This ad appeared in the Los Angeles Times 63 years ago today, marking the debut of The Quick Draw McGraw Show, replacing Wild Bill Hickok in the Kellogg Monday through Friday line-up.
It seems Monday was a popular night for Quick Draw on the West Coast. Here are some other stations that aired the fastest-shootin’-est cowboy, er, cowhorse, er, horseboy on birthday night, September 28:
KJEO 47, Fresno (at 6 p.m.)
KRCA 3, Sacramento (at 6 p.m.)
KGW 8, Portland (at 6 p.m.)
KSD-TV 5, St. Louis (at 4:30 p.m.)
KAKE 10, Wichita (at 6 p.m.)
WTTG 5, Washington, D.C. (at 7 p.m.)
WVET-TV 10, Rochester (at 6 p.m.)
WNAC-TV 7, Boston (at 6:30 and 7:30 p.m.)
WRGB 6, Schenectady (at 6 p.m.)
The ad shows the first Quick Draw cartoon was “Lamb Chopped” (Production J-11), featuring the orange, bad-guy Snagglepuss. The other cartoons were “Baby Rattled” (J-14) with Snooper and Blabber, and “Million Dollar Robbery” (J-31) with Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy.
Syndicated columnists Hal Humphrey wrote a column three days before the series debuted, talking about the $56,000 it cost each episode to be made. Cecil Smith of the Times wrote about the day it debuted. The Newspaper Enterprise Association's Erskine Johnson and Don Page of the Times praised the series in November. It wasn’t “violent” like those old movie cartoons. Humphrey talked about the series “good taste.”
16mm prints of the half-show show were not struck for all stations. Some were bicycled from station to station and if you read TV listings for the third season (most cartoons were reruns), you can see that different shows appeared in different cities on the same day.
This isn’t intended as a full birthday post; instead you can read an old post on the show here.
Happy Birthday " Kweeks Draw ", as Baba Looey would say. Used to watch WTTG out of D.C. all the time.
ReplyDeleteAnyone out here still hoping for Quickdraw DVD release? Might as well use Steve Hanson recordings if the majority of the show elements are missing. (iirc Earl found a handful, NOT MANY, masters of Quickdraw and Augie interstitials so should release those too)
ReplyDeleteThey managed to release Wally (and Lippy) on DVD, and those prints were terrible. I found recording of reruns from QDMG from 2019 and the looked fine. Why can't WBD/WHV at least put some money into music issues and a bit of effort for restoration?
Earl told me how there were all kind of things at H-B that were unlabelled. I can only imagine the nightmare sorting through it. They didn't know what they had.
DeleteHe didn't say if he got documentation from Leo Burnett about what was in its archives, if anything. At one time, they had two 35mm of some of the Huck shows, the rest in 16mm black and white.
I read some stuff about unlabeled Quickdraw stuff too. It's a shame that the show wasn't properly archived--- or rather, stuff just being misplaced after all these years.
DeleteI'm generally curious what the DVD would've been like; that is if the DVD ever went to production lol