The Hanna-Barbera New Cartoon Series
Wally Gator: The Complete Series*
Warner Archive Blu-ray ($24.99) a vailable from Movie Zyng
Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har: The Complete Series
267 min. / Color / 1.33:1 / DDS-HD Master Audio English 2.0 / SDH
Warner Archive Blu-ray ($24.99) available from Movie Zyng
Balconeers, stick with us on this one, we promise there’s a point. To understand the existence, not to mention the popularity, of Wally Gator, Lippy the Lion, Hardy Har Har, and their pals Touché Turtle and Dum Dum (and more on those pals later) we need to first note the phenomenon known as the Baby Boom, a world-wide cataclysm, not of exploding infants, but of healthy, bouncing baby boys and girls, as the Post-War world ramped up marriages and families, roughly covering the period 1945-1964. It’s estimated that by 1962, there were nearly 40 million youngsters under the age of eleven in the United States, nearly all of whom had access to a television set. And while infants may not have actually exploded, toy sales had, more than doubling to $1.1 billion from a decade earlier. So, the point of this paragraph: in 1962, there were a heck of a lot of kids, and a lot of toys to sell them.
The best way to reach this young audience was through television, and there was scarcely a metropolitan area in the country that didn’t have local TV kiddie-show hosts with daily programs of old Popeye and Casper cartoons, Little Rascals and Three Stooges shorts, and puppets. Lots and lots of puppets. In Akron, where I grew up, we had Professor Jack on Ch. 49, or from Cleveland (three stations, plenty of after-school TV room) we had Barnaby (an elf with an invisible bird), Franz the Toymaker and his sidekick Raggedy Ann, Woodrow the Woodsman, and Captain Penny, who famously told kids that it was okay to laugh at the Stooges but not try to emulate them by poking little brother in the eyes or hitting them over the head with a mallet (which is pretty good advice even if you’re not watching the Stooges, now that I think of it), not to mention Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo and probably a few more I’m forgetting. The point of THIS paragraph: there simply weren’t enough vintage cartoons to go around to fill all these shows, even if the station’s program director dug into the vaults for ancient Cubby Bear and Farmer Al Falfa cartoons. How on earth did you expect to sell Easy Bake Ovens or Give-a-Show Projectors without cartoons to keep kids’ interest in between commercials?
Luckily, there were a plethora of cartoon producers more than happy to step in to fill the void, and we’re not talking about half-hour, self-contained shows here like The Alvin Show or King Leonardo and his Short Subjects, but miniature 5-min. cartoons intended solely to syndicate to stations for their local kiddie hosts, or as filler if a movie or baseball game ran short. If you’re of a certain age (specifically, “old”), you remember The Mighty Hercules, Out of the Inkwell, Dick Tracy, Felix the Cat, Colonel Bleep, made-for-TV Popeye (the ones with “Brutus”) and other scarcely-animated cartoons that nevertheless were a big part of our childhood. And the point of THIS paragraph is to get the point of this article: Hanna-Barbera, building on their success of their self-contained shows with Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, the Flintstones, Top Cat, and Yogi Bear, saw a market they could enter with these five-minute filler cartoons, and in 1962 promoted three new cartoons sold to stations as “The Hanna-Barbera New Cartoon Series” that could be used as filler or bundled together as one program; my memory is that they were called Wally Gator & Friends in NE Ohio, but my memory is such that I can’t recall what I had for lunch yesterday or where I put my keys, so don’t make me swear to that. There were 52 cartoons in each of the three new cartoon offerings, which gave stations a lot of ammo to sell Super Balls with.
We have covered one of the cartoon series, Touché Turtle and Dum Dum, already, so let’s move on to the other two.
Lippy the Lion was a rascally fellow in a shabby hat and vest who, belying his species’ reputation as King of the Jungle, tends to wander around urban landscapes looking for easy ways to improve his lot in life. He was voiced by Daws Butler (as were 1,000 other Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters) in imitation of comic actor Joe E. Brown, who was alive and active in those days, so I wonder if he was aware of this, although us kids probably had no idea of who Joe E. Brown was; I didn’t, but in my defense (a) I was four years old, and (b) I do now. Lippy’s side kick was a laughless hyena ironically named Hardy Har Har (and surely “Lippy and Hardy” was no coincidence) who regularly greeted Lippy’s suggestions with a prediction of doom and “Oh, me. Oh, my” in a whiney voice, which became the show’s big catch-phrase amongst us pre-schoolers. Mel Blanc voiced him.
Wally Gator wore a hat and collar and lived in the city zoo, where he has it really good, all things considered, and is frequently shown gardening, taking part in water sports, and generally enjoying life. Nevertheless, he’s restless and frequently tempted to escape and go looking outside the zoo walls for fun and adventure (and a change of diet, although he seems to be a vegetarian alligator, thankfully for hapless zookeeper Mr. Twiddle). As with Yogi Bear and his escapes from Jellystone or Magilla Gorilla outside the pet store, Wally invariably fled back home after tasting freedom. He was also voiced by Mr. Butler (okay, so he had 1,001 voices), this time imitating Ed Wynn, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we all recognized THAT voice, even in the pre-Mary Poppins days, since Ed was all over TV in those days. One oddity about Wally: his opening credits and theme song describe him as a swamp dweller, although in the many cartoons we watched, he never got near a swamp. One wonders if he wasn’t intended to be a completely different character (his credit’s copyright is 1961, as opposed to Touché’s and Lippy’s 1962).
Circling back to our lengthy introduction, these cartoons are miles better than their competition in the syndication field, due to the professionalism, humor, and artistry of the Hanna-Barbera staff, and many of them are laugh-out-loud funny. I’d rank, for example, Lippy & Hardy in Monster Mix-Up, with a rotten kid and his chemistry set, with most anything in Mad magazine at the time, which is a compliment indeed. The idea that the writers, directors, and artists at H-B could present such varied and funny stories (the characters may be in a modern city in one cartoon, in Camelot in another, and in the Wild West in another) seems nothing short of miraculous. Note, however, that Hanna-Barbera, in a cost-cutting mode to get 156 cartoons done quickly, offered no bridging sequences or overall title sequence for the three series, and shot the cartoons on 16mm rather than 35mm, so the image quality doesn’t come near what we find on The Huckleberry Hound Show or Top Cat or the other Warner Archive Blu-rays. The discs have no bonus material but the menu has all the cartoon titles and is easy to manipulate, and you can print out this article and keep it handy if you’d like. We’ll even autograph it for you, we’re customer-centric here.
If you forced us to choose, we like Lippy and Hardy the best of the three series, because of the relationship between the two leads, but there’s no reason to settle: get all three sets and enjoy all of the cartoons, either on their own or if your baseball game runs short.
Animation fans, especially due to the Warner Archive, this is a great time for physical media.
