It's the opening of one of my favorite Hanna-Barbera shows, Top Cat. I'll point out two things for those of you who love to fixate on minute, trivial details. In the beginning, when the limousine turns around, you can briefly see that the insignia on the front is "HB." Then near the end, the folks in the camera department got the cel levels screwed up. The fancy-dressed waiter manages to walk between the lunch box and the table on which it has been placed. This mistake not only got on the air but no one ever fixed it.
Still, I thought this was a great series. Obviously, it drew inspiration from the Phil Silvers Bilko show. Some of us have a theory that the original notion was to build the show around Daws Butler's conman voice, which had otherwise found its way into the mouth of Hokey Wolf. It wasn't exactly an impression of Mr. Silvers but it did bring him to mind. And the way the theory goes, at some point in the development process, they chickened out, just as they had with The Flintstones. Daws did the voices of both Fred and Barney in the original presentation that led to that series…and what he did, at the request of Mssrs. Hanna and Barbera, was essentially the same dead-on Gleason/Carney impressions that he'd done for the Warner Brothers "Honeymousers" cartoons.
In the case of the Modern Stone Age Family, the lawyers seem to have gotten too worried about a lawsuit from Gleason and/or the producers of The Honeymooners. Daws's impressions were good enough to sell the series but when it came time to go on the air with it, they replaced his voices with ones that sounded a bit less like Gleason and Carney. The same thing may have happened with Top Cat. They feared litigation so they dumped the Daws impression and brought in someone who didn't sound quite as close to the original.
They did retain Maurice Gosfield, who'd played Doberman on the Bilko show, to play Top Cat's not-dissimilar cohort, Benny the Ball, but no one else from the Phil Silvers program was in evidence. Not long after, Allan Melvin — who'd played Bilko's sidekick, Henshaw — became a mainstay of the H-B voice pool…and Harvey Lembeck, who played Bilko's other sidekick, was heard in a couple of uncredited roles in other Hanna-Barbera cartoons soon after that. Makes you wonder if they first came to the studio's attention because someone was thinking of casting more voices from the Bilko series.
Meanwhile, I should mention one other possible source of inspiration for Top Cat: Joe Barbera, himself. There was a fair amount of Joe in Top Cat, always charming the ladies and buttering people up when he wanted something out of them. Both did it with such style and grace that it usually succeeded. After I started working with Mr. B. and seeing him in action, I decided that at least some of the writers of Top Cat must have had him in mind as a model, at least as much as they thought of Bilko. And it was only after I formulated this observation that I learned that in the original presentation, the name of the series was Top Cats (plural, referring to the whole gang) and their leader was named "J.B." A surviving storyboard for the pilot episode clearly has the name "J.B." written in throughout and replaced with "T.C."
Make of that what you will. And now it's time to click and watch the clip…
