Based on the UK series Home To Roost.
You want obscure TV cartoons? How about
Dodo, the Kid from Outer Space – surprisingly later than I thought (1965-1970) two of the voice artists were Don Messick (Scooby-Doo and others) and June Foray (!)
Commander Bleep – 1957 series with limited animation. The titular Commander Bleep was not only the hero, he was an alien – an unusual combination. His companions were a puppet named “Squeak” and a caveman named “Scratch” I kid you not. The cartoons used LOTS of SF tropes really crudely
Rough and Ready – maybe not as obscure, but I rarely see mentions of it. It was Hanna-Barbera’s first cartoon for TV, predating Huckleberry Hound
We’ve mentioned this one before – there was a series that ran in syndication (and, I think, on “kid’s shows” on independent TV) called Cap’n Skipperbird. Some company took foreign cartoons and re-packaged them for American TV, with translations. The “framing” cartoon featured a “host” named Cap’n Skipperbird.
To tell the truth, I don’t recall the Cap’n Skipperbird frames at all, but I do remember seeing lots of weird, obviously dubbed, cartoons on TV shows like Claude Kirchener’s Terrytoon Circus (where he played a Ringmaster and had a puppet sidekick named “Clowny” – who was, of course, a clown). I suspect these were Cap’n Skipperbird cartoons, possibly shorn of the Skipperbird intros, since I don’t recall them. The only cartoon they ran that I’;ve been able to identify is the 1950 French cartoon Jeannot l’Intrepide
Yeah, he had been cast for an episode of ST:TNG but killed himself before the episode filmed (he would have played Kivas Fajo)
Does anybody remember a Saturday morning program from the late 70’s, possibly early 80’s called “It”? Or maybe it was “If”? It was live action with short segments that were most likely humorous and/or educational in nature. I’m pretty sure it didn’t last very long.
Hah. Chuck McCann had a kid’s show on Channel 5 in New York, and was also on The First Family the JFK satiric album.
The kids show was nowhere near as good as Soupy Sales.
I probably saw that show.
There was a detective show where the hero had (for the time) a few cool gadgets, like a little reel to reel that slid out of the dash. I think it was Herrigan, Hannigan, something dynamic sounding.
Here’s a strange example. There’s a show that I remember only from a little bit of one television commercial which was a preview for that show. I remember I saw this advertisement on British television (while I lived there from 1987 to 1990). The opening showed a middle-aged man looking unhappy. In the same room was a woman who looked slightly younger who was holding a baby. The voice-over said, “[Name of the man] has a new job, a new wife, and a new baby.” Years later I decided that the man must have been played by Richard Griffiths, best known, I suspect, for playing Vernon Dursley in the Harry Potter books. The show was A Kind of Living. Griffiths was actually only 40 and was in fact three years younger than the actress who played his wife.
Wasn’t Dabney Coleman in that?
Honestly I had no clue so I looked it up on imdb. He wasn’t in the main cast. Bateman is the only actor among the regulars whose name I actually recognize (Garrett Morris did four episodes, so less than a quarter of them), but apparently both Kristy Swanson and River Phoenix (!) each did an ep.
OK, that was “Drexell’s Class”. I was putting Coleman in the David Garrison part.
The first TV cartoon I remember growing up was Sinbad Jr. from the mid-Sixties. Sinbad gained strength by tightening his belt. As far as I can tell, it has zero nostalgic resonance for anybody else of my generation. I googled it, and it turns out a youngTim Matheson was the voice of Sinbad.
^ Tim Matheson (as “Matthieson”) was also the voice of Jonny Quest.
Sinbad Jr. was kinda lame but light years ahead of a lot of Saturday morning cartoon fodder.
Paula from The Magic Garden was my first TV crush. The show was strictly a NYC market show and is unknown to anyone who didn’t grow up in the tri-state area
There is a fairly well-known animated series of vignettes that were made in the 70s I guess called The Red And The Blue. A red plasticine goober changes shape and fights the blue plasticine goober. It’s a useful filler for kids TV shows across the world, as it has no dialogue and is colourful and violent.
The first time I saw this series it was inside a TV show that I watched as a child in the late 70s in New Zealand. Now, NZ TV back then was a mix of British, American, Canadian, and occasionally French TV shows amongst the locally made product, so I can’t say for sure which country what I’m about to describe originated in. The Wikipedia page, for example, says Americans saw it first in Captain Kangaroo . I don’t believe New Zealand ever broadcast Captain Kangaroo , so it was probably not that. But then again, who knows? Maybe you guys do.
I remember the live-action part of the show being a sort of puppet town, a village of strange characters who lived in mushroomy higgledy-piggledy homes, where the main host, a young man in dungarees, would wander through and meet the puppets and have weird conversations with them about stuff, each of which would lead to an interstitial cartoon or song or whatnot. One thing in particular would always happen each week, he would find a red-and-blue striped sock, which he’d hold up and remark on how stinky it was, then wiggly-woobly we’d go into watching an episode of the aforementioned The Red And The Blue .
Is this familiar to anyone?
Good taste!
I haven’t kept up with the hundreds of posts in this thread, so apologies if it’s already been mentioned. Does anyone remember Capitol Critters? It was an animated show from the early 1990s about a family of mice that lived in the White House. The funny thing is that although I remember it, I’d remembered it as a live action show with the mice being played by puppets, a la The Muppets, but when I looked it up it was clearly animated. Maybe I was conflating it with some other show.
I remember this. But I think I saw very little of it.
Your description reminded me a lot of a series of YouTube videos I saw awhile back. Looking on YouTube I find manshman and Robert Benfer doing very similar animations. No live action segments though.
Got another one. TVOntario used to run a bizarre British kids’ show called Vision On. It was darkly surreal…people falling into mirror universes, optical illusions, I remember the woman host (who would also simultaneously translate with sign language all her of dialogue) lying on a bed of nails at some point, line drawings coming to life. Creative stuff, but just unsettling enough for my nine year old brain.
Fast forward a few decades to my discovery of Doctor Who, and learning that my favorite old school Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, had been one of the stars of the show. I’ve met him twice, but both times neglected to mention it.