Recollections of Old TV Shows - Many Other

Does anyone remember "Morton and Hayes?" That series, consisting of six episodes which appeared in the summer of 1991, was produced by Rob Reiner and centered around a 1940s-era comedy duo reminiscent of Abbott and Costello, Chick Morton and Eddie Hayes. Only one thing sticks in my head about the show: There was a "Who's On First"-like routine throughout which one of the pair - Hayes, I think - hollers the line "round up." I'm sorry that I never taped those episodes. As I recall, Reiner had plans to develop the series into a theatrical feature film, but I guess it fell by the wayside as other projects materialized.

I did a Yahoo search for "Morton and Hayes," and most of the few entries it found consisted of bios and filmographies of Kevin Pollak (Morton) or Alison Janney, or credits of various production staff. Interestingly, I learned that Jennifer Jason Leigh made a 1990 appearance in something entitled "Partners In Life," which this site claims was the pilot show for "Morton and Hayes." Didn't find it at The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) under her filmography, though, so I'm not sure what to make of it.

Nothing else of significance except this from the IMDb.

Back in the mid-1970s there was a live-action Saturday morning series on NBC called "The Kids from C.A.P.E.R." Very much like the Monkees, as I remember it - comic hi-jinks by this do-gooding group of four young guys, along with their musical accompaniment. Forgot what C.A.P.E.R. stood for, but - sure enough - the IMDb came through: Civilian Authority to Protect Everybody Regardless. (I was going to guess "Coalition for the Annihilation and Prevention of Evil ... Really.")

Remember the Saturday morning Beatles animated series on ABC in the mid-1960s? My recollection - and I might be way off base on this - is just that each show opened with the Beatles being chased by girls - as they were in "A Hard Day's Night" - to the song "Can't Buy Me Love," and that it closed with "And Your Bird Can Sing." I've read that the band was very unhappy with the show, and that they would never allow it to see the light of day again. That would be a shame. Here's what the IMDb says about it. User comments at that site indicate that the cartoons have been shown at Beatles conventions (What would I know about that?), and that copies of them are available for sale if you know where to look.

Also back in the mid-1960s was an animated (and I use that term as loosely as possible) series called "The Marvel Superheroes." I believe that it ran in syndication, not on any network. (Was it on Channel 9 WOR in NYC?) Each weekday featured a different superhero:

• Monday: Captain America
• Tuesday: The Invincible Iron Man
• Wednesday: The Incredible Hulk
• Thursday: The Mighty Thor
• Friday: Namor, the Sub-Mariner

The "animation" was just artwork lifted from actual comic books, and moved around a bit, plus some camera zooms thrown in for added impact. What did I care? Just to see these characters on TV was heaven to me at the time. Check out the synopsis on the IMDb.

Other shows from my youth:

• "My Mother the Car" (Was it really as bad as legend has it? I do remember having watched it, and that it's theme song featured the lyrics in a follow-the-bouncing-ball fashion.)
• "It's About Time" (It was sort of a reverse-Planet of the Apes in that two astronauts went back in time to the Stone Age and met primitive people, the major ones played by Mike Mazurki and Imogene Coca.)
• "Grindl" (Also starring Imogene Coca - as a hotel maid.)
• "The Bill Dana Show" (Don Adams - before he became Agent 86 on "Get Smart" - portrayed the bumbling hotel security agent, [Byron] Glick. I had forgotten this show until I did a check of "Grindl" on IMDb and determined that Don Adams was not on that show, but rather on "The Bill Dana Show." Apparently, I watched both of these shows, and mashed them together in my head, so to speak. Both were sitcoms from the early 1960s which took place in hotels ... at least I think that "Grindl" did. Unfortunately, IMDb has no plot summary for that show, and not much more than when it aired - 1963-1964 - and its cast - Coca, and James Millhollin as Anson Foster.)
• "Super Chicken" (Animated. All that sticks in my head is a line from the theme, "Bwaaaaaak for Super Chicken.")
• "Milton the Monster" (Animated. Sort of like Frankenstein, but friendly like Casper. The thing that sticks in my mind was that he had a hole in the top of his head that spewed smoke! And, if I'm correct, it was produced by the same outfit that brought us Casper, at least the 1960s TV version.)
• "Linus the Lion-Hearted" (Animated. At the time it was broadcast, there was a tie-in cereal called Crispy Critters. More durable than either the show or the cereal was a balloon of Linus which was flown in the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade for many years after the show went off the air. Was there also a character named Granny Good-Witch on that show? Also, I believe that Sugar Bear, who used to be featured in TV ads for Sugar Crisp cereal, first appeared there.)
• "Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse" (Animated. Their arch-villain the Frog had a voice like Edward G. Robinson. I believe that Bob Kane, the creator of Batman, had a hand in this cartoon.)
• "Diver Dan" (Live-action underwater shorts about a guy in an old-fashioned diving suit and a bunch of talking puppet fish - Minerva, Baron Barracuda, etc. The barracuda wore a monocle.)
• "Tennessee Tuxedo and Chumley" (Animated - from the producers of Underdog, I believe. Tennessee Tuxedo was a penguin, voiced by Don Adams; Chumley was a dumb walrus. I believe that the basic premise was that the pair were always trying to escape from the zoo.)
• "The World of Commander McBragg" (Animated. Far-fetched tales of a British military officer.)
• "Go-Go Gophers" (Was this the cartoon on which a character called Major Minor appeared? I think he commanded an old Western fort.)
• "Deputy Dawg" (Animated, from the folks who brought us Heckle and Jeckle. I remember a supporting character named Musky Muskrat, who spoke with a sort of Huckleberry Hound drawl, and whose catch phrase was "It's possible. It's possible." I also seem to recall a human character - possibly a sheriff - who was Deputy Dawg's superior.)
• "King Leonardo" (Another lion-king cartoon, with supporting character Odie Cologne, a skunk, who was Leonardo's trusted assistant. Also Leonardo's mangy looking brother and heir to the throne, Itchy Brother. And some kind of rat who was always scheming to get the dumb Itchy Brother crowned as a puppet king for his evil plans. Another one from the producers of Underdog?)
• "Alvin and the Chipmunks" (The original one from the late-1950s/early-1960s. It included segments featuring crazy inventor Clyde Crashcup and his whispering assistant Leonardo.)
• "The Dick Tracy Show" (Animated, with villains such as BB Eyes, Flat Top, Mumbles, and the Brow. Flat Top had a Peter Lorre voice. The villains were caught not by Tracy but by other comedic characters: Go-Go Gomez, Heap O'Calorie, and Joe Jitsu. Gomez was a Mexican who wore a large sombrero, O'Calorie was a rotund fellow with an Andy Devine voice, and Jitsu was a Japanese karate expert. They had a neat little gimmick for halting the action. In the heat of a struggle one of the officers would declare, "Hold everything," and the villains would freeze in their tracks while a wristwatch radio call to Tracy would be made. I forget the catch-phrase which got the action to resume.)

  I read a newspaper item today (February 19, 2003) that Dick Tracy will return to the small screen - again in animated form - courtesy of Los Angeles-based animation house Film Roman, the folks who bring us "The Simpsons." I found a confirmation of this story on this page .

• "Wacky Races" (A Hanna-Barbera effort animated that brought together some of their established characters - like Yogi Bear and Snagglepuss - plus some new ones, including Penelope Pitstop, and Dastardly and Muttley. What was the name of the two Stone Age racers who resembled Cousin Itt? Was it the Slag Brothers?)
• "The King Family" (A large, singing Mormon family, but not the Osmonds. Sort of a clan-oriented Mitch Miller. Remember him? The King Family seemed to drop off the face of the Earth, so to speak, somewhere in the late '60s.)
• "Gigantor" (1960s Japanimation about a boy and his big, flying robot.)
• "Tobor: The Eight Man" (More 1960s Japanimation, about a humanoid robot with various super powers. "Tobor" is "robot" spelled backwards. Get it? I don't remember why he was referred to as "The Eight Man." Or was it "The Eighth Man?" Either way, I'm at a loss.)
• "Simba The White Lion" (More 1960s Japanimation, involving the young heir to king of the jungle and some good vs. evil conflicts.)
• I don't remember its name, but there was an animated show about a bunch of bumbling superheroes, including Cuckoo-Man and Tornado-Man, I believe.
• "Captain Nice" and "Mr. Terrific" (Two prime-time, live-action, superhero-oriented shows which ran during the same season, I believe ... trying to feed off the "Batman" craze, presumably. One of them - don't ask me which one - had a theme song which started with the lines "A scientist both wise and bold / Set out to cure the common cold" or something pretty close to it.)
• "Mack And Myre For Hire" (A comic duo in the tradition of Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello who got into various fixes in each episode.)
• "Skippy The Bush Kangaroo" (A live-action effort from Australia which featured a young kangaroo in the type of adventures made familiar by Lassie.)

On May 7, 2004, a correspondent, Anthony Preziosi of Mantua, New Jersey, wrote me a note with some details about that "animated show about a bunch of bumbling superheroes" which I mentioned above. According to the website The Big Cartoon DataBase , the show was called "The Mighty Heroes," from Terrytoons, and it originally aired in 1966. It was directed by Ralph Bakshi and Bob Taylor, and was distributed by Twentieth Century Fox. The superheroes were Strong Man, Cuckoo Man, Tornado Man, Rope Man, and Diaper Man, five awkward, inept superheroes who fought crime in the town of Good Haven. The Mighty Heroes used their weird superpowers to battle menaces like The Enlarger, The Shrinker, The Ghost Monster, The Frog, The Shocker, The Raven, The Monsterizer, and The Scarecrow.

Regarding the Saturday morning Beatles animated series on ABC in the mid-1960s, Mr. Preziosi writes, "Yes...and it wasn't their voices, which is probably why they hated it so much."

Lastly, he refreshed my memory by providing the lyrics to the theme song of "Eighth Man":

Call Tobor, the Eighth Man
Faster than a rocket, faster than a jet.
He's the mighty robot...he's the one to get.

A correspondent, Gary Dieckman wrote:

"Just read your old tv show section. Here's some info:

King Leonardo was the King of Bongo Congo Island. His brother, Itchy Brother, was the pawn of a rat named Biggy Rat, who spoke in an Edward G. Robinson type voice.

The human character in Deputy Dawg was indeed the sheriff. All the voices in Deputy Dawg were done by Dayton Allen, a comic from Steve Allen's (no relation) old lineup which included Bill Dana, Tom Poston, Louie Nye and Don Knotts

More of the Superchicken theme song:

When you find yourself in danger, when you're threatened by a stranger, when you feel that you might take a lickin'

(Missing Verse)

Just calllll for superchicken!!!"

A correspondent, Rich wrote:

"Just wanted to chime in on some of those old shows. I remember Morton & Hayes, I even have one episode on tape somewhere - I'll have to check that out again. I've been collecting old tv videos for about 15 years. My unofficial goal is to get one episode of every prime time series from, say, '64 to '72 (just don't tell my wife - Heh! Hundreds of video cassettes are already cluttering my den).

I have a bunch of the shows that you mentioned: Captain Nice, My Mother the Car (not quite as bad as I expected - now, The Tammy Grimes Show, THAT was a bomb that truly WAS bad), It's About Time (I had forgotten how late in the season they actually brought the astronauts and cavemen back to 1966 USA! Those episodes are funnier than the stone age ones), The Beatles cartoons, Courageous Cat, and the 1960s Dick Tracy cartoon (which aired in syndication briefly in the 1990s - till they saw how incredibly racist a lot of it was, I'd guess - stereotypical Chinese and Mexican characters, for example). And King Leonardo - a cartoon that deeply affected me as a kid, though I'm not entirely sure why. It's remained one of my all-time favorites - good characters, great voices, the whole kingdom/castle milieu - an unappreciated gem, I think!"

A correspondent, Nancy wrote:

"I grew up on television---my family got our first set when I was about 5 in the early '50s. A lot of the children's shows you mention came after I was past the point of watching them, but do you (or anyone) recall a 1950's kid show, which was sponsored and/or produced by Buster Brown Shoes, which may have been (logically) called The Buster Brown Show." It wasn't animated, but it was either a variety show or a narrated series of stories, live or animated. At the commercial times (which were my favorite), the Buster Brown boy with page-boy haircut and the trademark peter-pan collar, would say, "I'm Buster Brown. I live in a shoe. [something-something] You can live there, too." They had a frog, too, who was called "Froggie the Gremlin" and he had this deep, almost maniaical laugh. As a kid, I had a rubber toy "Froggie" which was apparently sold as a promotional item. Many years later, my sister found one on sale for my infant son, so he had "Froggie", too.

On a more adult level, do you or anyone remember a very short-lived series called "It's A Man's World", about 4 guys, one a teenaged brother to one of the adults, who lived, I believe, on a houseboat. The actors I recall are Glenn Corbett, a post-"That Girl"-Ted Bissell, and the teen was Randy Boone. I don't recall the fourth actor.

It sure has been fun tripping down memory lane!"