My list of My Ten Favorite Cartoon Show Openings From My Youth brought a few irate "How could you leave off my favorite?" messages but fewer than I expected. Most of what you wished I'd included fell into the category of Honorable Mentions for me so here are ten more of those in no particular order…
In the fifties, CBS acquired the Terrytoons cartoon studio and its entire library. There were some new shows produced for television but mostly they tried repackaging the old ones into shows like this. This is the opening for Farmer Alfalfa and His Terrytoon Pals from 1958 and it's pretty violent as some of those ancient Terrytoons could be…
Kimba the White Lion was a popular Japanese shōnen manga series created by Osamu Tezuka and turned into an animated series over there in 1965. The following year, a dubbed version became very popular here in the U.S. I never cared much for the show but I liked the main title…
A lot of folks thought I'd committed a heinous crime leaving Top Cat (1961) off my Top Ten list. I loved the show but the title and theme song just barely missed the cut. And, hey: See if you can spot Joe Barbera's initials hidden in this opening and also the egregious animation error where someone got the cel levels mixed up near the end. That mistake was on every episode every week and they never fixed it.
Also, the end credits are on here but they aren't real. Hanna-Barbera somehow lost the end titles with the credits but they did have a copy of the end titles without the credits. So they copied the credits off one episode and, imitating the font and the placement, put the same credits on every print of the series, even though the people listed may not have worked on every episode. So every time you see a Top Cat, it says at the end that Kin Platt wrote it but Mr. Platt only wrote a couple…
With the success of the Bugs Bunny cartoons on Saturday morning, Warner Brothers put together another package of their old theatrical cartoons and marketed it in 1964 as The Porky Pig Show. The animation of the new opening title they had made — done, I think by Hal Seeger's studio — was not good but I kinda liked the song…
Before Total Television — a short-lived cartoon studio with distant ties to Jay Ward's — gave us Underdog, they gave us King Leonardo and His Short Subjects (1960) and this was another case where I liked the opening titles more than the show. For some reason, I like that the vocalists sound like they just got everyone in the studio at the moment to gather around a microphone and sing. And there's something nice about a cartoon show main title that ends with some of the characters firing a machine gun at the other characters…
In 1963, veteran animator Joe Oriolo, who had previously done the Felix the Cat cartoons for TV, gave us this series of The Mighty Hercules. I loved the theme song which was composed by Winston Sharples, who did so much of the music for Paramount's cartoons, with lyrics by Mr. Sharples' son and a vocal by Johnny Nash, who later had a couple of hit records like "I Can See Clearly Now"…
This is The Peter Potamus Show, which Hanna-Barbera did in '64 as part of the same deal with Ideal Toys that gave us The Magilla Gorilla Show. As with that series, the sponsor's name was woven into the theme song and there were visual plugs which were awkwardly chopped-out for later syndication.
At the age of twelve when this show went on, I had a great affection for Mr. Potamus, partly because his voice was supplied by Daws Butler. I have affection for any character voiced by Daws Butler and in this case, he was doing a voice not unlike character actor Joe E. Brown. Those who've handled Peter Potamus in more recent times seem to have a desire to disfigure the character and it feels to me like some psycho slashing my old teddy bear. Here he is when he was a pleasant potamus…
This was the opening of the 1964 prime-time series, The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo. I assume this came about because of the success of the 1962 Magoo's Christmas Carol special. Loved the special, never quite got into the series but I liked the opening, though not enough for it to make my Top Ten…
Super Chicken was not a show. It was a segment on the Jay Ward series George of the Jungle (1967) but my friend Shelly Goldstein loves this mini-main title. It was, like the main title of the program it appeared on,sung by Stan Worth with the vocal stylings of Bill Scott, who produced the show and voiced its main characters.
Before this, the Ward studios whipped up an unsold pilot for Super Chicken with Don Knotts in the title role and Louis Nye voicing his sidekick, Fred. But these cartoons have Bill Scott as Super Chicken, Paul Frees as Fred and Daws Butler as most of the villains Super Chicken went up against…
Lastly, this was not a cartoon show but it aired among them and that's close enough. Supercar was made for British television beginning in 1960 and airing in this country soon after — the first show I saw featuring "Supermarionation" by Gerry & Sylvia Anderson. I loved the puppetry on the show and I especially liked the part of the main title where the Supercar plunges into someone's goldfish tank.
And though I titled this post "Ten More Openings to Cartoon Shows From When I Was A Kid," I just decided to use some creative accounting and turn it up to eleven. I'm ending with the next "Supermarionation" show I ever saw — Fireball XL5 from 1962. It had a pretty good opening and a great end title. When I was in my teens, I should have tried serenading some girls with that end song. I'll bet one of them would have agreed to go out with me…