10 Awful '60s Saturday Morning Cartoons

By Richard Connelly Mon., Sep. 26 2011 at 8:01 AM

The bargain-basement spirit of 1776

People of a certain age like to remember the '60s as a golden age of cartoons, when nothing but magic came out of screens as kids lapped up their cereal while Daddy slept off a hangover upstairs.

But for every Rocky & Bullwinkle, Jonny Quest or Top Cat, there was a bunch of dreck.

Stuck as filler between cartoons featuring more popular characters, these B-list productions generally featured sparse backgrounds, lots and lots of running in front of those sparse backgrounds, and lame jokes that usually had no connection to the situation. All that changed were the settings, from the American Revolution to the Old West to a big city.

Here are ten that those rosy-eyed nostalgists have probably forgotten.

10. Touché Turtle
Jokes about Napoleon, Wellington and the gold standard can't save this, a classic example of a secondary character used to fill time in the Saturday-morning shows.

9. Punkin' Puss & Mushmouse
Only available in Portuguese on the Web, it seems. You'll have to live without all the sparkling, witty, Noël Coward-esque dialogue.

8. Go-Go Gophers
If the cheap, cheap animation doesn't reel you in, the un-PC depictions of Native Americans will.

Vezi mai multe din Desene animate pe 220.ro7. Magilla Gorilla
A lot of people fondly remember Magilla Gorilla, with its catchy intro song and the title character's Yiddish name. But yeah, does not hold up.

Tags:

Animation, Hanna Barbera, the `60s

We Recommend

Electronic Cigarette

Yeah, Rocky and Bullwinkle and Under Dog were my favs. I am not sure I remember any of these.

WukSoo

lol, wow OK now that was a trip down memory lane.privacy-web.pro.tc

Tallweed

true- they stink. but by contemporary standards- they are classics.

Mel Sharkskin

Every pointless, politically-wrong character, every hackneyed premise, each and every cheaply animated minute of '60 and '70s Hanna-Barbera sludge was vindicated in 2000 by the appearance of one hero bumbling down these mean streets: "Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law." Harvey and company put the Mo' in PoMo animation, and god love Adult Swim for bringing him to us.

MASSMURDERMEDIA

the custody battle between dr quest and race bannon over johnny and haji was pretty great... birdman waking up with quick draw mcgraw's head in his bed from the fred flinstone as tony soprano episode was genius... and of course, adult swim has breathed new life into "space ghost" and "sealab"...

Brittanie Shey

Two words: Shoyu Weenie

MASSMURDERMEDIA

had to google that one, hadn't caught that episode... thanks for hipping me to it...

MASSMURDERMEDIA

wally gator!... secret squirrel!... the impossibles!...

the banana splits have some of those awful cartoons, such as "arabian nights"... they also ran an awful live action series called "danger island" featuring jan michael vincent... but at age 8 or 9 i didn't think it was so awful, acting out that show with my friends...

FattyFatBastard

I wholly expect a 70's and 80's edition.

Jim C

The Minute-and-a-Half Man...that's still three-and-a-half minutes less than Dr. Brown, no?

DuckDuckGoose

That's what she said ..

Katy

These cartoons are delightfully wretched...

All of those Hanna Barbera cartoons that Boomerang shows late at night have been sending me off to sleep for a couple years now.

Some of them are from the Sixties, some from the Seventies, but they are all racially questionable ("The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan"? "Hong Kong Phooey"?).Also, most of them only have about 15 episodes ever made, and yet Boomerang shows them every night ("The Adventures of Penelope Pitstop"...).

MadMac

These were the same creative giants behind the Stephanie Fetchit maid in the '40s and 50s. So the racial shadow spans years over their products.

I watched an interview with Joseph Barbera where he justified the horrid 1970s Tom & Jerry Show versus the Academy Award winner from '47. He boiled it down to economics but really it's all about exploiting a market. Kinda like Pokemon now.