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Okay, let's flashback for a moment to 1973…back to that time when, as they always were back then, the folks running Hanna-Barbera were looking for ideas for shows they might sell to CBS, NBC or ABC. In early '73, the goal was to place programs on those networks' Fall 1973 Saturday morning schedules. Someone hit upon the idea of looking at what past live-action TV shows were still drawing viewers in syndication. Quite a few were optioned and developed. Several were sold.
H-B's main rival, Filmation, was trying the same thing, having enjoyed a modest success the previous season with The Brady Kids, an animated version of The Brady Bunch. For the '73 season, Filmation sold Lassie's Rescue Rangers to ABC, My Favorite Martians (plural, based on My Favorite Martian, singular) to CBS while the animated version of Star Trek went to NBC. A third cartoon company and occasional player in this marketplace — Fred Calvert Productions — sold NBC Emergency +4, a cartoon version of Emergency, which was still on NBC's prime time lineup.
Hanna-Barbera sold Jeannie to CBS, based (obviously) on the sitcom, I Dream of Jeannie. This show deviated a lot from its live-action source material. The animated Jeannie looked and acted somewhat like the character Barbara Eden played on the original. Julie McWhirter did her voice.
But there was no Tony Nelson, no Roger Healey, no astronauts at all. Instead, this Jeannie was involved with a surfer dude named Corey Anders and when people remember this show at all, it's usually because Corey's voice was supplied by a then-just-beginning-his-career actor named Mark Hamill. H-B also added, for desperately-needed comedy relief, a brand-new, invented-for-this-series genie named Babu. Babu's voice and catch phrases were supplied by the comic actor Joe Besser, known for his time in The Three Stooges and many sitcoms.
And Hanna-Barbera was also able to sell a sitcom-based cartoon series to NBC — an animated version of The Addams Family. This show was the source of some trouble and I may not have the story exactly right but there was trouble indeed. Remember how I told you about some folks at H-B not knowing that for a time, they didn't have the rights to use Yogi Bear and Top Cat on the same project? Well, this was sorta/kinda the same kind of problem.
The original The Addams Family live-action series — the one on which the cartoon was based — drew from two sources. There were all those wonderful macabre cartoons drawn by the great Charles Addams. Those cartoons were full of a lot of creepy people who didn't have names nor did they consistently all live together in a big house. All that was supplied by a producer-writer I worked with very briefly named David Levy. He apparently named Gomez and Morticia and the others. He said that he gathered the Addams-designed characters into a family setting for the series which starred John Astin and Carolyn Jones. The company that produced that series owned that format.
(Before someone asks: No, I never asked Mr. Levy if he got the idea to turn all those loose Addams characters into a family because Hanna-Barbera had done a couple different families of Addams-like characters in different cartoon shows.)
Anyway: What I heard happened was that when Hanna-Barbera went to obtain the rights to make an Addams Family cartoon, they acquired rights from one entity but not the other. They either made a deal to use the Addams drawings but not the TV show format or the TV show format but not Mr. Addams' designs of the characters. Or something like that. Levy explained this to me but I don't recall precisely nor did I ever hear "the other side," if there was one, of what kept the lawyers so busy.
Also: Gold Key comics put out a comic of the H-B Addams Family show — a pretty good comic drawn by one of those great comic book artists who never got very famous because he never drew super-heroes. His name was Bill Ziegler and at Gold Key, they told me the book sold well but they had to cancel it after three issues because of the legal concerns.
This kind of thing — going forward with a cartoon show without locking up the proper rights to what it was based on — was not as uncommon in TV as it should have been. Filmation once adapted the comic strip Tumbleweeds for TV without securing a deal with its owner. T.K. Ryan. I was once hired to adapt B. Kliban's wonderful cat drawings into a potential TV series for ABC but no one had made a deal with Mr. Kliban. I told both those stories years ago here in this post. There have been other such oversights.
Okay, so that was 1973. In 1977, inspired by The Battle of the Network Stars, Hanna-Barbera began work on a series that wound up being the cornerstone of a two-hour series called Scooby's All-Star Laff-A-Lympics. Three teams of cartoon characters — the Yogi Yahooeys, the Scooby Doobies and the Really Rottens — would compete each week in athletic competitions. To the extent possible, they wanted to use old H-B characters. Someone — and I do not envy the person who had this assignment — had to figure out who'd be on each team.
The Yogi Yahooeys were pretty simple. The team would consist of Yogi Bear (its captain), Boo Boo Bear, Cindy Bear, Yakky Doodle, Huckleberry Hound, Pixie, Dixie, Mr. Jinks, Hokey Wolf, Quick Draw McGraw, Snooper, Blabber, Augie Doggie, Doggie Daddy, Wally Gator and The Great Grape Ape. All but the Grape Ape were drawn from shows Hanna-Barbera had produced for TV between 1959 and 1963.
The Scooby Doobies (sometimes spelled Scooby Doobys) were a bit more of a problem. They, whoever "they" were, took three characters from the vast and eternal Scooby-Doo franchise — Scooby-Doo (captain), Shaggy Rogers and Scooby-Dum. From the Dynomutt show — episodes of which would be part of the two-hour block — they picked Dynomutt and The Blue Falcon. A new show they had developed called Captain Caveman and the Team Angels would be part of the block so the Scooby Doobies included Captain Caveman and his three Teen Angels — Brenda Chance, Taffy Dare and Dee Dee Skyes. (The Teen Angels were, of course, "inspired" by a then-popular prime-time series on ABC. I'll let you guess which one.)
Those were not enough so they added in Hong Kong Phooey (star of an H-B series which had just stopped rerunning on ABC) and Speed Buggy and his friend/driver Tinker from the Speed Buggy show which ran on CBS in 1973. They also added in Jeannie and Babu (from that Jeannie series, also on CBS in '73) and some characters from the Josie and the Pussycats show.
And for the Really Rottens team — the one that would be constantly trying to cheat, a la Dick Dastardly and Muttley on Wacky Races — they mostly had to invent new villainous competitors. The H-B staff writers and artists got together and came up with some characters, some of which were revamps of old characters. They had Dinky Dalton, Dirty Dalton and Dastardly Dalton — three evil cowboy brothers who, in slightly different form, had briefly appeared on the old Quick Draw McGraw Show. They added Mr. Creeply, Mrs. Creeply, Junior Creeply and Orful Octopus, who were kind of like several past Hanna-Barbera characters inspired by, of course, Charles Addams work.
There were a few other really rotten Really Rottens, as well. And of course, that team would not be complete without their leader and his sidekick — Dick Dastardly and Muttley from Wacky Races. With all those teams decided, the show went into production. Writers began writing. Animators began animating. And Hanna-Barbera attorneys began finding out that they couldn't include some of those characters they'd thought could be included.
Our story shall continue. We haven't even gotten to the part where I am hired to edit and write a Laff-a-Lympics comic book.
