Erik Tarloff remembers Soupy Sales. He gets White Fang and Black Tooth confused but otherwise, it's a perceptive piece. Thanks to Tom Pardue for the link.
Aaron R. Davis, a reader of this site, writes to tell me Cartoon Network stuck one of our new Garfield episodes into its schedule today between showings of R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour and Mainframe Entertainment's Scary Godmother: The Revenge of Jimmy. So I guess they're airing our show. They're just not telling anyone.
I was just sitting here wondering if there was a video in this world of the Lennon Sisters dressed up as skeletons and singing "Dry Bones." And sure enough, I get an e-mail from Fred Rupnow telling me where to find one. What are the odds?
Beginning in 1965 and continuing for two or three years (reports vary) there was a company called Hanna-Barbera Records. It released a flood of record albums based on Hanna-Barbera cartoon properties and also put out a great many records of unrelated music.
As a kid then, I was a big fan of the cartoon-based records, though I found some of them quite puzzling. For reasons I've never been able to determine (and perhaps never will), the "wrong" voice actors did a lot of the parts. For example, Daws Butler had always done the voice of Huckleberry Hound for the cartoons but the Huckleberry Hound record put out by H-B Records had Paul Frees playing the part. Daws had also originated the voice of Yogi Bear and done it for the cartoons...and he did it on some of the H-B Yogi records...but one features Allan Melvin performing the voice of the smarter-than-average bear with June Foray as Boo Boo! Daws (not Arnold Stang) did the voice of Top Cat on the Top Cat record. Don Messick (not George O'Hanlon) did the voice of George Jetson on a Jetsons record. The Augie Doggie record has Daws voicing Augie (as he did in the cartoons) and also Doggie Daddy (which he did not). And so on.
Despite the sometimes-odd casting and the generally-forgettable tunes, the records were often fun. I have them all, of course, but I've been hoping someone would reissue them on CD. It looks like that's beginning to happen.
A company called New Line Records is bringing out the first such re-release — an album of Christmas tunes ostensibly performed by Pebbles and Bamm Bamm. It's an odd choice since it really isn't a cartoon-connected album, as advertised, and that would seem to be the only appeal of such a product. It's just a bunch of anonymous singers singing holiday tunes with no connection to those characters or Bedrock or anything. (They even sing of the birth of Christ even though if we're faithful to continuity, Pebbles and Bamm Bamm were born before he was. That's kinda what "B.C." means, right?)
But if this release is the first of many, great. There are some real treasures in that library. You can sample Pebbles & Bamm-Bamm Singing Songs Of Christmas over on this website and if you want to order it from Amazon, come back and click here.
In May of 1968, MAD Magazine went to press with a political cover — a Norman Mingo painting featuring line art caricatures by Mort Drucker. Drucker drew the eight most prominent politicians in the country at that moment...basically the guys actively competing for the presidency plus President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson had announced he would not stand for re-election but a lot of folks thought he still planned to swoop down on the convention and somehow wrest a re-nomination.
The proofs of MAD #122 had just come off the presses on June 5 when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. The MAD guys decided it would be inappropriate to leave Bobby on their cover so they made a quick substitution, replacing him with a drawing of Alfred. Collector Steve Kuhn recently came across some copies of the "before" cover and he was nice enough to let me share one here. Just a little piece of history.
October 30, 2009
