A Word From Our Sponsor, Top Cat

Hanna-Barbera characters hawked food, vitamins, cigarettes and fire safety (perhaps the last two cancel each other). No doubt you’ve seen those commercials over the years. But there are some you haven’t seen—if you live in North America.

The Royal Bank of Scotland employed Top Cat and his gang in its television ad campaign in 1983. Someone has posted several of the spots on-line. The ads were animated at Hanna-Barbera. Best of all, they feature the voices of Arnold Stang and Marvin Kaplan, and someone doing Benny and Officer Dibble who I should be able to name. The originals, Maurice Gosfield (1964) and Allen Jenkins (1974) were dead when these ads were produced. As a bonus, they’re backed with the familiar music of Hoyt Curtin. In fact, in a couple of the ads, it sounds like the music’s going to launch into the Kellogg’s jingle. There’s a laugh track to add a retro feeling.

I have no idea who the animator or director was on these, but here they are:







The Bank of Scotland offered its own Top Cat stuff, too—a piggy kitty bank. Made of real plastic! Click to enlarge.



T.C. wasn’t the only Hanna-Barbera character shilling in the U.K. So were the Flintstones in this spot for an insurance company. Mark Christiansen animated a couple of scenes on this and Scott Jeralds did the character layouts and storyboard. See Scott’s note in the comment section.

The animation goes by a little quickly at times for me but the characters look great and I would have loved to have seen Fred’s car squash and stretch like this in the original cartoons. Whoever is doing the dying Flintmobile is evoking a bit of Mel Blanc as Jack Benny’s recalcitrantly-starting Maxwell.



If anyone has any additional insight about the spots, especially if they worked on these, please post it in the comment section.

Yowp thanks Chris S. for providing the links.