Your yowping reporter pre-dates that. I go further back, back to a time when you got more than cartoons on pre- and after-school shows on TV. You got live hosts, introducing cartoons and kibitzing with others in front of the camera. Their routines could be silly and funny and, if I may editorialise, more entertaining than the cartoons (A sign of a successful show was hearing cameramen break up in the background).
These shows were all over the United States, and they were the ones that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had in mind when they developed the Lippy the Lion, Touché Turtle and Wally Gator cartoons. The five-minute comedies could be dropped into kids shows, or even run on their own if a station was too cheap to hire live talent.
This is a bit of a long-winded way to get into this picture I snagged off the internet.
This is from The Pappy Show on WICU-TV in Erie, Pennsylvania.
There were people dressed up as Yogi Bear who toured North America in the late ’50s and early ‘60s, putting on shows at fairs and department stores. This version of Yogi isn’t one of them. He's a little emaciated. I don’t have the background behind the photo, so I don’t know if this Yogi appeared with Pappy regularly.
(Pappy was a chap named Skip Letcher. He had been a disc jockey CHVC in Niagara Falls, Ontario. On-camera cohort Bernard Abbey died in 1964 at the age of 39).
Since I mentioned Lippy, etc., I will use this as an excuse to post this newspaper supplement cover. The characters are on model, so this must have been studio artwork, though I’m not certain why Touché is floating in mid-air. The Lippy, etc. cartoons were viewed in our home, using a special antenna, from KTNT-TV in Tacoma on the Brakeman Bill Show. The best part of the show was a hand puppet named Crazy Donkey. Even my dad would stop and watch Crazy Donkey do or say something ridiculous.
It’s a shame the live host period ended. You can blame those people who watered down cartoons to “protect” children. Hosts on some stations plugged things, and there was a lot of concern about advertising aimed at kids. The hosts vanished. (So did a droll series called Linus the Lionhearted, starring Post cereal spokes-cartoons).
We didn’t need a “Cartoon Network” back then. There was, at least where I grew up, plenty of animated fun after school. I could watch a live kids show that included cartoons, then switch to a half hour of The Flintstones in reruns, then switch to another channel with Warners and Fleischer Popeyes, then switch to another channel that aired Quick Draw McGraw or Huckleberry Hound. That took up a good couple of hours and you could get your cartoon fill for the day.
I’m pretty sure there are readers here who fondly remember the live, ad-lib kid shows on their TV set. The hosts were just as popular as the cartoons they showed. Bravo to them.
Some of the kiddie lures had impressive pedigrees. In San Diego there was Johnny Downs (he was just himself, not an assumed character like Uncle Nutsy or Cap'n Skipwreck), who had been a B-movie juvenile in the 1930s and '40s. Then there were the varying versions (and hosts, perhaps the most memorable being Bob McAllister) of "Wonderama" between the '50s and the '80s, but I forget if they showed cartoons.
ReplyDeleteThe best part of these Boomer-era hosts and hostesses was they talked to kids rather than down to them. And if nothing else, they inspired Pee-Wee Herman, who when he achieved his Saturday morning show was accused of having become what he was originally satirizing.
Hi...Wonderama was nationally syndicated..and,yes,Wonderama did show cartoons..:)
DeleteIn St. Louis, Mo., we had the Wrangler's Cartoon Club with Texas Bruce (Harry Gibbs), which showed the Guild package of Looney Tunes, Betty Boop cartoons and many others, including the early Soyuzmultfilm and other Eastern European cartoons, and the Cookie and the Captain show with Popeye the Sailor Fleischer cartoons, and Captain Eleven (Harry Fender) and his sidekick JoJo, with Three Stooges comedies and Felix the Cat cartoons. They were all fun show hosts, Harry Gibbs was the gentlest and most appealing with his cowboy hat and painted chuckwagon with a shelf on it which he leaned against. Cookie and the Captain were a comedy team, doing mostly ship-board comedy, since the whole program took place on a boat, and Captain Eleven (Harry Fender) was the silliest and used the most physical comedy, since he was playing the Stooges two-reelers. Captain Eleven piloted a steamboat, which was very appropriate to the St. Louis riverfront. All these shows are sadly missed, and precious little kinescope recordings exist of their programs.
ReplyDeleteHere in Waco,Tx. we had hosts on 2 different channels every weekday afternoon. The one i remember most fondly had Zeebo the clown. The main host would have kids come down off the bleachers and scribble on à large pad on an easel. Zèebo would then turn the scribbles into a picture. Hè was a good artist as I recall
ReplyDeletezones 60 or so years later.
You covered everything that I was watching on TV. Bullwinkle too.
ReplyDeleteI remember dad taking us to see Bozo the Clown and Oscar Meyer Weiner mobile in Panorama City when just a supermarket was there. Maybe a few more stores, like May Company. It was rural. Then we’d go home and see them either as adds on tv or on a show. Cartoons made everyone happy.
MG
The way a program is presented has a pretty non-neglible effect on getting people to watch the thing. I myself come from the -- how we say -- closer side of year 2000, so H-B stuff was always synonymous with the Cartoon Network/Boomerang/Adult Swim space. Though, when I was a kid, I only seemed to care about their next airings of the Flintstones or Scooby Doo. Nevertheless, the fine folks at CN/Boomerang cooked up such great packaging for the *rest* of the H-B corpus that they never left my head, and I eventually came around to actually watching some of the pre-1960 material ... as a college student. Needless to say, I still watch them today because they turned out to be my favorite cartoons. Not because I grew up with them; but because they're actually *good*. So, when a presentation or ad team cares enough, they actually do sell the cartoon as being worthwile even many years later.
ReplyDeletePS: As for the 50's/60's brainiacs trying to make "safe" media, their incessant desire to wedge "positive" messages into cartoons eventually made them less safe, really. With the old stuff, you don't have any politically motivated writers slipping God-knows-what into a family program. Though, you probably shouldn't show Judo Jack to a kid.
A familiar presentation on CKCO-TV broadcast from Kitchener-Waterloo in the 60s was a personality named "Big Al" a senior donned in cowboy hat, boots, western attire. He had an hour-long show of theatrical cartoons which intermingled local kid talent acts. The earliest memories I have of this program featured the Guild Looney Tunes and the AAP color cartoons. I distinctly recall seeing 'All This And Rabbit Stew', 'Scrap Happy Daffy', Tin Pan Alley Cats', 'Angel Puss'... the whole C11 shebang.. I knew a lot of the references were to a war and a society that came well before me, as I approached my parents with many questions- yet they still allowed me to watch. After a few seasons the show dropped to a half-hour and was re-branded as "Big Al And The Flintstones". I lost interest in it then because we could watch the Flintstones after school so I wasn't too interested in seeing it at its new timeslot at noon. I recall tuning into it a few years later when it no longer featured cartoons, only the local kid talent acts as "Big Al's Big Top". I believe this was right before the end of his run.
ReplyDeleteOne more program that gave me a great opportunity for awesome cartoons was WUAB-TV's "Barnaby and Friends". It featured another aging entertainer dressed in vaudevillian attire, accompanied by puppets- he generally featured MGM and the Harveytoons, including Casper, Audrey, Huey, Buzzy and Herman & Katnip. I recorded this program into the late 1980s but by then, he began cutting back on the lesser-celebrated Famous characters and stuck mainly to Casper, Audrey, the random Harveytoons and the Screen Songs... Oh, and the Filmation T&Js/Droopy cartoons >_< I wasted a lot of VHS time having to record the entire program while I was at work just to get the Harveytoons at the end....
Techically live-action hosts still exist: Toon In With Me on MeTV has Bill and Toony.
ReplyDeleteI remember Brakeman Bill and Crazy Donkey! Those were the days! The Touche, Lippy, and Wally cartoons also appeared on The Stan Boreson Show our local NBC affiliate. Plus, there was Captain Puget, Wunda Wunda (my own kindergarten teacher!), and my favorite, J.P. Patches and Gertrude! Much as I loved the cartoons they presented, these folks could have sustained their shows by their own personalities alone. But that was how I got acquainted with many of the old theatrical shorts as well as the newer Hanna-Barbera output, through shows like these. In the Northwest, we had a bumper crop of these type of hosted kid's shows.
ReplyDeleteThanks for remembering all of my childhood favorites! The Seattle/Puget Sound market was blessed with a multitude of Kiddie Shows well into the 70's, including Flash Blaidon. What a time!
DeleteNever watched Boreson.
DeleteJ.P. was incredibly funny. The cameramen were always laughing.
I didn't know Ruth Prins taught kindergarten. I watched her every day when I was very young.
Linus wasn’t too bad, they were solid cartoons. Ed graham should’ve done more cartoons rather then letting Linus become a one hit wonder
ReplyDeleteTotally so! Linus was a fun odd show,and not just due to the cereal origins..
DeleteGraham wasn't really an animation guy. My recollection was he was a copywriter at Young and Rubicam and, through his agency work, cooked up Bert and Harry Piel. The Piel commercials were farmed out to various animation studios. That was his initial connection with animation. He soon was producing commercials, a bunch of them animated with the voices of Bob and Ray.
DeleteGraham mentioned once that Piel's management wanted Mel Blanc to voice Bert and Harry.