As anyone who’s ever watched Baggy Pants and the Nitwits can tell you, the 1970s were a strange time in the half-century history of kids’ Saturday morning television. The late ’60s superhero craze, brought on by the popularity of ABC’s Batman, was met with a vehement backlash by advocacy groups who protested the violence and lack of “E/I” (educational/informative) content. As the handful of animation studios (Hanna-Barbera, DePatie-Freleng, Filmation, and Rankin/Bass chief among them) struggled to provide the broadcast networks with shows that toned down the mayhem and promoted “positive values,” they at the same time looked to new cultural trends to emulate, sought out tried and true formulas to steal borrow from, and occasionally managed to sneak some actual entertainment past the censors. This year marks the 50th anniversary of seven Hanna-Barbera series that debuted in the funky Fall of 1974. Some are fondly looked back on, while others are barely remembered, but each had a unique niche in the kids’ TV field.
Devlin – Americans of all ages were following the exploits of school bus-jumping motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel in the ’70s, but a cartoon dedicated to his bone-breaking stunts wouldn’t fly (sorry). Instead, Devlin followed young circus cyclist Ernie Devlin as he thrilled audiences with his cycle mastery, and out of the big top tried to look after his younger siblings Tod and Sandy (their parents having died before the series began). This mix of family drama and adventure (along with Ernie supplying the obligatory safety messages) won over many critics, but it only lasted for one year and 16 episodes before the Devlin kids rode off into oblivion.
Hong Kong Phooey – “Number one super guy” Hong Kong Phooey, who presented himself as a crimefighting martial arts master even though his skills left something to be desired, was originally planned to be an alter ego of Huckleberry Hound. Instead, H-B went with klutzy canine and police station janitor Penrod “Penry” Pooch (voiced by Scatman Crothers), who tried to follow the instructions in his Hong Kong Book of Kung Fu but often needed help from his put-upon pet cat Spot to catch the bad guys (why Penry was a talking, clothes-wearing dog and Spot a typical cat was never explained). Joe E. Ross voiced the station’s exasperated sergeant and Kathy Gori police switchboard operator Rosemary, who for some reason had a crush on Hong Kong. The show offered relatively tame action to its slapstick tone and, while again only one 16-episode season was produced, Hong Kong Phooey lived on in reruns and was featured in 1977’s Scooby’s All-Star Laff-a-Lympics. Fanriffic!
Korg: 70,000 B.C. – This was perhaps the strangest of Hanna-Barbera’s 1974 debuts, because it was a live-action series, depicting the struggle to survive the rigors of Ice Age Europe by a small but determined family of Neanderthals. Produced with help from leading natural history museums, the show eschewed dinosaurs and volcanos to give a realistic depiction of prehistoric life (although Korg and his clan were shown speaking complete English sentences…hey, you had to make some allowances so kids could follow along). Burgess Meredith served as narrator. Despite earning plaudits from educators, the series didn’t catch on with audiences and was only on for one season. Having learned their lesson, H-B would find more success three years later with a less authentic troglodyte in Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels.
Partridge Family 2200 A.D. – Plenty of ’60s live-action TV shows found themselves turned into cartoon series a decade later: The Addams Family, Jeannie, My Favorite Martians, and so on ad infinitum. One of the odder translations was this sci-fi outing in which Shirley Partridge and her rock band brood were inexplicably moved to the 23rd century and shown amid old building and vehicle designs from The Jetsons. Younger siblings Danny Bonaduce, Brian Forster, and Suzanne Crough lent their voice talents (as did Susan Dey for two episodes before leaving to shoot a movie), while other actors filled in for Shirley Jones and David Cassidy. Studio rights issues have kept this one-year wonder from turning up on home video.
These Are the Days – Hoping to cash in on the popularity of CBS’s The Waltons, this oh-so-wholesome animated series chronicled the lives of the Day family–widowed mother Martha (beloved TV mom June Lockhart); youngsters Kathy (Pamelyn Ferdin), Danny (Jackie Earle Haley), and Ben (Andrew Parks); and grandpa Jeff (Henry Jones)–in the Midwestern town of Elmsville in the early 1900s. The stories revolved mostly around the children’s adventures with their schoolmates or with Jeff’s latest “invention,” and while the show won praise for its heartfelt tone, audiences were skipping it in favor of a similar prime-time show that also debuted that year, the live-action Little House on the Prairie.
Valley of the Dinosaurs – Hey, remember that show that debuted in 1974 and followed a family on a rafting trip who somehow wound up in a mysterious world where prehistoric animals still lived? No, I’m not talking about Sid and Marty Krofft’s live-action Land of the Lost. I mean this H-B cartoon where John and Kim Butler, their kids Katie and Greg, and their dog Digger go from the Amazon rain forest to a danger-filled valley of…well, you see what the title says. Anachronistically enough, the Butlers are befriended by a caveman clan (Gorok, Gara, Lok, and Tana) that apparently speaks English. The two families learn to cooperate, with Gorok’s brood being introduced to technology like the wheel, pulleys, and windmills while the Butlers explore their strange new environment as they seek a way home. Like its antediluvian counterpart Korg, the show was only around for one year…and no, they never found the way back (just like on Land of the Lost).
Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch – More than 30 years before Pixar’s Cars (but over 20 years after the Tex Avery short One Cab’s Family), this series really put the “car” in “cartoon. Set in a human-free world of anthropomorphic motor vehicles, it featured a compact car–with a passing similarity to Herbie the Love Bug–named Wheelie who had headlight eyes and communicated in horn honks and beeps like an automotive R2D2 (he could also spell out messages on his windshield a la sports stadium scoreboards). While Wheelie wanted nothing more than to go on drives and drink high-octane shakes with his girlfriend Rota Ree, their good times were always interrupted a gang of bullying motorcycles, the aforementioned Chopper Bunch. The fact that the show was not only panned by critics for “excessive violence” (of the mildest slapstick kind) but also by the biker community for its depiction of grungy and ill-mannered cycles probably contributed to it only airing for a single-season 13-episode run.
Do you have memories of sitting in front of the TV with your cereal bowl watching these shows, or do you have another ’70s Saturday morning favorite? Less us know in the comments.