This is an amended version of a post which ran here on 9/18/07. It adds in another video and some other info…
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 said 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 Yippee, Yappee and Yahooey (aka The Goofy Guards) and a cartoon of Breezly & Sneezly, who were a polar bear and a seal.
Okay, you got all that? Good because this is going to get complicated — and I guess I need to post one of these…
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, it might be necessary to offer the local station an extra minute of commercial time. Ideal wanted the shows constructed so that one minute in each show could be easily dropped.
To do this, H-B 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. When Magilla Gorilla and Peter Potamus debuted in Los Angeles, the same "curtain call" minute for each was aired each week and they were, in some ways, the best minute in each show. Each featured a catchy little tune and better than your average H-B animation. Here's the one from The Peter Potamus Show as it originally appeared…
The shows ran in syndication for one year and then the Ideal deal expired. Soon after, Hanna-Barbera sold the shows 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. For one thing, the Ideal Toys logo had to be taken out of the openings and closings.
The opening to The Magilla Gorilla Show had Ricochet and his sidekick Droopalong in it. I vaguely recall that it was reanimated to replace Ricochet and Droopalong with Breezly and Sneezly but every time I see it now, it has Ricochet and his partner in it…and that's not the syndicated opening because the Ideal plugs have been replaced. So maybe they didn't change that and I just imagined it.
The opening to The Peter Potamus Show didn't have any other characters in it so it could remain unchanged. For some reason though, they dropped the lyrics to the opening and also the closing, leaving a music bed that was not arranged to be heard without lyrics.
But then the "curtain calls" in both shows now had the wrong characters. Again, I have a vague memory that they reanimated that minute in the Magilla Gorilla Show to replace Breezly and Sneezly with Ricochet and Droopalong and again, I might have imagined it. But for the Peter Potamus curtain call, they definitely redid what had to be redone to replace Breezly and Sneezly with Ricochet and Droopalong.
If you watched it just a moment ago you'll recall that in it, 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." Here's the second version. It wouldn't surprise me if one of those male voices yelling "Ricochet" is Bill Hanna. Anything to save a buck…