John R. Troy has the following question…
You've covered Li'l Abner, Al Capp, and a lot of Hanna-Barbera stuff over the years on your blog, but I've never seen this mentioned.
As a kid, I remember a short lived series featuring The Shmoo from the Li'l Abner comic strip, called The New Shmoo, and after that he also appeared on a show where Fred and Barney were cops and had him as an assistant. They sort of reinvented him as a shape-shifting blob and had Frank Welker do the voice.
I was wondering, do you know anything about how Hanna-Barbera got the rights to this character? It seems a bit strange that they got the rights to just that character and not the Li'l Abner strip, though I also know Shmoo merchandising was a big thing in the 1950s, so I could see a separate licensing deal.
And why would they call it "The New Shmoo?" I don't believe the character was ever shown in animation before.
You've come to the right place, John. I can answer everything except that last part. I was working at Hanna-Barbera at the time and though I only had one teensy-weeny thing to do with that program, I heard a lot about it. I can answer all your questions except one in two words. Those words are "Fred" and "Silverman."
Mr. Silverman was then the Programming Chief at NBC and because of his background programming Saturday morns elsewhere, he took a special interest in that daypart at NBC. One of his aides told me Fred would have been a happier man if all he had to worry about each day was his network's Saturday morning schedule.
He was, among his other contributions to that job description, the person behind the belief that the network should not trust the cartoon studio too much creatively. The argument for this was as follows: If Hanna-Barbera was producing shows for your network and also for another network — and they were always producing shows for another network — they might assign their best people to the other network's programs. Based on my observations, that was not an unreasonable concern. So you had to have someone who worked for your network supervise everything, approve scripts and storyboards and voices, etc. In other words, become the real Producer of the show no matter who was credited in that position.
Joe Barbera and others at H-B complained mightily about the networks tampering with their shows…and they were right to complain because sometimes, the network person in charge was a real boob. If the studio had only been concerned with selling shows to one network, that might not have happened. But only selling to one network was not going to happen because the firm that owned Hanna-Barbera — it was no longer Bill and Joe — loved the idea of selling as many shows as possible, preferably squeezing all the competition outta the way and outta the business.
When Bill 'n' Joe sold out, they stayed on to run the company that bore their names. The folks who took control loved it when at any given time slot on Saturday morning, there was a Hanna-Barbera show on CBS, a Hanna-Barbera show on NBC and a Hanna-Barbera show on ABC. Thus Joe Barbera's marching orders were pretty simple: Sell as many shows as you can.
So one day, Joe was over at NBC trying to sell them as many shows as he could…and Joe was a terrific salesperson. You might not like everything he sold. Joe certainly didn't like everything he sold. But he was there trying to sell, sell, sell — and Silverman had an idea. He remembered how popular The Shmoo was in the old Li'l Abner newspaper strip. People loved those little creatures and there was a brief merchandising boom for them. Fred suggested building a show around The Shmoo.
Reportedly, Joe said — this is what he later said he said — "You want to do Li'l Abner?" and Silverman (also reportedly) said, "No, kids today won't care about those hillbillies. Just get The Shmoo. If you do, I'll buy it." Following through on that was Joe Barbera's job.
So he went back to the office and told one of his business guys to buy the rights to make a cartoon show about The Shmoo. The business guy said, "Do you have any idea who I contact?" and J.B. thought for a second and he called in his secretary and said, "Call Mark Evanier and see if he knows who the hell owns The Shmoo." She called me in my office down the hall and I gave her the phone number of Al Capp's brother.
I had a telephone friendship with Capp's brother because of a couple of projects with which I was almost involved, most of them potential revivals which never happened of the Li'l Abner Broadway show. But as I'm writing this now, I'm not sure if the brother spelled his first name Elliot or Elliott, or if his last name was spelled Kaplan or Caplin. I've seen every possible permutation. But I did know his number and that he handled business dealing for the Capp Estate. I also knew that if he didn't control the rights to The Shmoo, he'd know who did.
And the next thing I knew, H-B was developing a cartoon show of The Shmoo. They turned it into one of their many knock-offs of Scooby Doo but I neither worked on nor ever watched the series. Supplying that one phone number is all I had to do with it. But hey, since I never saw it and you probably never saw it, let's watch the opening title together…
Okay. That was…well, interesting. I don't have any desire to watch an episode but if by some chance you do, someone has uploaded all of them to this page on the Internet Archive. My main reaction to the opening is to wonder howcome a character who can shape-shift into any form doesn't think to maybe grow himself a pair of arms?
As for how it wound up being connected with The Flintstones: Fred Silverman was a firm believer in the concept of programming "blocks." This is the theory that if you're putting on a half-hour Scooby-Doo show and a half-hour Dynomutt show, both will do better if you splice them into The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour…and it doesn't really matter if the two shows have anything in common or connect in any way.
He did this kind of thing often and because Fred was considered an expert at programming Saturday morning, others followed his lead. One problem with it for those of us who care about credits is that when they put two shows together in an hour like that, they merge the end credits and if/when the shows are later separated, the credits usually aren't.
(Which reminds me: If you watch the credits on The New Shmoo — I'll admit I peeked at them — you'll see the names of three great comic book artists — Mike Sekowsky, Dave Stevens and Jack Kirby. The way H-B did credits, all that means is that at the time the credits were made up, there was some paperwork somewhere that said those two gents had done some drawings that were intended for this show. I suspect Sekowsky did a fair amount, Stevens did a little and Kirby did almost nothing. At the time, Jack was under contract to the Ruby-Spears animation studio, which was literally across the street and owned by the same corporation that owned H-B. During times when Ruby-Spears didn't sell much to the networks — because, for example, Joe Barbera had done his job extra-well that season — Kirby's contract allowed Ruby-Spears to loan his services to Hanna-Barbera so he had stuff to draw to earn his salary. That's why Jack's credit was on a number of Hanna-Barbera shows, even some he only worked on for a day or two.)
Okay, this next part gets tricky…
In February of 1979, a new version of The Flintstones debuted on NBC's Saturday morning schedule and it was called The New Fred and Barney Show. Around the same time is when Mr. Silverman ordered Mr. Barbera to get the rights to the Shmoo and they also worked out a deal for a new cartoon show of The Thing, using the character from Marvel's Fantastic Four property but in a whole different concept. He became a teenager who turned into The Thing and there's a whole messy and convoluted story that I don't fully understand about how that deal was brokered. At the time, Silverman had canceled the Fantastic Four cartoon series that DePatie-Freleng — a rival cartoon studio which Marvel was in the process of acquiring — had produced for NBC.
Please don't ASK me to explain that. All you need to know here is that H-B was producing more episodes of The Fred and Barney Show to run as part of NBC's Fall 1979 schedule. They were also producing the new shows of the teen version of The Thing and what would be called The New Shmoo. At some some point, Silverman decided to marry two of those three shows together and they debuted in September as an hour series called Fred and Barney Meet the Thing.
The storylines of the two shows did not crossover. The characters only "met" in some short interstitial animated segments which had Fred and Barney dancing with The Thing. These were designed by my buddy Scott Shaw! who had the unenviable assignment of deciding how tall The Thing would be in relation to those guys from Bedrock and vice-versa.
The New Shmoo debuted as a standalone half-hour but after a few weeks, Fred decided it might do better as part of one of his "blocks." So there was soon a 90-minute show called Fred and Barney Meet The Shmoo. It featured a half-hour of Fred 'n' Barney, a half-hour of The Shmoo and a half-hour of The Thing, even though The Thing didn't get mentioned in the show's title. To make the 90-minute show even more disjointed, at one point they interpolated a special H-B had produced — The Harlem Globetrotters Meet Snow White — cut into four segments aired over four weeks. Here's a promotional drawing of Fred and The Shmoo…and have you ever seen two cartoon characters who looked less like they belonged in the same drawing?
In his series, The Shmoo was much shorter than the teenage kids with whom he solved mysteries. In the promotional drawings, he was the same height as Fred Flintstone. This is the kind of thing that would have really bothered me if I'd been ten years old and watching all this. And even when I was ten, I don't think I'd have been watching all this. Or any of this.
So I think that answers all of John's questions except for "Why would they call it "The New Shmoo?" I dunno. Because it rhymed? Because Silverman thought it made the show sound more exciting? Because the people doing this thought they were reinventing Al Capp's character? A lot of TV shows have names that don't make sense. Jimmy Kimmel Live! is not live, The Daily Show is not daily and there were no laughs on any program ever called The So-and-So Comedy Hour. It's a strange business, it is.
