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Experiences during a weekend in which I watched selections from the recently released second volume DVD sets of “Saturday Morning Cartoons 1960s” and “Saturday Morning Cartoon 1970s” showed the great value of these cartoons.
I looked forward all week to sitting down on that Saturday morning with my traditional Saturday breakfast of Sugar Pops and a bagel and watching some of the ‘60s cartoons. Watching the coyote chase the road runner and hearing the very catchy theme song of “The Road Runner Show” for the first time in many years was a nostalgic treat; I also enjoyed watching similar cartoons on the “The Bugs Bunny Show.”
Seeing these episodes and short cartoons with numerous Hanna Barbera characters that included Peter Potamus, Lippy the Lion and Har De Har Har, Touché Turtle, and Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy was incredible fun. It also convinced me that nothing is funnier than seeing cartoon animals chase and attack each other.
Watching the ‘60s Hanna Barbera cartoons also reinforced my existing sense of the common look to that studio’s cartoons and their use of the same voice actors in each series. An episode about Western sheriff Quick Draw MacDraw that involved a cave looked like an episode of “The Flintstones” and used much of the same music.
I also enjoyed discovering “The Space Kidettes” and could see the strong similarities between this series and “The Jetsons.” Incidentally, the episode of “The Jetsons” on the set that has young Elroy getting mixed up with gangsters is one of my favorites.
The next day, I partially flooded my basement while trying to flush out my hot water heater. I planned to read after resolving the problem but said to myself that I wanted to watch &%^*(%* cartoons and did. This showed that these cartoons are great for both when you want high-quality silly entertainment and when you need to relax.
Watching several of the 12 episodes on the ‘70s set that Sunday afternoon provided a very good, inexpensive, and generally healthy mood enhancement. I started with “The New Adventures of Gilligan,” which was very similar to the sitcom and included most of the original stars as voice actors. This plot had the Howells learning a lesson after building an exclusive country club.
Other childhood favorite rarities on this set include “The Hair Bear Bunch” about a groovy group of bears who escape from their zoo regularly and “Inch High Private Eye.” All you detectives out there can probably guess what this one is about.
I also particularly enjoyed the dramatic cartoon “Sealab 2020” because I had only seen the hilarious and far less reverent version of this series on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim late-night programming. I did learn a bit from this episode that taught us kids to not dump nuclear waste in the ocean.
I noticed as well that many of the cartoons from the ‘70s were tied closely to the ‘60s. Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner combined to star in “The Bugs Bunny Road Runner Show” that has one of the all-time best cartoon theme songs.
Additionally, virtually every Hanna Barbera character from the 1960s short cartoons were travelling around on “Yogi’s Ark” learning lessons that included the evils of bigotry and pollution. This series had Yogi and Boo Boo leading a crew that included most of the characters mentioned above and Snagglepuss, Huckleberry Hound, Atom Ant, and numerous others.
In addition to providing a chance for Xers to relive fond childhood memories and millennials to discover these great shows, the success of these collections encourages Warner Brothers to release complete series sets of these shows.
The fact that a handful of these series, most of which were collections of Warner Brother shorts, were on both Volumes One and Two of these sets is encouraging. My biggest disappointment was that the Scooby-Dooesque shows “Goober and the Ghost Chasers” and “Speed Buggy” only made Volume One.
I would love to hear other fond childhood memories of these shows or to have some you kids out there e-mail about your new-found love of these characters; my e-mail address is tvdvdguy@gmail.com.
Review by John Stahl John Stahl is a freelance legal writer who is also a fan of classic and cult television programs. He can be reached at tvdvdguy@gmail.com.
Product Details
Actors: Tom & Jerry, Magilla Gorilla, Peter Potamus, The Road Runner Show, Flintstones
Format: Animated, Color, DVD, Full Screen, Subtitled, NTSC
Language: English (Dolby Digital 1.0)
Subtitles: English
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number of discs: 2
From the Back Cover
A banana-loving gorilla--Magilla's the name--leaves his pet-shop home and stirs up lots of ape-roarious trouble. A tiny ant provides colossal-size heroics. A horse short on horse sense enforces the law. (Of course, no one knows he's a horse because he wears a bandana. And a cowboy hat.) Must be the '60s.
Have a blast with Volume 2 of the blasts from the past that made Saturday your favorite day of the week. From do-you-remember rarities (The Space Kidettes) to time-honored favorites (The Bugs Bunny Show), from a pig (Porky!) to a Potamus (Peter!), hours and hours of up-and-at-'em, cereal-crunching, don't-touch-that-dial fun await you on these two discs. Check your calendar--it's Saturday! Features:
- Completely Bananas: The Magilla Gorilla Story: Take Yogi Bear, turn him on his ear and what do you get? Magilla Gorilla! Our experts will explain how the latest in Hanna-Barbera's line of anthropomorphic heroes differed from its predecessors and signaled the end of the line of comical animal leads
- Saturday Morning Wake-Up Calls
Episodes:
Johnny Cypher in Dimension Zero: Attack from Out of Space/Rhom, Super Criminal/The Eye of Ramapoor
Peter Potamus: Fe Fi Fo Fun
Flintstones: The Flintstones Flyer
The Porky Pig Show: Scaredy Cat/Baton Bunny/Feather Dusted
Frankenstein Jr. & The Impossibles: The Shocking Electric Monster/The Bubbler
Adventures of Aquaman: Menace of the Blanc Manta/The Rampaging Reptile-Men/The Return of Nepto
Herculoid: The Beaked People/The Raider Apes
Space Ghost/Dino Boy: The Heat Thing/The Worm People/Zorak
Superman: The Force Phantom
The Jetsons: A Date with Jet Screamer
The Road Runner Show: Beep Beep/Satan's Waitin/Chili con Carne
Magilla Gorilla: Gridiron Gorilla
Tom & Jerry Show: No Bones About It/An Ill Wind/Beach Bully
