Here are five more of these, starting with Tennessee Tuxedo and his Tales, which joined the CBS schedule in 1963…one of those occasional attempts to make children's television a bit more "educational." Don Adams at the time had a recurring role on The Bill Dana Show on NBC and hadn't yet signed on for Get Smart, and Larry Storch hadn't yet been cast in F Troop. Thus, they were available to be in the voice cast of this show…
Speed Racer was another dubbed Japanese show that came over here in 1967 and was quickly embraced by many eager fans. I was not one of them but I liked the opening…
In 1962, Hanna-Barbera produced a block of cartoons called unofficially, The Hanna-Barbera New Cartoon Series or sometimes, The New Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Series. Neither title ever appeared on the air. What it was was a package of three different cartoons, each with its own main title. Wally Gator was one, Touché Turtle and Dum Dum was another and Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har was the third. They made 52 shorts of each and the local stations that bought 'em programmed them every which way, usually with a local host between the different segments.
My favorite was Wally Gator and though I liked his little main title and tune, it puzzled me. As you'll see, it showed him zipping around a swamp as the singers referred to him as a "swingin' alligator in the swamp." Okay, fine…but in the cartoons that followed this, he was always in a zoo and not a swamp. That baffled ten-year-old me but Wally's voice was done by Daws Butler and I could never dislike a cartoon character voiced by Daws Butler…
Jonny Quest (1964) was one of the first real attempts to do an adventure show in animation for television. (Clutch Cargo and Space Angel both preceded it but I'm not sure if you'd call what they did on those shows "animation.") Jonny Quest was a Hanna-Barbera show created by Doug Wildey, a brilliant and incorrigible artist who I am proud to say I knew well…maybe too well. I'm still a little pissed, as Doug was, that his credit line was removed from the end titles of some prints of some episodes.
One thing I liked about this show was that the lady who headed up Standards and Practices for ABC in the eighties — a lady with whom I often mud-wrestled — despised it. It was to her, the show which ruined television animation by introducing "violence" into the arena. That was a silly charge, especially if you saw what passed in her eyes for "violence." On Jonny Quest, it never got much worse than what was in this main title which, incidentally, was mostly not animated for Jonny Quest. All the shots without Jonny or other recurring characters were from a demo that H-B made for an unsold pilot film for a show based on the old radio series, Jack Armstrong…
And lastly for this time around: The DePatie-Freleng cartoon studio did more than all those Pink Panther cartoons. In 1966. they gave us Super 6 with a theme song sung by Gary Lewis of Gary Lewis and the Playboys…or maybe Gary Lewis without his short-lived rock band. Can't say I was ever fond of the show but as you've seen from these lists, I could like the theme song without liking what followed…
I'm going to post five more of these in a day or two and then I'll probably move on to some other topic of vital importance.