TV Legends Revealed #26
This is the twenty-sixth in a series of examinations of legends about television and the people involved in TV and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the previous twenty-five.
Today is a special theme installment! All Wacky Races related legends!
Let’s begin!
TV LEGEND: Wacky Races was originally going to be a game show.
STATUS: True
As mentioned in the previous installment of TV Legends Revealed, Hanna-Barbera had a short-lived animated series in the late 1960s called Wacky Races, which featured a group of colorful personalities all racing against each other.
The main villain on the show was Dick Dastardly and his sidekick, Muttley (who had a distinctive laugh/snicker)…
An interesting aspect about Wacky Race is to look at the producers behind the program.
If you look at Hanna-Barbera’s TV series, you will not find very many joint productions. They basically handled their properties on their own.
On the same token, Heatter-Quigley Productions (a company formed by TV writers Merrill Heatter and Bob Quigley) also tended to handle their properties on their own.
Not only that, but their programs were entirely different genres.
Hanna-Barbera did cartoons, while Heatter-Quigley produced game shows.
Their most famous game show was Hollywood Squares…
So why, then, did Hanna-Barbera and Heatter-Quigley co-produce Wacky Races?
It was because Wacky Races was ORIGINALLY intended to be a game show!
As the show fell through, it is a bit unclear exactly what the show would have entailed, but it seems like it would have worked around animated sequences where contestants would bet on the results of the races (presumably more involved than that, as that alone is a pretty sorry excuse for a game show).
Eventually it was determined that the property would work better as a straight animated series, and that’s the way they went, but Heatter-Quigley maintained a co-ownership of the Wacky Races characters, something that likely factored into the next legend.
By the way, Wacky Races has come out with more than one video game version of the show, so I suppose a game show isn’t that far afield!
TV LEGEND: Mumbly was invented to replace Muttley in the Laff-A-lympics.
STATUS: False Enough for a False
In a similar vein to the Wacky Races, in the late 1970s, Hanna-Barbera released another short-lived television series called Laff-A-Lympics.
In it, three teams of Hanna-Barbera characters competed against each other in a series of Olympic-style events from all over the world.
There were the Yogi Yahooeys (consisting of talking animal characters), the Scooby Doobies (consisting mostly of cartoon shows that starred human characters) and the Really Rottens (consisting of the bad guys from cartoons)…
The Really Rottens were led by Mumbly, a dog with a distinctive laugh/snicker and his co-hort the Dread Baron.
Here they are with their team…
and by themselves…
So, quite naturally, it was thought that the two characters were meant to be stand-ins for Dick Dastardly and Muttley…
And THAT is almost certainly true.
The reason is most likely the fact that, as mentioned above, Hanna-Barbera did not own the two characters outright, so they substituted look-alike characters.
However, people think that Mumbly and the Dread Baron are just re-named Muttley and Dick Dastardly, and that is not so, at least not in the case of Mumbly (Dread Baron was created just for the Laff-a-lympics).
Mumbly might have BECOME a stand-in for Muttley, but Mumbly was, at a time, his own character!
You see, Mumbly starred in his own show a year or so before the Laff-a-lympics began.
The Mumbly Show was basically a take-off of Peter Falk’s Columbo, with Mumbly being a mumbling detective…
So Mumbly was actually retroactively turned into a villain (without an explanation) for the sake of Laff-a-lympics!!
Since the show, Muttley has tended to be the longer lasting character between the two.
Do note that besides their slightly different appearances, they also had slightly different characterizations - Muttley was the sidekick to Dick Dastardly, while Mumbly was in charge of the Really Rottens.
TV LEGEND: Muttley and Dick Dastardly were removed whole cloth from one show and added to another.
STATUS: True
While Wacky Races was not a big hit, Hanna-Barbera were fans of the Penelope Pitstop character and the Dick Dastardly and Muttley characters, so as soon as the show ended, they developed a new show for the three characters in 1969.
It was to be called the Perils of Penelope Pitstop, and Dick and Muttley were to serve as the bodyguards for Penelope’s brother, who would always be trying to save Penelope from various perilous situations.
Before the show began production, though, it was determined that Dick and Muttley were too good of a pair of characters to “waste” as supporting characters in another series.
Meanwhile, Hanna-Barbera was working on a series called “Stop that Pigeon!” where some World War I pilots would be constantly trying to chase a messenger pigeon.
It was vaguely based on the hit 1965 British comedy Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines…
The rivals for the pigeon were to be a pilot like the Red Baron and his sidekick, a dachshund with goggles.
However, these characters never made it past development. Instead, Hanna-Barbera just took the characters of Dick and Muttley from Penelope Pitstop’s show, and plopped them in, whole sale, into this other show.
And thus, Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines was born!
This show was more successful than both Wacky Races AND Perils of Penelope Pitstop, running for two seasons (which was pretty decent for a cartoon at the time - the show had more episodes, for instance, than Jonny Quest and only one less episode than the Yogi Bear Show!).
It’s pretty amusing, Muttley and Dick have seemed to prove pretty much adaptable to any premise! That’s generally a sign of a good character right there!
Okay, that’s it for this week!
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com
Wow, that is a LOT of different shows being made from the same family of characters… while I mourn that such a huge contained universe doesn’t get made anymore, most of those shows also look like utter crap. Ha!
I’m a little amused by the description of the Scooby Doobies. While not entirely untrue, of the human characters, only the girls in the middle were headliners (of Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels).
The others were headlined by (and thus, arguably, starred) the dogs (Scooby-Doo, Dyno-Mutt, Hong Kong Phooey), a genie (Jeannie)*, and the car (Speed Buggy). Shaggy, Blue Falcon, and Tinker didn’t get that honour. (Well, Shaggy eventually did, but not until about 30 years after Laff-A-Lympics.)
* Jeannie herself didn’t appear, presumably because HB didn’t own her.
In terms of the line-ups, you could probably make the case that the Yogis were primarily 50s and early 60s characters (Great Grape Ape being the only obvious ringer added to the team), while the Scoobys were late 60s & early 70s (the the RRs being the scruffy types - technically, only about of the RRs were “bad guys” in their original form - most were just oddballs - example, the members that came from the Addams/Munsters-like neighbors from the Flintstones).
There’s a thought for a legend check - were those Flintstones-originating characters meant to be a parody of the Addams Family, The Munsters, both, or neither? The humanish characters appear to be closer to the Addams in looks, but the family had a lot of critters in the family, that made them also seem Munster-ish.
@Kamino- Good point. I’ve personally wondered whether the division into human-friendly and human-deficient groups was an intentional one, or just a reflection of the major change in creative output from HB over the years. If you look at the main characters in each group, there’s a pretty clear chronological distinction between “classic” 1950s-early 60s HB characters like Yogi Bear, and the seventies-era characters as exemplified by Scooby Doo. What becomes obvious is that, while the earlier HB cartoons were often imitative of well-known live action sitcoms (Flinstone=Honeymooners, Top Cat=Phil Silvers, etc), the post-Scooby output was mainly imitative of, well, itself (pretty much all the shows represented in the Scooby team were mystery/adventure comedies).
Of course, my theory isn’t perfect, either, since Grape Ape was definitely a latter-era character- maybe he was intended to fill in for Magilla Gorilla, who was for some reason absent?
One slight correction: The Really Rottens consisted of “bad guys from cartoons,” yes, in the sense that they were bad guys, and they were all in a cartoon- the Laff-a-Lympics. However, with the exception of Mubmbly (who was, as Brian pointed out, not really a bad guy), none of them had ever appeared elsewhere, and most never appeared again.
Hmmmm…. The Yogi Yahooies were all “funny animal” charcters. Typical toons. Whereas the Scooby Doobies were more action oriented and “serious” (for HB anyhoo) characters.
The Really Rottens always kida threw me, ‘cos I don’t know where half of ‘em are from….
@Basara- I think the answer re: the Flintstones neighbors is “both”- because there were actually TWO sets of “monster neighbors” in the Flintstones “canon” (keeping in mind that continuity from Flintstones show to Flintstones show is conspicuously lacking). The first monster family, “The Gruesomes,” who showed up towards the end of the original primetime series, definitely seem like an Addams Family pastiche- father, mother, son, and uncle. About ten years later, in one of the Saturday morning versions of the Flintstones (maybe “The Fred and Barney Show?”) new “scary neighbors” moved in called the Frankenstones. Considering the dad looked like Frankenstein’s monster, there was definitely something more Munsters-ish about them. To add more confusion, the Creeplies (in Laff-a-Lympics) looked an awful lot like the Gruesomes (who also looked an awful lot like the “Evil Scientist” family from “Snagglepuss”) but were “new” characters- and bad guys. Meanwhile, the Frankenstone family underwent numerous name changes and variations, and even a major voice change- Mr. Frankenstone went from sounding like Boris Karloff to sounding like Charles Nelson Reilly.
Which all proves that HB really liked to recycle character designs and ideas from show to show.
@ctc: They weren’t “from” anywhere, with the exception of Mumbly. In the same way that the Dread Baron was a ripoff of Dick Dastardly, most of them were ripoffs of other character designs. The Creeplies looked like the Gruesomes, the evil octopus thing looked like Squiddly Diddly, the Daltons shared their name with several villains from the Huckleberry Hound show, etc.
[...] which you can check out here, at legendsrevealed.com. I’d especially recommend you check out this installment of TV Legends Revealed for a whole Wacky Races edition of TV Legends [...]
The Wiki article on Dick Dastardly reveals Marvel came up with a typical retcon to explain the similarity:
“in issue #12 of the Laff-A-Lympics comic book by Marvel Comics, Dread Baron and Dastardly are brothers”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Dastardly
So ‘Stop That Pigeon’ was the original intended title? When I was a kid I thought it was the title. It was only a few years ago that I heard it was officially called ‘Dastardly and Muttley and their Flying Machines’. I wasn’t old enough to read credits back then, but my older brother could read and he called it ‘Stop That Pigeon’ too.
I have no memory of ‘Wacky Races’ or ‘Penelope Pitstop’. I can barely remember ‘Stop That Pigeon’.
I remember Wacky Races (barely), and don’t remember the Pigeon one at all.
However, from TV theme songs CDs and covers, it’s obvious that the theme song for the show would indeed leave most people with the idea the name was “Stop that Pigeon” - especially as that’s much shorter than the actual name.
On the “Saturday Morning Cartoons’ Greatest Hits” album, Reverend Horton Heat does a mash-up of the Johnny Quest theme with Stop that Pigeon.
I love the Johnny Quest part, and would have loved a few minutes more of it rather than the awkward transition to the Stop that Pigeon song.
I wonder why they had to do both.
[...] #26 - Wacky Races was originally going to be a game show. [...]