Month May 2013

The Retro Bin : Yogi’s Space Race (1978)

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In this installment of The Retro Bin, we’ll be looking back at the NBC Saturday morning series produced by Hanna-Barbera studios, Yogi’s Space Race.

Yogis_Space_Race

Wow. That title logo font is so original. Never saw that anywhere before.

When George Lucas’ motion picture Star Wars became a monster hit at the box office in 1977, each of the 3 networks (this was before the creation of the FOX network, by the way) tried to come to come up with their own TV version. There was Space Academy and Jason of Star Command on CBS, Space 1999 and Battlestar Galactica on ABC and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century on NBC. Not surprisingly, Star Wars Mania also found it’s way into the world of SatAM cartoons. NBC’s Yogi’s Space Race was one of several of the alphabet network’s attempts to bring Star Wars to the small screen. The series was another H-B “potpourri” series bringing together established H-B stars such Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound along with new characters in order to compete with each other in a good natured competition. Basically, it was Wacky Races in space. One can imagine how the board meeting that lead to this shows’ creation might have went:

HB Executive #1: We’ve got to come up with a new show to cash in on this Star Wars heat! Anybody got any ideas?

HB Executive #2: Hey, remember that cartoon that we did back in 1965? The Wacky Races? Well, why don’t we just do that again, but in space?

HB Executive #3: Yeah! And let’s stick some established character in there so kids’ll want to watch it! Since we use Scooby Doo, Yogi Bear and The Flintstones for everything, let’s use 1 of them.  Like, say….(throws a dart at a dart board with pictures of old H-B characters taped on it). Yogi Bear! We can call it “Star Race”!

HB Executive #2: No, too obvious! Let’s call it Yogi’s Space Race!

HB Executive #1: BRILLIANT! Let’s get to work on that!

Yogi’s Space Race originally ran for 90 minutes, with the Space Race segments sandwiched between 3 added attractions; The Galaxy Goof Ups (which featured 4 of the Space Race characters as Galactic Patrol officers whose missions mostly involved using their stupendous incompetence to give their superior officer daily migraines), as well as 2 non-space themed attractions, The Buford Files and The Galloping Ghost. Buford was basically a bucolic version of Scooby Doo, while Galloping Ghost focused on 2 women who worked at a dude ranch which was also haunted by the ghost of the Miner 49er. Think Hey, Dude with a specter. Neither of these series ran for very long, and in the case of each, if you’ve seen 1 episode, you’ve seen them all, so sorry, folks, I’m not motivated enough to do a full review of either. Galaxy Goof-Ups was later spun off into it’s own separate series, aptly titled Galaxy Goof-Ups, reducing the series to 60 minutes. It was then reduced to only a half hour in early 1979 when NBC spun off Buford and The Galloping Ghost to a single series, imaginatively titled Buford and the Galloping Ghost, so in the end, the Space Race segments ran by themselves. Anyways, here’s the shows’ intro.

The Space Race segments focused on weekly intergalactic racing competitions in which the competitors flew around in mini space cruisers. The individual teams consisted of:

yogis-space-race_L19

  • Yogi Bear and Scare Bear (a cowardly bear voiced by Stooge replacement Joe Besser who also starred on Galaxy Goof-Ups). That’s right, no Boo-Boo this time. He was offered the job, but he declined.

Yogi: Hey, Boo-Boo! NBC wants us to star in a new show where we race and have adventures in outer space!

Boo-Boo: That’s sounds kind of stupid, Yogi. I think I’ll pass on this one.

Yogi: But, Boob, it says that every week we get to dance in a space disco!

Boo-Boo: It’s 1978, Yogi. Disco is practically dead! Besides, you know that I prefer Rockabilly!

yogis-space-race_L08

  • Huckelberry Hound and Quack-Up (another new character who also starred with Huck, Yogi and Scare Bear on Galaxy Goof-Ups, who here acted as the zany, clumsy pilot of the ship)
“Oh, a crazy cartoon duck. Real original, Hanna-Barbera! I wonder where you got that idea from!”
*************************************
yogis-space-race_L15
  • Jabberjaw and Buford (from the aforementioned Buford Files) – Jabberjaw, the shark with the Curly Howard sound-like voice, flew the ship, while Buford ran outside of it on a treadmill to give the ship additional speed.

yogis-space-race_L13

  • Wendy, Rita and Nugget Nose (the central characters from Galloping Ghost)
yogis-space-race_L10

From this…

yogis-space-race_L18

…To this. Transformers. Creepos in Disguise.

  • Phantom Phink and Sinister Sludge/Captain Good and Klean Kat – A space villain bad guy and his sneaky dog who also disguised themselves as Captain Good (Phink), the heroic champion and the paragon of good sportsmanship and his sidekick Klean Kat (Sludge). No one on the show (except for us, the viewers) knew that Phantom Phink/Captain Good and Sinister Sludge/Klean Kat were one and the same. Why they did this was never explained. Either Phink and Sludge had serious split personality disorders or maybe they owed Jabba the Hut a huge debt.

Space Racers

In fact, there were a number of things that weren’t explained on the show, such as how did Yogi, Huck and Jabberjaw get to outer space in the 1st place? And what were they doing there? How did Huck recline on his spaceship patio without him floating off into the abyss of the cosmos? And is a outer deck patio on a spaceship really a good idea for a race where the object is to go fast? And how was it that all of the racers were able to breathe when there’s no oxygen in space, yet none of the space ships that they flew in had tops? I tend to think that perhaps each of the ships had some kind of device that surrounded each them with a packet of artificial oxygen which allowed them to breathe in the vacuum of deep space, or possibly…

Dang! There I go over thinking a kids’ cartoon show again! Sorry about that. Anyway, just like it’s spiritual ancestor, Wacky Races, the individual episodes mostly ran together. Most people who are old enough to remember the series just remember the overview of the series in general, rather than any individual plots or story lines. Same deal with Galaxy Goof-Ups. I actually didn’t see any episodes of Galaxy Goof-Ups until they were rerun on Nickelodeon, and even after that, I don’t remember much except that at least once in each episode the title quartet would be shown boogeying down at an intergalactic disco, which of course was in no way inspired by the Cantina scene in Star Wars. I leave you now with images of disco music…IN SPACE!!

(No, this isn’t the actual music that was used on the show. I couldn’t find a clip with the actual show’s music, but you get the idea.)

The Retro Bin: The Super Globetrotters (1979)

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Hello and welcome to a new segment on Twinsanity titled The Retro Bin, where we unearth a forgotten show from Toon Town’s past, examine it and basically tear it a new one. Today, we’ll be looking at a Hanna-Barbera “classic” from 1979, The Super Globetrotters.

Look! Down on the court! Is it the 1992 Dream Team? Is it the NBA Hoop Troop?? NO! It’s the Super Globetrotters!!!
 
First, the obligatory history lesson: in 1970 the world-famous Jesters of Dunk were given a Saturday morning cartoon series from Hanna-Barbera Studios in which they would travel the world having wacky adventures. Not content to rest on their laurels, HB gave the Trotters another series, this time adding a new twist: figuring that just having the Harlem Globetrotters in a SatAM cartoon wasn’t enough, HB decided to take the concept one step further and make the Globies superheroes who transform into their super-selves by running into magic lockers. (We are not making this up.) The Trotters of Tomorrow were an eclectic bunch to say the least:
  • Nate Branch became Liquid Man, who could turn himself into water. One of Saturday morning’s greatest mysteries is that if Nate was called Liquid Man, then why did he wear an ‘F’ on his costume? That bugged the heck out of me as a kid.
  • Freddie “Curly” Neal became Super Sphere (aka Sphere Man), who could retract his limbs into his head to bounce, smash, and grow. Naturally, his head looked like a basketball.
  • Hubert “Geese” Ausbie became Multi-Man, who could clone himself into into a seemingly infinite amount of duplicates to surround and mystify foes. He also carried around a shield which he never seemed to have use of.
  • James “Twiggy” Sanders became Spaghetti Man, who possessed a body of living spaghetti which he could use his as a ladder, a rubber band or a rope.
  • Louis “Sweet Lou” Dunbar became Gizmo Man (sometimes just Gizmo), who had an immense Afro which was a gateway to Hammerspace, containing an unlimited supply of gadgets (including one that fit the current situation). Sweet Lou’s particular power was so nutty that it later turned up as a visual gag in an episode of Comedy Central’s Upright Citizens’ Brigade.
The team received their marching orders from the Crime Globe, a basketball-shaped satellite (voiced by Frank Welker) that would alert the Globetrotters of villainous activities and even give them strategies to fight them.
-Wait, an HB show about a team of superheroes featuring a guy who can turn into water, a guy who can create copies of himself and a guy who can spring and stretch. That sounds kind of familiar….
…Hanna-Barbera copying one of their own successful formulas? Nah, couldn’t be. They’ve never done that.
The actual episodes typically blurred together, so it’s not really necessary to go into great detail about them. This opening pretty much sums things up.

The stories were little by way of repetition: The Globetrotters would be playing some exhibition match somewhere when they’d get a message from the Crime Globe warning them that some nut-cake with a wacky-themed costume and gimmick was planning to unleash some diabolical plan of some sort, the Globies would go Super, then the Trotters and the villains of the week would after 15 minutes, shtick each other to a stalemate. Then the Villain of the Week would challenge the Globetrotters to a basketball game for whatever McGuffin they were squabbling over. Since they’re the Harlem Globetrotters, basketball is what they do, they would always accept, expecting a fair game. The villains would always cheat–because they’re villains–and the Globies would get their butts handed to them in the first half, then at halftime the Crime Globe would have to remind them that they’re, like, you know, SUPERHEROES and that they should go Super again and use their powers to beat them. They would, and they would come out triumphant. This happened in every episode. Every. Single. Episode. You’d think just once the Globetrotters would get the idea to become super  at the start of the match, but no. I would have loved to have seen this exchange, just once:

Crime Globe: (at the start of the match) Attention, Globetrotters. Suit up and become the Super Globetrotters.

Nate: Why? It’s just a basketball game. We’re the Globetrotters. This’ll be a piece of sweet cake!

Crime Globe: Ah, no. Come on, guys, how many times have we done this? The bad guys are going to cheat and whoop your butts throughout the first half, then I’ll have to tell you that you can’t win this game as regular Globetrotters, then you’ll have to became superheroes to defeat them. So how about this time we skip all that and cut right to the chase??

Twiggy: Well yeah, that’s happened once or twice, but…

Crime Globe: It happens every week. What’s wrong with you?! It’s just like that time you guys met Snow White; you were playing against the Wicked Queen’s living gargoyles and of course the Queen used black magic to beat you, so at half time you finally got the bright idea that since you’re the flipping HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS, that you should be using your exhibition tricks to win, like you should have been doing at the beginning. So go super, now!

Curly: You sure? ’cause I think…

Crime Globe: GET IN THE @#$%ING LOCKERS ALREADY!!

After a single season, the Globies were handed a copyright lawsuit by a certain rock band/superhero trio and also received this letter from the Hall of Justice:

Dear Globetrotters,

If you really want to save the world, stay on the courts and leave the super-heroics to the professionals. Back off our racket or we’ll make arrangements for you to have to start dragging around 2 annoying teenagers and a stupid dog in a cape.

Signed, 

The Justice League

And that put an end to the practice of basketball stars doubling as superheroes, at least until Shaquille O’Neal took the role of Steel. And we all saw how well that turned out.