Um. How can I put this delicately?
These are not great cartoons.
They are wallpaper. They’re pleasant enough and killed air time in between routines with Crazy Donkey on Channel 11 when I was a kid.
But they’re filler.
I can tell you my favourite cartoons on the Huck Show. Or the Quick Draw and Yogi Bear shows. But the plots of the five-minute cartoons (this includes Touché Turtle) are completely unmemorable. I can’t recall a single one.
Earl Kress used to joke it seemed every Lippy cartoon ended with the pair of them on a raft, with Lippy yelling “Paddle faster, Hardy,” as they escaped from who-knows-what. (None of them actually ended that way).
These cartoons, to me, marked Hanna-Barbera’s slow, downhill slide. Does any of the animation or background art in these stand out to you? Anyway, just as Hanna-Barbera would repeat plots with different characters, I am repeating myself from this post.
The best part of Wally was the theme song, which I can only assume was written by Hoyt Curtin and Bill Hanna before it was decided to take Wally out of the swamp in the opening animation. I have never been a big fan of the Golden Records’ versions of the Hanna-Barbera music, but I like their take on Wally’s theme. The low-key arrangement for the little combo is quite good, especially the piano.
For fans of Mel Blanc constantly moaning "Oh dear, oh my," the discs will be available on December 15th.
Touche Turtle was probably the prize of this stage in Hanna-Barbera's devolution into quantity-over-quality mediocrity. And what about Yippy, Yappy, and Yahooey, which I can't believe I even remember? All I remember about Lippy the Lion was the title sequence, specifically Lippy and Hardy climbing a ladder of arrows up a tree; I couldn't remember the plot of any individual cartoon under advanced interrogation techniques. All I remember about Wally Gator was that he was boring.
ReplyDeleteThe one Wally I remember has him complaining about a leaky pipe and trying to fix it, with increasingly disastrous results until the whole zoo is flooded. The running gag has Mr. Twiddle offering to call a plumber and the payoff lets him say, "Now why didn't I call a plumber?" as he and Wally drift in a boat. The whole thing was similar to a KFS Popeye of a year or two earlier, "Plumber's Pipe Dream."
DeleteThere are a few bits in the Lippy episodes I remember besides the title sequence (note how smoothly Lippy is animated as he climbs -- an example of H-B animators splurging in opening/closing titles). Toward the end of one episode, Lippy and Hardy are at the controls of an airplane moving slowly through thick fog. The altimeter says they're a few hundred feet below sea level -- Lippy is first to notice this but slower than Hardy in grasping the significance. In another, the two are stranded and Lippy declares that he's so hungry he could eat *anything.* Hardy flees and Lippy can't understand why.
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