Review: ‘Saturday Morning Cartoons 1970s Volume One’ on DVD
As the 1970s dawned, I was 12 and no longer as interested in Saturday morning fare. There was Little League which was either in the morning or afternoon and I found myself drifting more towards the [[[Bowery Boys]]] shorts that ran on channel 5 after the cartoons wore themselves out. My younger siblings watched, but not with the same passion I had shown just a few years earlier.
For me, the Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1970s Vol. 1
, coming tomorrow from Warner Home Video, was more introductory than revisiting my childhood. Having just finished the 1960s volume, it was startling to see how rapidly things had changed. Spies and super-heroes were rapidly supplanted by large gaggles of people either playing music or solving mysteries or both. The disc opens with a cheat, an episode of [[[The Jetsons]]], which may have run in the 1970s for the umpteenth time, but was emblematic of an earlier era, stealing time from something more current.
The success of [[[The Partridge Family]]] in prime time and [[[The Archies]]] on Saturday mornings certainly explained by there was so much music, without a single top 40 tune to emerge from any of these groups.
The mysteries could be ascribed to the wildfire success of [[[Scooby Doo]]], the series that straddled the decades by being introduced in fall 1969 and becoming the most imitated series of the 1970s.
The stories were also vastly different. By 1970, concerns over violence seemed to have begun taming the stories so the level of danger was different. The villains tended to be stupider and more bumbling, prone to slapstick ways of taking themselves out than being subdued by the crime fighters. Groups of teens were proving to find mysteries, stumbling across problems and then fumbling their way through the investigation until the culprit was exposed and then apprehended as much through dumb luck than effective law enforcement.
Scooby Doo, a series I never warmed to through the years, is represented here in an episode from The New Scooby-Doo Movies that guest-starred the Harlem Globetrotters, which had their series so it was a nice but of cross-promotion. The Globetrotters were at the height of their fame around this time and this was a fun brand extension even if none of the players actually did their own voices, leaving that to the likes of Scatman Crothers. In this case, there are too many people caught up in a fairly mediocre story concluding with the guest stars strutting their stuff on the court, doing things that only work in animation. That it needed a laugh track, cueing kids when to laugh speaks volumes of how unfunny this could get.
We are shown just how many imitators there were with episodes from [[[Goober and the Ghost Chasers]]] and [[[Funky Phantom]]] that also featured groups of teens and their pets solving cases. One thing that was never clear, even after watching these, is why these people were friends. Look at Fred and Daphne, the homecoming King and Queen, who in the real world would have nothing to do with Shaggy or Velma. We’re just presented them as an ensemble and the stories move forward. Goober and Funky Phantom are pale imitations with stock stories, stock characters and even overly familiar voice artists doing variations on their characters, especially the great Daws Butler recycling his Snagglepuss for the Phantom.
Other imitators were [[[Josie and the Pussycats]]] which came in 1970, just two years after The Archies. The music was certainly incidental to the story and this one had a vile Captain Nemo who played an organ coming to hate the pop stars and their music.
The one variation that was weird was [[[Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan]]] which was more a “how done it” than “who done it”. In a nice special feature, actor Jamie Farr talked about the series where he wrote three episodes and explained how the network insisted the Clan each had a distinct personality all had to have something to do and each case featured a song from the children’s band. Oddly entertaining with nice voice work from Keye Luke as the famed Chan. It’s also interesting to note that a show with a predominantly Asian cast made it to Saturdays before any African-American series.
The Asian influence was also seen with [[[Hong Kong Phooey]]], where a dog working as a janitor at the local police station was also the feared martial arts pooch – reflecting the then hot genre of martial arts films. The animation is among the weakest offerings but had its moments.
An oddity was [[[Yogi’s Gang]]], a show that collected all of the Hanna-Barbera characters from the previous decade and put them on a flying ark. Each episode used different collections of characters, by Yogi, and had adventures. Based on the episode here, the story seems designed to shine the spotlight on each character to say their favorite line or do a character bit. The story, though, had a nifty twist ending which made it satisfying, especially compared with the rest of the stories collected here.
Perhaps the most original series on the two-disc set is [[[Roman Holidays]]] that tried to replicate [[[The Flintstones]]] formula in a Roman era setting. It was about a nuclear family and their exploits – it didn’t look like any of the competition and had some of the best writing, so it’s sad that it lasted a mere 13 episodes.
By the latter part of the decade, Scooby’s imitators were fading fast and CBS was ready to try heroes once more. While ABC was still running[[[Super Friends]]], there hadn’t been much in the way of heroic adventure but in 1977 they hired Filmation to bring back [[[Batman]]] and try their hand at [[[Tarzan]]]. The former featured Adam West and Burt Ward reprising their prime time roles and both needed better direction because they over-emphasized the phrases or sounded constipated rather than dramatic. With cartoon violence even further de-emphasized by this point, actually fighting the criminals was out so the cases were contrived so the Dynamic Duo could triumph over the likes of the Joker with their wits and equipment. They added Bat-Mite for comic relief and it didn’t work at all. Filmation’s animation recycled much of their earlier Bat-efforts and there isn’t much entertainment to be found. Tarzan, with nice design work from Bob Kline, tried to make Edgar Rice Burroughs’ world palatable to kids and it largely worked.
The final extra on the set is a short piece looking at how odd Funky Phantom was with modern day animation folk such as Paul Dini trying to figure out how and more importantly, why it got made.
Here’s a quick preview… enjoy!
Back in the days after the dinosaurs died out, Saturday mornings meant all three networks would run children’s programming from as early as 7:30 until noon or so. Every fall, as we started a new school year, we eagerly anticipated what new animated fare there might be and were mesmerized by the cartoon antics of anthropomorphic animals, adventurous humans and some downright silly-looking monsters. The baby boomers born at the end of the generation were raised on this diet animated diet as it proved cheaper to produce than live-action fare.
The Western movie genre is something most of us consider a relic from the 1950s, and yet, two of the better regarded films – 
On the other hand, Howard Hawks’[[[El Dorado]]], shot five years later and in full color, is a bigger story, played out on location and feels entirely different. His characters, though, are stoics and barely exhibit much emotion. When John Wayne accidentally kills Luke McDonald (Johnny Crawford), the McDonald family barely nods in acknowledgement. This story is also about land rights, as the black-hatted Ed Asner hires gunmen to force the McDonalds into giving up their water rights. The Sheriff (Robert Mitchum) has become a drunk over an ill-fated romance and it takes his old friend, mercenary John Wayne, accompanied by the tyro James Caan to help maintain law and order. The professional rivalry theme plays out between Wayne and Mitchum, both showing their age here, but also between Wayne and Christopher George, the gunhand newly arrived to aid Asner.
Joe Simon and Jack Kirby have been the gold standard for partnerships in the comic book field. Their work ethic, their creations, and their longevity speak volumes about the duo and speaking of volumes, they are likely the only ones to get DC and Marvel to allow stories from their archives to share two covers,
For whatever reason, baseball is the sport that translates best to film. Maybe it’s the team aspect, or the poetry of the game, but there are more movies about the sport than any other. On the other hand, baseball and other sports never seem to translate well to the comic form. Go figure.
opened in 1989, there hadn’t been a baseball film played for laughs in ages so the right film arrived at the right time. Since then, it has endured, one of those movies you find arresting as you channel surf. Forget the dumb sequels and recall what it was like to see the collection of misfits forged a bond to thwart the evil owner and go for the championship.
It’s fascinating to see the same material presented in competing books, approached in entirely different ways. DK Publishing, the successful home to the various character-specific Ultimate Guides, offers up 
DK, known for its hyperkinetic layouts, tones things done here and makes each spread easier to read, with nice call outs, and judicious graphic selections showing the great range of art styles employed through the years.
Marvel has had varying degrees of success with the direct-to-video efforts but the program continues and there’s little surprise that the most recent offering featured Wolverine, given the release this week of [[[X-Men Origins: Wolverine]]]. What is odd is that Lionsgate chose to release the video 
in January, too late for the holidays and too early to capitalize on the Fox feature.
All eyes are on what J.J. Abrams and his team have done to reinvigorate public interest in 
. The reason the franchise, created by Gene Roddenberry, needs any attention at all is the result of inept studio focus during the 1990s and beyond. To Paramount’s management at the time, [[[Star Trek]]] was a cash cow to be milked dry as often and in as many ways as possible. Any care about creativity was a lucky happenstance, not by design. Therefore, they let [[[Star Trek: Voyager]]] limp along on their UPN network only to be followed by the even limper [[[Star Trek; Enterprise]]]. The film series, featuring [[[The Next Generation]]] characters, kept hitting the reset button until [[[Nemesis]]], which had a disinterested director foisted upon the series at a time it really needed to improve its game given the critical drubbing the television version of the franchise was receiving.
