Tag 90s Cartoons

The Retro Bin: Yo Yogi! (1991)

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It’s that time again! Time for another installment of The Retro Bin. Remember that great animated series that featured all new versions of those beloved classic cartoon characters that we grew up watching? The one that debuted in the early 1990s? The one that had all of those great jokes and well written stories? The one that gave us a reason to start watching cartoons again? That show was Steven Spielberg’s Tiny Toon Adventures, but we’re not going to be talking about that show today. Instead, we’ll be talking about a cheap Hanna-Barbera produced knockoff of that show. A Saturday morning “quickie” (as in quickly gone and forgotten) from 1991 titled Yo, Yogi!.

yo_yogi

When the shows’ title is a worn out buzzword, that’s not a good sign.

Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies begat The Flintstone Kids, which had sex with Tiny Toons to spawn this show. Yo, Yogi! was like Tiny Toon Adventures, only without the memorable characters, clever writing or funny jokes. Yo, Yogi! was one of the last Hanna-Barbera produced Saturday morning shows before NBC abandoned Saturday morning cartoons in favor of live action, teen-centric programming (i.e., Saved By the Bell clones) the alphabet networks did away with SatAM cartoons altogether. Yo, Yogi! ran for only a single season (1991) on NBC. Apparently, someone at H-B studios thought that shrinking Yogi Bear down to half of his height and dressing him up in a lime green puffy jacket and red hi-top sneakers would be a good idea.

“DUDE! The green jacket and rd hi-top are so 90s! It’s AWESOME!!”

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Anyway, here’s the premise:Yo, Yogi! takes place in Jellystone Town (so it’s a town now?). Yogi Bear, along with his sidekick Boo-Boo and their pals Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss and Cindy Bear (voiced this time around by Kath Soucie) have been de-aged into 14-year-old teenagers. The characters hung out at Jellystone Mall (which appeared to be patterned after the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota) owned by “Diamond” Doggie Daddy with Augie Doggie as his heir to the mall business. Yogi and the gang work at an agency called L.A.F. (short for Lost and Found – The initials spell out LAF, as in ‘Laugh’, get it?) where they act as detectives trying to solve mysteries under the supervision of the mall’s security guard Officer Smith. Dick , or “Dickie” Dastardly as he was called here (doing his best Montana Max impression) and his sidekick Muttley would cause trouble for Yogi and his gang. New character Roxie Bear was a teenager who was causing trouble with Dick Dastardly and she was Cindy’s rival and Yogi’s competitor. The characters were never seen at home or school. Some other H-B characters were also turned into teenagers, such as Top Cat, Wally Gator and Hardy-Har-Har, while other characters such as Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole, were featured as young children. Magilla Gorilla appeared in 1 episode as a famous rapper named Magilla Ice (groan!)
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Here’s the shows’ opening:

A lot of this show didn’t make much sense to me. First, if this series is supposed to take place before the old shorts, does that mean that Jellystone started out as a mega mall and was later torn down to make room for a national park? Second, why did Yogi and his friends wear more clothing as teenagers than they do as adults? And why was Dick Dastardly always trying to mess with the L.A.F. Squad anyway? What did he get out of it? At least in DD’s previous incarnations, he had clear motivations. In both Wacky Races and Fender Bender 500, he wanted to win the race, and he preferred cheating to achieve this goal. In Yogi’s Treasure Hunt, Dick wanted followed Yogi’s Gang around so that if they found any treasure, he could ambush them and claim the treasure for himself without having to do any actual work. Here, he just meddled in the gang’s affairs simply because he seemed to have nothing better to do. And like in his previous appearances, if he didn’t devote so much of his time to trying to screw over the good guys, he’d probably do all right for himself. And it didn’t make sense how some characters were de-aged for the show, while others weren’t. If Yogi and company all hung out with Auggie Doggie and Doggie Daddy in the present, how is it that Auggie and his dad are still the same age here? Unless the Auggie Doggie on Yo, Yogi! is actually Doggie Daddy as a puppy and the Doggie Daddy on this show is his father, who’s also called Doggie Daddy…

Sorry. Didn’t mean to blow your mind. I think that it’s best to think of Yo, Yogi! as an alternate reality rather than a flashback, as that would make a tad more sense. Tiny Toon Adventures was one of the best written TV shows of the 1990s. Yo, Yogi! didn’t seem written at all.

The main problem that I had with Yo, Yogi! was the entire mentality of the show’s supposed appeal smacked too much of this:

Steve Buscemi - How Do You Do Fellow Kids

Or to put it another way, if anyone remembers that one episode of The Simpsons titled “The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show”, the worst thing about Yo, Yogi! was that the whole series was a “Poochie”; a soulless by-product of committee thinking. It was based on the premise that kids would be more willing to watch a show with established cartoon characters from several decades earlier if they were remade to be “cool”, and it seemed like the entire series was concocted in board room by executives who don’t have a creative bone in their collective bodies. I doubt that the producers of Yo, Yogi! even knew what a writer was. The shows’ producers and writers tried to make Yo, Yogi! like Tiny Toon Adventures without realizing what is was that made TTA so great. Quite frankly, if taking established characters and trying to update them for younger audiences by making them desperately cool and hip is the only way to get them back on the air, then I think it’s better that they stay buried.

NEVER FORGET