For some reason, I get a lot of questions about the Abbott & Costello cartoon series that Hanna-Barbera made in 1967. There were 156 5-minute cartoons made in a matter of months. The films went out into the syndication marketplace, didn't do too well and received only limited exhibition thereafter. Someone apparently lost a pile of cash on the deal but as I understand it, it wasn't Hanna-Barbera. I once asked Joe Barbera about the show and his answer went something like this: "The agents came to me one day and said, 'We've got this offer to do all these Abbott and Costello cartoons if we can do them for X dollars.' We had a lot of writers and artists sitting around with nothing to do at the moment so we grabbed it and we did them and I got to meet and work with Bud Abbott."
That was all he remembered and there may not have been much more to it than that. The cartoons were H-B standard, which at the time was roughly equal to Abbott and Costello standard. A year earlier, H-B had done 156 Laurel & Hardy cartoons that, to put it charitably, were not worthy of their subjects and which were criticized as such. No one seems to have been as offended by Bud and Lou being Hanna-Barbera-ized, partly because it was Abbott and Costello and partly because Bud himself participated. The best thing you can say about the series is that we got to hear him again, and Bud — who was hard up for money at the time — made enough of it to last him for the rest of his life and not feel like a charity case. (He died in 1974. I met him briefly out at the Motion Picture Country Home on one of my visits out there to see Larry Fine, but all I got to do was shake hands and lay a few nice words on the guy. He wasn't in the mood or health for any sort of conversation. Oddly enough, though he and Larry had similar backgrounds and many mutual acquaintances, neither seemed aware or interested that the other was there.)
Due to some combination of age and disinterest in the material, Abbott's vocal performances in the cartoons were generally uninspired. Still, it was nice to hear him, and there were moments when you heard traces of the old magic as he bantered with Stan Erwin, who provided the voice of Lou Costello. Erwin was a former performer who was then working as the Entertainment Director for the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. In fact, in that capacity, he'd booked Abbott and Costello, and later booked Costello as a solo after the team split up. Legend has it that he got the cartoon job because someone at H-B asked Abbott who did the best Costello impression he'd heard and he mentioned Erwin.
Whatever the cartoons' financiers lost in syndication, they may have made up in merchandising. There was a fair amount of it featuring the animation models of Bud and Lou. The best thing — and it was a lot funnier than the cartoons — was an Abbott & Costello comic book published by Charlton Comics. The early issues were written by Steve Skeates and drawn by Henry Scarpelli, and they were pretty good. If the show had been that clever, it might have been a hit.
And that's just about everything I know about it. Here's the opening…