scoobyculture - Tumblr blog

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I'm not dead.

I'm just dealing with an existential crisis brought on by the most soul-shattering animated series Hanna-Barbera ever produced. A write-up on it is coming soon.

SOON.

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Is it OK to still make Double Rainbow jokes, or has that ship sailed?

"Secret Safari", Speed Buggy

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I'm in Canada attending Anime North 2014.

This has nothing to do with Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

Ask me anything.

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Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels

Here's a little trick Hanna-Barbera employed after making Josie and the Pussy Cats. They would take whatever was popular at the time, and release a show with a vaguely similar sounding name. This bit of trickery is how we got shows like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids (not connected to the Redford film),  Jabberjaw (created to cash in on the shark fever left in the wake of Jaws)... and Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels, unconnected to Charlie's Angels.

With a name as derivative as that, imagine my surprise when Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels actually turned out to be a really fun show. The series revolves around the Teen Angels driving around, always en route to a fair, or a college seminar, or a Soviet figure skating competition. Wherever they end up, they get wrapped up in some mystery typically involving a monster (though the series does a good job of breaking up monsters with more mundane crimes, like a stolen six-foot tall mechanical man). The Teen Angels snoop around, Dee Dee (red sweater) providing leadership and brains, Taffy (green) providing overall enthusiasm and the plan to catch the crook, and Brenda (purple) fretting ineffectively, the team continuing onward despite her fairly reasonable concerns.

Ironically, the weakest element of Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels is Captain Caveman himself. Every Meddling Kid show integrates their mascot differently: Scooby Doo functions as Shaggy's partner in crime and half of a comedic duo.  Funky Phantom takes the stage over the teens he travels with. But Captain Caveman is the least essential mascot I've seen yet. His interactions with the other characters in the story and the teen angels themselves is minimal, possibly a result of his far-out concept. As a character on his own, he proves mildly amusing, as Hanna-Barbera mascots go, but his integration into the larger show feels tacked-on. Cavey's voice is provided by voice acting legend Mel Blanc, and you can definitely hear a bit of Porky Pig whenever he laughs.

Unique to Captain Caveman is its eleven minute running time, a result of packaging the show with Scooby Doo All-Stars and Laff-A-Lympics. Rather than hindering the show, the shorter running time leaves it much more tightly constructed. The show moves at a much more brisk pace, and as a result avoids the meandering parade of pointless dumb gags most of the other meddling kids shows take.

The show is still a slave to the usual formula, but at least the Teen Angels make an attempt at actual detective work.  Each episode begins with the teens finding a mystery, Cavey does schtick, they gather three clues, Cavey does schtick, Taffy comes up with a plan to catch the villain, Cavey captures the villain, Brenda reviews the three clues and their relevance, Cavey closes on some schtick. It's not much, but given the sheer insanity of some of H-B's other shows, the adherence to some internal logic is much appreciated.

So that's Captain Caveman. Is it perfect? No. Funky Phantom manages a better mascot character and Scooby-Doo integrates all its elements more coherently. But is it worth a watch? Absolutely. It's a brisk, fun little show that doesn't eat up a lot of time.

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Most of the time, Captain Caveman does his schtick off to the side. When you watch the series, you barely notice how little he interacts with the Teen Angels.

Which makes it all the more jarring when something like this happens.

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From "Cavey and the Baffling Buffalo Man", Captain Caveman, 1977.

The episode starts with Buffalo Man screaming like a maniac, stealing a jeep, and launching it into a ravine.I can already tell this one's gonna be a winner.

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A Few Thoughts On... The Chan Clan.

The Chan Clan doesn't show up much these days because, like Josie and the Pussycats, they were a licensed show based on the now relatively obscure Charlie Chan novels. The cartoon is the only time the character of Charlie Chan was played by an actual Asian person.

The pilot episode had Asian voice actors for the entire Chan Clan, but the final series re-dubbed them with Caucasian voice actors, including a young Jodie Foster. The original dub of the pilot episode has not been released.

You know, H-B really liked to push the band angle as a way to explain a bunch of teenagers traveling around and getting mixed up in criminal plots (and  to sell records), but for the Chan Clan it's completely superfluous. Charlie Chan is a famous and respected detective. It would make sense for him to travel abroad and for his kids to come along.

The Chan Clan is in possession of a sentient dog and a shape-shifting truck that can disguise itself as any vehicle. Neither are very useful.

There are a lot of characters in Chan Clan, but really the entire top row there kinda blends together. It's basically dog, kid, kid, kid, dude with ridiculous outfit, tomboy, brains, tough guy who's actually weak, Daphne, clown, Fred, and the competent one.

Chan Clan is a bit more realistic than most meddling kids shows, in that the kids interfering with an official investigation just causes problems. There's a clear formula in Chan Clan, and its different from the other Meddling Kids shows: the Chan kdis themselves never piece the mystery together, and any clues they stumble upon they don't really understand.

The Chan Clan formula revolves around the kids blundering into comical situations while their father, a professional police detective, does all the work. So, like I said, a bit more realistic.

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Character Analysis-Alexandra Cabot

When Hanna-Barbera put together a group of meddling kids, they had a pretty standard line-up. You had the leader, you had the goofball, you had the damsel in distress. If you were lucky, sometimes you got the brainy nerd. So every time they break this formula up, something interesting ends up happening.

Such is the case with Alexandra Cabot, Josie and the Pussycats' pessimistic, sarcastic, and far more entertaining companion.

In a classic cartoon scenario, Alexandra, as a rival of Josie, is allowed to exhibit all the traits the heroine can't. She's jealous, petty, spiteful, and rude, which gives Josie and the Pussycats an edge that the other Meddling Kids' shows lack.

Alexandra upsets the usual meddling kids generally friendly balance, pointing out the flaws in everyone around her while ignoring her own. And though she's often the butt of the joke, she always gets her satisfying swipes in.

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This blog is going to spend a lot of time mocking Hanna-Barbera. But I feel it's important to get two things straight.

One, Hanna-Barbera may have popularized the meddling kids formula, but they were hardly the only ones doing it. In fact, The Hardy Boys 1969 cartoon from Filmation actually preceded Scooby-Doo by a week.

Two... it could be much, much worse. As this clip should show, through a combination of horrible voice acting and animation even more shamelessly cheap than Hanna-Barbera, some of the other studios' output at the time made Hanna-Barbera look like Richard Williams.

Fun fact: Chubby Morton, AKA "He who makes me want to pierce my ear drums with a sewing needle", is voiced by Dallas McKennon. He's perhaps best known for his stock recording of insane laughter, which was used in Crash Bandicoot for the boss Ripper Roo.

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From the Jabberjaw Opening.Hanna-Barbera often reused assets when they could. Designs, plots...

Think this guy looks a bit familiar?

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Character Analysis-Mudsy, the Funky Phantom

Mudsy, from The Funky Phantom, is in most ways a typical Hanna-Barbera mascot. For most of the episodes, he doesn't do much aside from cracking wise and providing a convenient deus ex machina to catch whatever evil land developer decided to dress up as Swamp Thing that day. And in a series already clogged with comedic sidekicks (Mudsy's ghost cat, Boo, and some bulldog whose name I can't recall), Mudsy is almost irrelevant. It doesn't help that he carries the same cowardice every mascot does, despite the fact that he's already dead.

I mean seriously, what's going to happen to him?

However, there are a few select episodes where Mudsy is redeemed, and the concept of a ghost companion is used to the fullest (or, at least, the fullest a 1970's children's cartoon would allow). Episodes where Mudsy's personal history drives the story.

Against all odds, Mudsy wound up being the most developed mascot Hanna-Barbera ever created, next to Scooby-Doo- and Mudsy only had seventeen episodes to do it in.

Over the course of the brief series, we learn Mudsy's family history, and even his own role in the revolutionary war.  He's hardly a fully-developed character, but he has a definite sense of background and history, and that gives him an edge.

Even his corny jokes about the Revolutionary War become a bit more amusing when he reacts to criticism with indignity. "I helped discover Electricity when I told Thomas Jefferson to go fly a kite!" "Mudsy, Benjamin Franklin flew the kite." "There was more than one kite, y'know!" His casual attitude towards a manufactured American mythology ultimately proves endearing, deflating what so many of us have held in awe by treating it as business as usual.

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From "Who's Chicken", a Funky Phantom episode.

You know, a ghost pirate is so easy to pull off with a little bit of effort. You're just lazy, Chicken-Man.

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Mascot-Driven vs. Cast-Driven

This seems like an important distinction to make as we begin our ongoing analysis.

Meddling Kid shows come in two flavors: Mascot-driven, where the focus is on the comedic mascot of the group. Jabberjaw, Funky Phantom... generally, if the mascot is the title, it's mascot-driven.

Cast-Driven shows don't have a focus on the mascot, but rather on the human members of the cast. Chan Clan and Josie and the Pussycats are both examples of cast-driven shows.

Generally speaking, Mascot-driven shows are more memorable, simply because the mascot provides an easy hook for viewers to remember. It's hard to forget a shambling, ten-foot tall anthropomorphic shark imitating Curly.

It's a lot harder to remember a bunch of mostly interchangeable kids.

-Noah

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"A final mystery-solving road trip before college."

Mystery Inc. sequel series that looks like this? Did someone mess around with a monkey's paw, or what?

Please kill me  - Scooby-Doo

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From "Malice in Aqualand", a Jabberjaw episode.

The real beauty of this frame is exactly how long it's held. This face is on screen for almost a minute. The show even cuts away, then cuts back. Same face. Either they couldn't afford to redraw it, or they didn't care enough to. With Hanna-Barbera, it might be both.

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Hanna Barbera and the rise of Scooby Culture

On September 13, 1969, CBS aired the Hanna-Barbera series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You, which was created in response to the criticism of violence in Hanna-Barbera's action cartoons, and in response to the success of The Archie Show. Little did they realize that they had doomed themselves to creating the same cartoon, over and over again, for a decade.

 Jabberjaw. Speed Buggy. The Chan Clan. From the late 60's to the early 80's, there were no less than TEN shows nearly identical to the Scooby-Doo premise of Kids-In-Vans-Solving-Mysteries. No matter what Hanna-Barbera tried, they couldn't escape the "Scooby Culture" they had created.

Over ten years of shows. Over one hundred episodes. Days of limited animation, meddling kids, and land developers dressing up like Nosferatus. And this blog is going to take a look at it all.

"Why," you may ask. Perhaps because, as ubiquitous as the "meddling kids" cliche is in popular culture, there's rarely been an extended, in-depth analysis of it. That while the broad strokes of the baffling subgenre have been parody fodder for decades,  the subtle differences and intricacies between each series have gone unanalyzed.

More likely, however, is I am a very specific masochist with a desire for mind-numbing intellectual self-harm. Either way, it's gonna be a hell of a ride.