Guess I should have expected it. I wrote about the Abbott & Costello cartoon show produced by Hanna and Barbera, and I got a lot of e-mails that said, more or less, "So what was the deal with those Laurel and Hardy cartoons they did?" The deal, as I understand it, was something that Larry Harmon — best known as the proprietor of Bozo the Clown — put together. He knew Stan Laurel and around 1961, made an arrangement with him for a cartoon based on these caricatures. News articles dated October of that year said that it would be a prime-time series on NBC and that Mr. Laurel would consult and contribute to storylines. (It is worth noting that this was one month after the first cartoon series produced for television, The Flintstones, debuted on ABC. At about the same time, Screen Gems — then the parent company of Hanna-Barbera — announced that a Marx Brothers cartoon show was in the works.)
There was a flurry of merchandising in anticipation of the Laurel & Hardy show…but no show. Apparently, NBC was not as committed to the project as the articles had suggested, and then there were some complications over the rights. The complications got worse when Laurel died in 1965 and there was some sort of claim on the rights by producer David Wolper. A partnership or compromise was brokered and in '66, the deal was set, not for network prime-time but for the syndicated children's market. There was only one crucial element missing: No animation studio. Harmon's, which had produced the Bozo the Clown cartoons, was no longer operative. So an arrangement was made with Hanna-Barbera to do the series.
Harmon himself supplied the voice of Stanley. Jim MacGeorge, who often impersonated Laurel in front of the camera, was engaged to voice Ollie. (Any time you see Chuck McCann playing Hardy in a sketch or commercial, it's usually Jim playing Laurel.) The usual Hanna-Barbera storymen and artists and supporting voice players were in place, and the cartoons varied wildly as to their quality and appropriateness for Laurel and Hardy. Four years earlier, H-B had produced a series of cartoons featuring two characters named Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har. It has been rumored that many of the scripts for the Laurel and Hardy films were either leftover Lippy & Hardy scripts or close remakes. There were also scripts in which Laurel and Hardy became super-heroes and some of these, it is said, were rewrites of scripts that had been written for an unproduced series about two clumsy crimefighters. Quality-wise, the Laurel & Hardy cartoons weren't much different from Lippy & Hardy, which of course is what was wrong with them.
Amazingly, that wasn't the last time Laurel and Hardy were animated by H-B. In 1972, the studio had this odd incarnation of the Scooby Doo franchise called The New Scooby Doo Movies. In this case, a "movie" was an hour long episode with an odd guest star or two. Among those who "met" Scooby, Shaggy and the gang were Don Knotts, The Three Stooges, Jonathan Winters, The Harlem Globetrotters, Sandy Duncan, Sonny and Cher, some other even odder selections…and Laurel and Hardy. The characters were redesigned a bit to fit in better with the Scooby style and again, Harmon and MacGeorge provided the voices. It was not Stan and Ollie's finest hour.
Here's the opening of a 1966 Laurel and Hardy cartoon…
More recently, Larry Harmon's company has repackaged the cartoons. Here's the opening they produced which combines clips from the old cartoons with a new theme song…
And while we're at it, here's three minutes of Laurel and Hardy guesting on The New Scooby Doo Movies. Be afraid. Be very afraid.