Many of you will skip this post and its next parts completely but there will be those among you who will consider this the most important "explainer" ever to appear on the Internet. I am going to attempt to explain the connection between the team of Dick Dastardly and Muttley and the parlay of Dread Baron and Mumbly. Those of you who don't know what the hell I'm talking about are excused. You can go now. Skip on to the next post. Go play Sudoku or go find something else on The World Wide Web to spend your time on. We grown-ups have important stuff to discuss…
I consider myself an expert on the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio and I was, for some years, an employee. One of the perks of working there then was that there were still folks on the premises — Mr. Hanna, Mr. Barbera and others — who'd been there a while. I met people who had worked on shows I'd watched as a kid and learned a lot of H-B history. I shall now share a vital bit of it with you.
This particular bit started with the 1965 movie directed by Blake Edwards, The Great Race. It starred Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood and it was about…well, a great race. The film was very popular and it inspired a number of other films, having itself been inspired by my favorite movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Hanna-Barbera, in its eternal quest to create cartoon shows a network would purchase, began developing some ideas for shows involving great or even almost-great races.
Further "inspiration" — which is a nice way of saying you're attempting to piggyback on someone else's success — came from another 1965 movie, Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines. Joe Barbera had his creative staff writing and sketching ideas for shows featuring great automotive races and great air races.
None of that development led to H-B selling the shows it sold for the 1966 or 1967 seasons but they kept at it. Often, when some writer or artist on the payroll had nothing more pressing to do, Barbera would give them the previous development on some past, dormant project and have them spend a week or three trying to turn it into something saleable.
At the same time, the three buyers of Saturday morning programming then — CBS, NBC and ABC — had all indicated some interest in live-action game shows for kids. A production company that seemed able to fulfill that interest was Heatter-Quigley Productions. It was the partnership of two men — Merrill Heatter and Bob Quigley — who were seeking a foothold in the game show business then ruled by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman. The first success of Heatter-Quigley was a daytime, Monday-Friday game show called Video Village. Here is the box of the Milton-Bradley home game version of Video Village…
There was also for a while, a prime-time version of Video Village and also a Saturday morning one for kids which changed names in the middle of its brief run. It either started as Video Village Jr. and changed to Kideo Village or the other way around. It didn't last long but a few years later, the folks at Heatter-Quigley made a deal with Milton Bradley to sponsor a new version of it called Shenanigans. It was on ABC's Saturday morn schedule for a while and it was hosted by Stubby Kaye. Its home game looked like this…
For a while, Heatter-Quigley and Hanna-Barbera worked together to try and create a Saturday morn game show for younger viewers that would combine real game-playing kids in a studio with animation. From what I gleaned from folks at the H-B studio who worked on the project, the main idea seems to have worked like this: They created or would create a bunch of colorful cartoon characters who'd race each other in colorful, cartoony vehicles. They would make cartoons of these races with different characters winning each time.
Then the show would have non-animated, actually-alive kids in a TV studio with a live host. The host would show one of these cartoons to the kids in the studio and the kids at home, stopping the action at intervals to ask all those kids to more-or-less wager on the outcome. If you were in the studio and you guessed correctly as to which animated racer would be first to cross the finish line, you won some cheap prize. If you were home and you guessed right, you just received a feeling of pride and satisfaction.
And since any show made for Saturday morning was rerun over and over, you would surely watch the reruns of this show. If you remembered who won the last time, you'd certainly be able to guess on the reruns. One writer at H-B who worked on the project, a gent named Larz Bourne, told me he thought they should edit the cartoons for reruns, writing them so the last two minutes of any episode could be switched with the last two minutes of any other. Ergo, when you watched a rerun, you wouldn't know. But there were those who thought kids would enjoy the reruns more if that wasn't done.
That debate became moot when it was finally decided to forget about the game show aspect and just make it a half-hour cartoon of wacky racing. And so was born Wacky Races, which debuted on the CBS Saturday morning schedule in 1968. Let me insert this graphic here…
The two characters in that graphic are Dick Dastardly and his snickering canine sidekick, Muttley. Dick was the bad guy, always trying to win each Wacky Race by cheating, much as Professor Fate — the character played by Jack Lemmon in The Great Race — had cheated over and over with his schemes. And as with Professor Fate, Dick Dastardly's cheating invariably boomeranged on him. It was the same way everything Wile E. Coyote tried to catch the Road Runner would somehow lead Wile E. to be flattened, dropped off a cliff or well-charred to a crisp.
Paul Winchell supplied the voice of the dastardly Mr. Dastardly and the other voices in the show were done by Daws Butler, Don Messick, John Stephenson, Janet Waldo and the announcer/narrator, Dave Willock.
Messick, who was the undisputed master of voicing Hanna-Barbera dogs, especially the snickering kind, snickered for Muttley. Muttley functioned in service to Dick D. in much the same way that, in The Great Race movie, Peter Falk had aided and abetted Professor Fate. This will not be the last link in this article between Peter Falk and a Hanna-Barbera snickering dog.
The show was very successful, and Dastardly and Muttley were kind of the breakout stars of it, as villains usually are. Also popular was a lovely Southern belle motorist who often won the competition…Penelope Pitstop, voiced by Ms. Waldo. And hey, while I've got you here, you wanna watch an episode of Wacky Races? Let's take a break and you can do that if you like. Then meet me on the other side to continue this long, far-from-over explanation of things…
Okay, we're back. Now, if you watched the whole cartoon, you may have noticed something in the end credits. Since Heatter-Quigley was involved contractually in the whole project, they had a contractual piece of it. Here's the end title card you may not have seen…
So they got money. And Wacky Races was so popular that the following year, CBS reran all 17 episodes from the first season and ordered two spin-off shows from it. One of them was The Perils of Penelope Pitstop…
In that show, the villain was a character named Sylvester Sneekly, also known in the sinister identity of The Hooded Claw. The actor who supplied his voice was oddly uncredited on the show but you couldn't help but recognize him as Paul Lynde. By this point, Mr. Lynde was best known as the Center Square Celebrity on the popular game show, The Hollywood Squares, which was produced by — guess who? — Heatter-Quigley. There was probably some connection between him being on both shows and maybe even an explanation of why he wasn't credited on the cartoon one but your guess is as good as mine, possibly better.
And Hanna-Barbera also produced this other spin-off. Dick Dastardly and Muttley couldn't be the villains in Penelope's show because they got one of their own. The studio got to make use of all the drawings and gags they'd done years earlier when they were trying to come up with something "inspired" by Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines…
Like Ms. Pitstop's series, Dastardly and Muttley In Their Flying Machines was popular at first but ratings plunged when they'd aired all the newly-produced episodes and went into reruns. Wacky Races also faltered in its second season and when the following year's CBS Saturday morn schedule debuted, there was no trace of Penelope Pitstop, Dick Dastardly, Muttley or the Wacky Racer of your choice. They all wackily raced off into off-network syndication forever and a day.
So that's the end of the story, right? Au Contraire, mon ami. We've only reached about the halfway mark in this tale of vital concern. The rest of it will be along shortly…maybe tomorrow but most likely Monday or Tuesday. Then you'll hear about Dread Baron, Mumbly, more cartoon characters competing against other cartoon characters, how Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie materialized and then disappeared, why Top Cat didn't live in the same universe as Yogi Bear and — as if all that weren't enough — the other connection between a Hanna-Barbera snickering dog and Peter Falk, with Kojak (sort of) thrown in for good measure. Isn't this all more important than anything else you'll find on The Internet?
