Yesterday, we brought you the opening to the 1963 Casper cartoon show. Here's the ending, which is a bit sad until the last few bars of music. It's nowhere near as sad as the closing credits of the Linus the Lionhearted Show but it's still a bit depressing. Then again, the whole Casper franchise is about a dead child so maybe depressing is appropriate.
Something dawned on me as I watched this. The premise of the Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons was always that poor little Casper just wanted to have a friend…but he didn't fit in with the ghosts and witches of his world, and he scared away almost everyone he encountered in "our" world. Usually, at the end of each cartoon, he'd find someone who liked being around him…and then the next cartoon, he'd be right back to moping about, trying to find someone who wouldn't spot him, do a bad Tex Avery "take" and run screaming into the background painting.
Okay, that was the premise when they made a couple of theatrical cartoons per year. When he got into the comic books, he started making friends left and right: Wendy, Spooky, Nightmare, etc. Someone at Harvey Comics — and I have to presume this was a conscious thought — decided that the idea of Casper scaring away all potential friends would get monotonous. It would also make for a pretty depressing comic book…so they pulled that idea way back. Casper in the comics sometimes scared people but mostly, the stories were about a kid who was different from all the rest. Since we all feel different from everyone else when we're kids, there was a nice bit of reader identification going on there. My friends who had older siblings (I was an only child) all identified madly with the way Casper was picked on by The Ghostly Trio…and of course, adding in all those friends as a supporting cast created plot possibilities, to say nothing of spin-off comics.
All in all, it was a nice bit of retooling an animated property for the comic book page. And it sure was successful for a couple of decades there.
Before we roll the clip, I should mention: I said when I posted the opening that Norma McMillan was the voice of Davey on the kids' show, Davey and Goliath. Anthony Tollin reminds me that she was a voice of Davey and that Dick Beals — who's mentioned more often on this site than Donald Rumsfeld — was the original voice. Dick Beals would also make a much better Secretary of Defense than Donald Rumsfeld but that's beside the point.
