t communicate with their humans, just to each other with voices resembling those of Amos and Andy). The show was never clear on who owned the two hounds, but it was almost certainly one of the members of the Clue Club private investigation agency: Larry (the leader), Pepper (the blonde), D.D. (the redheaded boy in the Sherlock Holmes hat), or Dottie (the computer prodigy who functioned as the Velma of the group). A lot of their cases took them to museums, amusement parks, lighthouses and other venues familiar to Scooby-Doo fans… maybe a little too familiar, given Clue Club’s total run time of just 16 episodes. Sometimes, two (dog) heads really aren’t better than one.
13. Jabberjaw (1976)
While most of the intended audience for Jabberjaw was likely too young to see 1975’s Jaws in theaters, it was pretty hard to miss the impact that Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster had on pop culture. While comic artists were busy working sharks into as many covers as they could, their colleagues down at Hanna-Barbera set their blender to purée and threw in Scooby-Doo, The Jetsons, Josie and the Pussycats, Sealab 2020, and even The Flintstones to give us the Neptunes, a pop band composed of a bunch of teenage mystery-solvers (Biff, Shelly, Bubbles, and Clamhead) and their walking, talking great white shark mascot (voiced by Frank Welker channeling the Three Stooges’ Curly Howard) who all live in an underwater city in the far-off future of 2076. Get all that? That the concept was so off-the-wall loopy actually worked to its advantage; after its original 16-episode on ABC, reruns of Jabberjaw continued until 1978 and its headlining star has popped up in everything from Scooby’s All-Star Laff-a-Lympics to Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. And then there was his 2018 team-up with Aquaman in a DC comic that a Wikipedia editor said made Jabberjaw a “less cartoonish character” than his animated counterpart — although how you make a talking great white who plays drums in a band appear “less cartoonish” is a very good question.
14. Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels (1977)
“Set free by the Teen Angels from his prehistoric block of glacier ice comes the world’s first superhero, Captain Caveman! Now the constant companion to the Teen Angels—Brenda, Dee Dee, and Taffy—in their hilarious and sometimes scary mystery missions. Get ready for Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels!” Okay, Opening Narrator Guy, we will! It’s not hard to imagine this show as a Saturday morning riff on Charlie’s Angels, which also ran on ABC and debuted a year earlier. But did the ladies at the Charles Townsend Detective Agency ever have a flying caveman at their beck and call? I think not. Living in a makeshift cave attached to the top of the Teen Angels’ van, “Cavey” traveled with them around the world to investigate vanishing ships, circus phantoms, and the usual mysteries solved by teen sleuths and their sidekicks. But where Scooby-Doo had to be bribed with Scooby Snacks to pull his weight in the team, the over-eager Captain Caveman had super-strength, could fly and eat just about anything, and pulled a seemingly infinite number of objects hidden inside his excessive body hair. Handy! Perhaps because of his ebullient nature (and “unga-bunga” vocals by Mel Blanc), Captain Caveman was one of the more successful Scooby-Doo knock-offs, with 40 episodes under three seasons under his belt. (Wait, does he even have a belt under all that hair? Whatever. You get the idea). “Captain CAAAAAVE-MAAAAAAANNNN!”
15. The Buford Files (1978)
The Dukes of Hazzard, The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo, The Buford Files… does anyone else get the feeling the Carter years were a prime time for cornpone comedy? Buford is a lazy bloodhound who lives deep in Fenokee Swamp somewhere in the Deep South with his humans, teenage siblings Cindy Mae and Woody. Together, the three of them solve whatever local mysteries can’t be solved by Sheriff Muletrain Pettigrew and his deputy, Goofer McGee (which is to say pretty much all of them). His ears revolve like radar dishes when he’s listening for something and his nose responds to clues like a Geiger counter; known weaknesses include howling his heart out when the moon appears and a running feud with a raccoon that can distract him from the business at hand. Along with The Galloping Ghost (about the ghost of an Old West gold prospector who watches over two young cowgirls), The Buford Files appeared as a 15-minute segment on the 90-minute Yogi’s Space Race; the two were then repackaged as a half-hour show in 1979 before all but disappearing like the Galloping Ghost himself.
16. Fangface (1978)
After Scooby-Doo creators Joe Ruby and Ken Spears left Hanna-Barbera to start their own animation studio (the aptly named Ruby-Spears Productions) in 1977, one of their first shows out of the gate made it pretty clear they were taking some of that Scooby gang mojo with them. From the opening narration: “Every 400 years, a baby werewolf is born into the Fangsworth family, and so when the moon shined on little Sherman Fangsworth, he changed into Fangface, a werewolf! Only the sun can change him back to normal, and so little Fangs grew up and teamed up with three daring teenagers—Kim, Biff, and Puggsy—and together they find danger, excitement, and adventure!” Cut to scenes of the kids running from mummies and getting grabbed from behind by someone reaching out from a sliding wall panel. Perhaps realizing that a hero who only works three days a month could be a liability, the show establishes that Sherman only needs a photo of a full moon or the sun to transform back and forth (no word on whether a CD of Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever does the trick). The second season introduced Fangpuss, Sherman’s baby cousin who also turns into a werewolf when he… hold on, what happened to that “every 400 years” business? Is it too much to ask for a little realism in our shows about crime-solving teenage werewolves?
17. Casper and the Angels (1979)
Poor Casper. You wouldn’t think a bona fide star of film, televisions, and comics would have to slum it in a Scooby-Doo/Jetsons knock-off, but I guess even a ghost has to eat (or do they…?). Debuting on NBC as part of the network’s Saturday morning fall line-up, Casper and the Angels saw our friendly ghost solve crimes and catch bad guys with the help of Mini and Maxi, two police officers patrolling the skies of Space City in the year 2179. Rounding out the cast were the ladies’ rival officers, Nerdley and Fungo, and Hairy Scary, a shaggy ghost (wait, ghosts have hair now?) with a big red nose who enjoys scaring people. Quoth the Fandom page on this show: “It can be inferred that this series was inspired by the live-action drama series Charlie’s Angels and CHiPs.” Oh, it can… and it will. Thirteen episodes were produced, not counting two TV specials that also aired in 1979, Casper’s First Christmas and Casper’s Halloween Special (which also featured Hairy Scary in his only non-Angels outing).
18. Rickety Rocket (1979)
It’s hard to know what to make of Rickety Rocket, a Ruby-Spears production that ran as a segment on ABC’s Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show. On the one hand, it brought a bit of much-needed cultural diversity to the Saturday morning landscape, which at the time consisted mostly of Fat Albert and Maxi from Casper and the Angels, plus you can kind of see how the show was applauding these industrious youngsters of the future who cobbled together their own sentient rocket for mystery-solving adventures. On the other hand… well, you can see from the image above how it might be a little problematic for some audiences today (though to be fair the animation back then was pretty non-discriminatory in that pretty much everyone was a broad caricature). Sunstroke, Splashdown, Cosmo, and Venus run the Far Out Detective Agency, with Rickety Rocket acting as a futuristic (and, well, rickety) version of Speed Buggy. Because the action takes place in the future and the kids often find trouble in space, the usual line-up of mummies, swamp creatures, and sea monsters are joined by space vampires (named Count Draculon, of course) and space pirates. Because everything is better with space pirates, is why.
19. The New Shmoo (1979)
With the ’70s coming to a close and big changes brewing in the animation industry, Hanna-Barbera decided to take one more kick at the Scooby-Doo can before going all in on the next decade’s cavalcade of cuteness (see also: Smurfs, Snorks, Trollkins, Biskitts, and Pound Puppies). Introduced in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip in the 1940s, Shmoos were presented as fantastical creatures who reproduce asexually, live on nothing but air, and are eager to be eaten by hungry humans. Nobody in The New Shmoo has cause to comment on how well the Shmoo tastes; instead, the Shmoo teams up with Mickey, Nita, and Billy Joe, employees of Mighty Mysteries Comics who solve mysteries with the help of their shape-shifting friend. Though only 16 episodes went out the door, Hanna-Barbera wasn’t quite ready to get out of the Shmoo business after that, and so he was inexplicably dumped in prehistoric times to serve and protect alongside Fred and Barney as an officer with the Bedrock Police Department in 1980’s The Flintstones Comedy Show. After that, the Shmoo pretty much retired from television, though at least one part of him lives on: Frank Welker recycled his Shmoo voice to play the title character in PBS Kids’ Curious George.
20. Mister T (1983)
Life was pretty good for Mr. T in 1983. The former bouncer and bodyguard was the star of a smash-hit TV show, his appearance in the previous year’s Rocky III introduced his catchphrase (“I pity the fool!”) to the world, and he was just a few months away from having his own breakfast cereal. So who better to headline a cartoon where he takes a busload of kids around North America and solves mysteries? Premiering on NBC (also home of The A-Team), Ruby-Spears’ Mister T re-imagines the action star as the owner of a gym where young gymnasts train; they invariably get mixed up in shady shenanigans while on the road attending various events and competitions. Joining them on their outings is Ms. Bisby, the well-mannered bus driver; Spike, younger brother to one of the gymnasts who dresses and talks like his idol, Mr. T; and Bulldozer, a bulldog who sports a hairstyle similar to his owner. Because it was the ’80s, every episode was book-ended by live-action segments starring Mr. T, who presented the theme of the episode at the beginning and then came back to make a closing statement about whatever lessons were learned during the episode. As for me, what I most remember from watching this show was learning the meaning of the word “jurisprudence.” The more you know.
Posted in 1970s, Titanic Television!
Tagged cartoons, Josie, Mr. T, saturday morning, Scooby-Doo, Super Friends
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2301.22 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2760 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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