Surely you remember those cartoon shows billed with ‘and friends’
Woody Woodpecker and friends
Popeye and friends
Tom and Jerry and friends.
You’d get a Woody Woodpecker cartoon followed by some crappy cartoon and then another Woody in a 30 minute show. Those crappy cartoons in the middle were awful.
I can recall that Chilly Willy was one of the “friends” of Woody Woodpecker. I can’t remember the others. I also can’t remember having negative feelings towards them.
Just as an aside, Woody Woodpecker et al. wasn’t a Saturday morning staple for me. The show was more of an after school thing while waiting for Thunder Cats to come on.
You know what I did hate? When Scooby Doo would have “guest stars”. Like Laurel and Hardy, the Globe Trotters, and the Addams Family. I could buy a bunch of teenagers and their talking dog driving all around the country in a van, solving mysteries while eating humongous sandwiches. But them running into John Denver was too much. I’d still watch the episode, but I’d be seething inside.
It’s one thing when the guest is Batman or Speed Buggy, but why would a kid care about Tim Conway or Sandy Duncan…
Or Laurel and Hardy! Were there a bunch of kids in the 1970s who were hip to Laurel and Hardy? Because 80s kids were not.
I don’t know about “hip,” but at least in the cities I lived in as a kid in the '70s, the local TV stations would often show old black-and-white comedy shorts, mostly Our Gang/Little Rascals and Laurel & Hardy.
But, I suspect, by the ‘80s, with the growth of syndicated kids’ cartoons (like He-Man and GI Joe), showings of those old comedy shorts declined.
No, it’s still weird to me when Spiderman isn’t with Iceman and Firestar.
The studio execs and scriptwriters would have been.
But also… in the late 60s/early 70s a bunch of the old time comedy teams (L&H, Abbot & Costello, the 3 Stooges) were featured in cartoon shows of their own. Because their their live material was often featured as part of “family time” TV programming from the 50s into c. 1970 so the studios, of course, sought to cash in further with animated versions. And from there they found their way to the Hanna Barbera productions, where I can’t help but get the strong smell of herbal products in the planning meetings for that time period…
Hmm, they wouldn’t be completely unknown. May have been a local thing, but they were often shown during baseball rain delays. I remember some pizza places had a screen where they’d show Laurel and Hardy, Three Stooges, Little Rascals, stuff that you could just glance at for a minute or two with no need to know the plot.
Yeah, back in the 1970s we didn’t have many choices - 3 networks, PBS and maybe a couple of independent stations - and the independent stations often got Laurel and Hardy, Bowery Boys, Little Rascals, Abbott and Costello for cheap, and showed them regularly - we’d probably be more familiar with L&H than with Tim Conway (doesn’t mean we liked them - but they were familiar)
Bothers me far less than The Three Robotic Stooges or Gilligan’s Planet or any of the other "updated cartoon versions.
But the adaptations of shows like Emergency! which shoehorned in a cute kid and a panda or something were worse.
I was a kid in the 70s. On weekday afternoons, and on weekends, we got a lot of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, the Three Stooges, old matinee serials, Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes movies, etc. Movies from the 30s and 40s, TV from the 50s and 60s.
It was the Brady Bunch cartoon that had the panda - ::shudder::
Yeah, it’s important to remember that those independent stations got so much cheap programming to fill time. I was just talking in a pro wrestling group about how some independent station 1000 miles away would air broadcasts just for something to show late at night and would get a decent male audience. Even if the tapes were a few weeks old, well so were the wrestling magazines.
Two pandas. Though I have a vague memory that they were actually panda-like aliens…
It was brilliant marketing, How els could you get a Supet Chicken fan to watch two hours of Popeye cartoons?
It bothered me when they would package cartoons from different animators under the umbrella title of “(Whomever) and Friends.”
I did not hate it but did think it was silly.
So they’d know Tim Conway and Sandy Duncan also were on shows on the same network that aired Scooby Doo (i.e., CBS). It’s called synergy and then-network-head, Fred Silverman wasn’t above using CBS’s Saturday morning line-up to promote their prime time schedule.
I remember being put off by the bizarrity of “The Tom & Jerry/Grape Ape Show”
Rocky and His Friends was one of the greatest of all Saturday morning cartoon shows, so no.