Yeah, things were really sucking in the cartoon world in the ‘60s, which brought us things like “Dodo, the Kid From Outer Space” and “The Big World of Little Adam.” And don’t even get me started on Luna the inane flying horse, which seems to have been inspired by a Mobil Oil sign.
Yet these cartoons were made for TV or theatres and the distributors had to convince someone to buy them. So trade ads were taken out. These are all from 1965 editions of Variety.
Dodo was the brainchild of the Halas and Batchelor studio in England. Adam was the result of Fred Ladd (known for importing TV cartoons from Japan) taking NASA stock footage and adding cheap animated inserts. The Tom and Jerry ad below plugged the fact the cat and mouse were coming to Saturday morning TV. The designs in the ad are from the Chuck Jones era but I don’t know if any of the Jones cartoons aired as part of the series. And the Three Stooges designs you see aren’t the ones used in any cartoons I’ve seen. Dave Detiege was involved in them, along with Disney vets Jack Kinney, Nick George, Cecil Beard and Homer Brightman. No one would mistake them for Disney cartoons.
On Saturday mornings in the 1966-67 season, “Dodo” aired opposite “Spunky and Tadpole” in New York City. Spunky might actually have been the better choice.
If you do a search for any of these series on the internet, you should be able to find videos. “The Beatles” series on ABC was the best of the lot and deserves a DVD release simply because of the Fab Four’s place in music history.
None of Chuck's TOm and Jerry's (despite his inserts flor the TV show of the 60s) ever appeared on TV..SC
ReplyDeleteThose Three Stooges designs were taken from a cartoon short produced for The Three Stooges Scrapbook (1960), a live-action unsold TV pilot. Read more about the animated segment HERE.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to glean more info about those proposed Beatles "specials".
A lot of those "Astronut" shorts got released to theaters by 20th Century Fox, all the way up to the early 1970s. By the 1960s, there was really no difference in quality between made-for-TV and theatrical Terrytoons cartoons.
ReplyDeleteBrubaker, quite correct. As Leonard Malin has pointed out, Hector Heathcote cartoons were made both theatrically and for TV, and could be distributed either way, while the solely made for TV Deputy Dog got theatrical requests - mostly from Texas.
ReplyDeleteWhat did the Beatles 'specials' turn out to be? Were they abandoned? Or did they end up as Yellow Submarine?
ReplyDeleteThe Beatles special were eventually abandoned. "Yellow Submarine" was not greenlighted until sometime in 1967 (as the song itself wasn't released until August 1966).
ReplyDeleteI hated those "Three Stooges" cartoons. Our local station ran the Stooges in a one hour timeslot. One of the two-reelers followed by two of the cartoons, then a second two-reeler. It was torture, having to sit through those crap cartoon Stooges to get to more of the real thing.
ReplyDeleteThe things TV stations used to do just to annoy little kids.