From the E-Mailbag…

Mike Tiefenbacher, who knows a heckuva lot about stuff I know a heckuva lot about sent me this after message after he read what I posted about that most vital of topics, Peter Potamus…

I never saw this post the first time around, but I would have noted three things then if I had:

1) The show was always called The Peter Potamus Show. That "Magic Balloon" thing came from a line of dialogue from a Magilla Gorilla cartoon where he's watching what he calls "Peter Potamus & His Magic Flying Balloon," in what I assume was meant as a joke. There were never any opening titles with that name, and no one I know has even turned up any promotional materials that use the name — and in fact, it doesn't even make any sense since his boat with balloon attached is a scientific, mechanical machine, and isn't magical in any way. So Earl was wrong, for once, and he was just perpetuating one of those online errors we all love so much.

As proof of this, Scott Shaw! asked Jerry Eisenberg, who created the show, and he confirmed that the series — in parallel to all the prior H-B three-cartoon series which preceded it plus Ruff & Reddy (not to mention the other Ideal series, The Magilla Gorilla Show) — it was always The Peter Potamus Show and never anything else. Not having seen every print ad promoting the show, it's possible that one of them did use those words (but you'd have to show it to me) — but in any case it's probably as bogus a name-assignment as the name the internet has pinned on the Touche-Wally-Lippy trio of cartoons (The New Hanna-Barbera Show), which never had a series name because it wasn't designed as a show of its own (rather to be inserted in hosted, live kids shows), even if almost every station aired them that way.

Tellingly, when stations assigned their own title to the show, it was either The Wally Gator Show, The Touche Turtle Show (which it was called in Milwaukee), or The Lippy and Hardy Show, even though each cartoon had its own opening and closing which only used the characters' names, because that's how these syndicated Hanna-Barbera shows were expected to be titled. (In fact, The Atom Ant Show and The Secret Squirrel Show were the last to be so titled, even despite the fact that NBC sandwiched the two together as one show. It's what was expected.)

2) The two aforementioned series did indeed swap characters, both in fact and in their credits, and there were appropriate changes made to all the openings and closings. But the changeover didn't occur immediately after ABC picked them up, and both shows had the original line-ups until they didn't (at some point I can't testify to). So that explains the credits with the Ideal logos, but leaves room for the credit character swaps you (and I) remember.

(Sometime around this change, a similar credit alteration also happened to The Huckleberry Hound Show when they removed the Kellogg's characters in favor of the characters who were on the then-revised line-up of Huck, Hokey and Ding, and Yakky Doodle; Pixie & Dixie had switched to The Yogi Bear Show, but that show's openings and closings didn't feature the supporting cast so there was no revision needed there).

3) The closing goodbye from The Peter Potamus Show was the sole time I ever heard anyone refer to Breezly as "Breezly Bear." In every other instance, it was Breezly Bruin. "Bruin," of course, wouldn't have scanned in this tune, so maybe it was done on purpose, or maybe it was because the cartoons' opening titles only ever said "Breezly and Sneezly," and Joe or whoever wrote the lyrics thought that was really his name. Had they gone with Breezly Bruin, neither "Ricochet" or "Ricochet Rabbit" would have worked in their lyrics.

One thing you're wrong about, though: there isn't anything too trivial to be mentioned in a blog, especially when it had to do with classic-era Hanna-Barbera.

I have a hunch "Peter Potamus and His Magic Flying Balloon" was a name used at some point — maybe even for only a few hours — early in the development process. A lot of H-B shows went through dozens of names, some of which no one could remember from day to day. Remember that Joe Barbera was the master of the Sliding Pitch, meaning that when he went into a client to sell a show, he would keep changing the idea on the fly, modifying it to appease the body language and expressions of whoever he was pitching to. I once watched in awe as Joe described one idea for a new show to CBS execs and when they didn't seem to be liking it, effortlessly turned it into a completely different idea with misdirection that would have fooled Slydini.

The Magilla Gorilla Show debuted eighteen months before Peter Potamus. Maybe the week they recorded that Magilla cartoon with the mention, the Peter Potamus project was actually called Peter Potamus and His Magic Flying Balloon by someone around the studio.

For some reason, a lot of people seem to think those two shows went on the air at the same time. They didn't — and the year of Magilla was one in which Daws Butler was on the "outs" with Hanna-Barbera — a quarrel over money and how much of it Daws should get when he voiced a star character. He did a little "day player" work for the studio during that period but after having initially cast him to voice Magilla Gorilla, they replaced him with Allan Melvin and didn't have Daws play any regular characters on that series. By the time The Peter Potamus Show got into production, his agent had patched things up so Daws played recurring characters on that show. Then there was another dispute and he wasn't on much of anything for H-B for quite some time after.

The cartoons of Wally Gator, Touche Turtle and Lippy & Hardy aired in Los Angeles on Channel 13 in a show called The Touche Turtle Show and later The Beachcomber Bill Show with a live host named Bill the Beachcomber, played by Bill Biery. He had a little set that looked like a beach shack and he'd banter between cartoons with Wally, Touche and Lippy. Some puppeteer (I don't know who) did pretty good impressions of those characters as he operated pretty-good puppets of them. I wondered at the time — and still do not know — if Hanna-Barbera was somehow involved in the design and manufacture of those puppets, making them available with the cartoons to local stations. Mr. Biery soon migrated to WPIX in New York where he showed the same cartoons but henceforth worked with original puppets.

He was another one of those kid show hosts whose jobs went away. I'd like to see Donald Trump try to bring those back.