In 1964, Hanna-Barbera produced two cartoon series for the Ideal Toy folks. One was The Magilla Gorilla Show and each half-hour featured a cartoon of Magilla, a cartoon of Ricochet Rabbit and a cartoon of Punkin Puss & Mushmouse. The other series was…well, there's some argument as to what it was called. I remember it always being called The Peter Potamus Show. My friend Earl Kress says it was originally titled Peter Potamus and his Magic Balloon and that it was later changed to The Peter Potamus Show. Whatever it was called, each 30-minute episode featured a cartoon of Peter Potamus, a cartoon of The Goofy Guards and a cartoon of Breezly & Sneezly, who were a polar bear and a seal.
Okay, you got all that? This is going to get complicated.
Ideal Toys was going to place the shows on various local stations around the country. Because different kinds of deals would be made here and there, Ideal asked H-B to format the shows with a minute that could be dropped out. In some cities, it might be necessary to offer the local station an extra minute of commercial time and Ideal wanted the shows constructed so that was easy to do. Hanna-Barbera was pleased to do this since it meant that one minute of animation in every episode would be a rerun every week. So they produced two little "curtain call" minutes, one for each series. In each, all the heroes in the show would come out and dance around and say goodbye…and this minute could run or not, depending on the needs of the local broadcaster. When Magilla Gorilla and Peter Potamus debuted in Los Angeles, the "curtain call" minute in each was aired each week and it was, in some ways, a highlight. Each featured a catchy little tune and better than your average H-B animation.
The shows ran in syndication until 1965 when the Ideal deal expired. Soon after, Hanna-Barbera sold the shows (all reruns) to ABC to run on Saturday morning. For reasons unknown though, they decided to switch two segments: Ricochet Rabbit would move from The Magilla Gorilla Show to what was now definitely called The Peter Potamus Show. The Breezly & Sneezly cartoons would move from Peter's show to Magilla's. This meant that some changes had to be made. The opening to The Magilla Gorilla Show had Ricochet and his sidekick Droopalong in it so it would have to be reanimated to replace them with Breezly and Sneezly. The opening to The Peter Potamus Show didn't have any other characters in it so it could remain unchanged.
Then the "curtain calls" in both shows had to be redone to change around the characters. The one on Magilla's show was just a matter of animation changes…but on the Potamus program, not only did the animation have to change but the song did, too.
As the Peter Potamus "curtain call" was originally animated, there was a point where Sneezly, being a seal, was balancing Peter on his nose. They took out Sneezly and had Ricochet Rabbit just balance Mr. Potamus on his head. In fact, everywhere Sneezly appeared, they redrew him into Ricochet, and wherever Breezly Bear appeared, they redrew him into Droopalong.
All well and good…but Breezly Bear had also been mentioned in the song and to save a few bucks, H-B decided not to bring in singers and redo the whole tune. So what they did instead was to dub in the voices of some men yelling "Ricochet." They couldn't say "Ricochet Rabbit" because it had to be the same number of syllables as "Breezly Bear."
Our clip today is the second version of the "curtain call" from the Peter Potamus Show. Breezly and Sneezly are out. Ricochet and Droopalong are in…and you'll hear the men yelling Ricochet's name to drown out "Breezly Bear." It's actually a nice little spot if you ignore the patch job on the audio track.