On we go. To read this series from the start, try clicking on this link.
Laff-a-Lympics may have been the most complicated cartoon series ever produced for television. I'm not saying "best," just "most complicated." If you total up the number of characters on the three teams of characters, it comes out to about 41 characters. But there were more than that. The show needed sportscasters to cover the action and it was decided to have one off-camera voiceover announcer and two on-camera cartoon characters doing play-by-play.
Someone — there were a lot of "someones" involved in this show along with a lot of Johnsons — decided the sportscasters should be the two Hanna-Barbera characters with the funniest voices. I believe it was someone at the network who picked Snagglepuss and Mildew Wolf. Mildew Wolf was a character previously seen only on the It's the Wolf! segments on the Catanooga Cats series that ran on ABC in 1969.
But there were more characters 'n' creatures in the cast than that because of part of the "pitch" that sold Laff-a-Lympics to ABC was that there would be a lot of other old Hanna-Barbera characters turning up for cameo appearances. So here and there, we'd occasionally see Magilla Gorilla, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, Jabberjaw, Peter Potamus…and I dunno who all else. It meant the show would have a helluva lot of characters to be drawn and animated in crowd scenes and every artist who worked on the show had to have huge piles of art reference on all of them. And then they needed voice actors…
In order to have Yogi Bear, they needed to hire Daws Butler to do his voice…and Daws would also do Snagglepuss, Huckleberry Hound, Hokey Wolf, Mr. Jinks, Augie Doggie, Snooper, Blabber, Quick Draw McGraw, Dixie Mouse, Wally Gator and a few more. In order to have Captain Caveman, they needed Mel Blanc, who would also do Speed Buggy, Barney Rubble (when he turned up) and, again, a few others. They needed Don Messick to do Scooby Doo and also Boo Boo, Pixie Mouse, etc.
They needed Casey Kasem to do Shaggy abd Scatman Crothers to do Hong Kong Phooey. They needed Laurel Page, Marilyn Schreffler and Vernee Watson to supply the voices of the three Teen Angels. They needed Joe Besser to voice Babu. To include Cindy Bear, they needed Julie Bennett. Having Dynomutt in the show required Frank Welker. To include The Great Grape Ape, they needed Bob Holt.
Gary Owens spoke for Blue Falcon and when they recorded the first episode, they had him also be the off-camera announcer, as well. Then they realized it sounded like Blue Falcon was announcing the competition in which he was a competitor so they replaced him with Messick. Gary had one of the best voices in the entertainment industry but he only had the one.
Most of those actors could and would double or triple as other characters, especially as newly-created Really Rottens. But it still came down to fifteen actors. Some of them — like Butler, Blanc and Messick — wouldn't work for for scale payments; not when they were all doing 5-15 different voices. So the voices cost them way more than the voices on a Saturday morn show usually did.
One place where they did save money was Mildew Wolf. Paul Lynde had been his one and only voice but Mr. Lynde asked for too much dough to return to the role — or, at least, what Bill Hanna thought was too much dough. So voicing Mildew instead was John Stephenson doing a Paul Lynde imitation. Stephenson also voiced Doggie Daddy and a couple of Rottens including Dread Baron. We'll get to Dread Baron six paragraphs from now.
If you look at almost any Hanna-Barbera end title of the era, you'll see as many, if not more voice actors listed. But H-B back then had a policy. They didn't like to make up the end credits more than once a season for each series. So when a show was about to debut, they produced one end title for the whole season. It tried to list every person who'd worked on that show in any serious capacity that season as of the moment when they had to make up the end credits. The Animation Guild also dictated that certain employees had to be credited.
Thus, the end titles for Laff-a-Lympics — and this'll give you a sense of how difficult a show this was to produce — listed 29 layout artists and 45 animators. They didn't all work on every episode but they were all listed in the end credits of every episode.
To give you an example of how you can only trust old H-B credits so far: In the end titles of the 1979 Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo Show, my name is in a list of eight writers. I only wrote on two episodes that season — Show 1 and Show 7 — but my name's there on every episode. And to show you how not crediting folks for specific episodes can confuse things, online episode guides like this one show me as writing Show 1, Show 8 and Show 13. Well, they got one right.
If you see fifteen names listed as having done voices on any other H-B show of the day, it probably means that four or five people played regular characters and were in every episode. The remaining names would be actors who guested on one or a couple of episodes. They almost never had to hire more than five or six actors to record the voices on one episode. On Laff-a-Lympics, the fifteen names listed were probably, apart from Alan Reed, in every episode. Mr. Reed was probably there because he voiced Fred Flintstone in at least one episode.
They spent a lot of time replacing characters in the show as the lawyers figured out they couldn't, for example, use characters from Josie and the Pussycats as they'd once planned. I don't know if they even approached the Archie folks (who owned that property) but either way, it was going to cost them money on what was already a damned expensive show to produce. So out went those characters.
That happened early enough in the process that it didn't affect things too much. So did some attorney's realization that they couldn't use Dick Dastardly and Muttley without cutting the Heatter-Quigley company in on the revenue from this series. You may remember from the first part of this series that Heatter-Quigley had a financial interest in the shows on which those characters had first appeared. When someone realized that would mean cutting Heatter-Quigley in on the proceeds from this show, they invented a new, somewhat similar character — Dread Baron — to take the place of that Dastardly guy.
As for Dick Dastardly's comrade Muttley, they already had an altered version of that character. The season before, they'd produced The Mumbly Show, a series which may at one point in the development stage have been The Muttley Show. Again going to live-action TV for inspiration, they created another H-B snickering dog and cast him as, basically, Columbo. He was a detective who wore an old raincoat and drove a battered old car. For some reason, he reported to a boss named Captain Schnooker who looked a lot like Telly Savalas in his role as Kojak.
That was the second link between Peter Falk and a Hanna-Barbera snickering dog that I promised you back in Part 1 of this series.
Mumbly in his own show was a hero on the side of good. Mumbly on Laff-a-Lympics was a bad guy, helping Dick Dastardly Dread Baron cheat to win the athletic competitions. There was no explanation as to what drove him to a life of crime. That car of his probably couldn't even drive him across the street.
Okay, so now Laff-a-Lympics was getting into full production and it was about this time that the show entered my life. I was engaged to write and edit a comic book about it and I did some of my work from an office at the Hanna-Barbera Studio on Cahuenga Boulevard. At times, this meant consulting with the folks working on the cartoon series…and being awfully glad that I wasn't one of them. I'll tell you about that in our next (hopefully, final) chapter in which we find out what happens when Dick Dastardly and Muttley actually come face-to-face-to-face-to-face with Dread Baron and Mumbly.
