I don’t recall how old I was when I first encountered the program, but I did immediately recognize it as religious indoctrination. It did detract from my ability to whole-heartedly enjoy it.
These days, I prefer Moral Orel.
After reading some of the posts in this thread I begin to think my childhood memories had become wildly distorted.
Well, perhaps they have, but D&G was just as preachy and insipid as I remember. But at least now I know that air traffic controllers work “miracles” by “knowing” (good thing they don’t rely on stuff like “science” or “technology”), but even they don’t know as much as God!
I scored 4 multi-episode DVDs of Davey and Goliath at the dollar store and bought them for the epic lulz.
TWDuke nailed it: “Just as preachy and insipid as I remember.” But my friends and I had a great time nonetheless in our alcohol-fueled D&G mock-a-thon.
I remember “Davey and Goliath” and “Jot” being on Sunday mornings. D & G was better than Jot, but then MANY things were better than Jot. 
Ever since, I have had very little tolerance for gratuitous, heavy-handed morals in television shows.
I remember “Davey and Goliath” and “Jot” being on Sunday mornings.
D & G was better than Jot, but then MANY things were better than Jot.
Of course, to answer the OP, there was very little else on Sunday mornings at that time, so yes, we were watching for entertainment.
Ever since, I have had very little tolerance for gratuitous, heavy-handed morals in television shows.
Davey and Goliath was one of the few cartoons available in the desolate wasteland of 1960s Sunday-morning TV in Western PA. That didn’t make it suck any less. I think it aired on WJAC-TV (coming to you from atop the Alleghenies!) out of Johnstown.
WIIC (now WPXI) channel 11, Pittsburgh, had Cartoon Colorama, which was 30 minutes of really shitty Hanna Barbera cartoons like “Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har.”
WTAE, Pittsburgh, had 30 minutes of really old, sucky Warner Brothers animated shorts…which was almost always cut short by a really, really fucking long Candy Gram commercial starring Don Wilson. I swear that goddamn commercial was like 17 minutes of that fat fuck raving about how delightful the candy was.
KDKA, Pittsburgh, then part of Group W, ran religious programming AFAICR.
WFBG (now WTAJ) out of Altoona had neither jack nor shit cartoon-wise. If you didn’t mind getting up obscenely early in the morning on weekdays, they did air 30 minutes of The Cartoons Nobody Liked: Clutch Cargo and Courageous Cat & Minute Mouse, with a Brutus-era Popeye once in a while. This came on after Farm, Home, & Garden which was broadcast audio-only.
I remember not giving it very much credance as entertainment not because it was overtly religious, but because the kid was such a little weenie. I mean I was maybe in my pre-teens to tween period when I’d catch the show (because it was the only thing on) and thinking what a little pansy Davey is.
Of course, I always rooted for Doofus* over Gallant in the Hi-Lites magazine too.
*Or whatever that little bastard’s name was.
Goofus
I think D&G was actually done by the same fellow that did Gumby.
I watched D&G a lot when I was a kid in the 70s. I liked it–I saw the religious overtones, but they never really fazed me one way or the other. It was just a fun show I liked to watch.
I think sometimes people tend to forget (or not realize, if they didn’t grow up then) that religion wasn’t nearly as contentious back then as it is now–the nonreligious weren’t as prickly about religion, and there weren’t as many hard-core fundamentalists and televangelists trying to shove it down everyone’s throats. It was just an aspect of life. People either went to church or they didn’t, and nobody seemed to care one way or the other. At least that’s the way it was where I grew up (suburban southern-central California).
I disliked it as a kid, not because it was religious (I was too young to catch on to that) but rather because it was boring. It was the last choice of possible kiddie shows, only watched when there was literally nothing else.
I mean really. The kid wore a plaid-checked short-sleeve button up shirt. And he thought his dog could talk to him. The show was just weird.