THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1965, part 4

Written By:

Alan Boon

Ah, telephemera… those shows whose stay with us was tantalisingly brief, snatched away before their time, and sometimes with good cause. They hit the schedules alongside established shows, hoping for a long run, but it’s not always to be, and for every Street Hawk there’s two Manimals. But here at STARBURST we celebrate their existence and mourn their departure, drilling down into the new season’s entertainment with equal opportunities square eyes… these are The Telephemera Years!

1965-66

Six years into its eventual fourteen-season run, Bonanza was the king of TV in the 1965-66 season with a massive 31.8 rating, four ratings points higher than its nearest rival – Gomer Pyle, USMC – but five points lower than the previous year. It was a downturn that would continue in 1966-67 and, aside from the adventures of the Cartwrights on the Ponderosa ranch, NBC did not enjoy the best of years, their second highest rating show coming in at twelfth, as wacky spy show Get Smart debuted. CBS had much better form across the board, with Gomer Pyle joined in the top ten by The Lucy Show, The Red Skelton Hour, The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, and new arrival Hogan’s Heroes, while ABC looked to Bewitched and new sensation Batman, two high rating genre shows in a fertile period for such fare.

Other notable shows making their debuts in the 1965-66 season included talking pig sitcom Green Acres, eventual soap juggernaut Days of Our Lives, quiz shows Supermarket Sweep and The Newlywed Game, and a clutch of new genre outings as The Wild Wild West, Lost in Space, and I Dream of Jeannie all made their bows. They joined The Addams Family, The Avengers, The Flintstones, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Munsters, My Favorite Martian, and The Man from UNCLE as America embraced the fantastic, but those were all shows for the grown-ups: what about their offspring? This is the story of 1965’s new kids’ TV shows…

Roger Ramjet (NBC): Although he worked at various New York animation studios in his twenties, Fred Crippen didn’t hit his stride until he joined the eastern arm of the United Pictures of America (or UPA) studio. UPA was formed in the wake of an exodus of staff from Walt Disney following industrial action in 1941 and they aimed to be markedly different than their former employer. Crippen worked on UPA’s first big hit, Mr Magoo, and then moved to Los Angeles, where he directed The Gerald McBoing Boing Show. Crippen hit out on his own in 1958, forming Pantomime Pictures, starting mostly with commercial clients and lending his talents to other studios, with credited work on 1964’s Linus the Lionhearted, a cereal mascot turned Saturday morning cartoon star.

A year later and undoubtedly inspired by the success of Jay Ward’s anarchic The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, Crippen created Roger Ramjet, a proud American hero who defeats evil with the aid the American Eagle Squadron (and his PEP – proton energy power – pills). Incredibly subversive, Roger Ramjet was the first counter-culture cartoon, its five-minute episodes filled with jokes, like a page from MAD Magazine come to life. The show was unusual, too, in the way it was produced. Traditional productions began with rough animation, tightened after the soundtrack was recorded to match the visuals. For Roger Ramjet, the soundtrack came first, giving the animators space to not only match the dialogue but also fill the screen with the most random visual jokes and ephemera.

Voiced by Gary Owens. in his first role of a career that would see him go on to voice Space Ghost and announce Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, Roger would be dispatched on missions from his hometown of Lompoc, California – “the town where nothing ever happens, and seldom does” – by General Brassbottom (Bob Arbogast). The voice cast also included David Ketchum, Dick Beals, and Joan Gerber. Roger’s arch enemy is Noodles Romanoff, the head of NASTY (the National Association of Spites, Traitors, and Yahoos). Although his PEP pills give him the power of “twenty atomic bombs,” Roger often finds himself captured, depending on the American Eagles – Yank, Doodle, Dan, and Dee – to rescue him. Other villains included Red Dog the Pirate, the Zsa Zsa Gabor-a-like Jacqueline Hyde, and the sexy Tequila Mockingbird, with all adventures neatly wrapped up within five minutes, topped and tailed by a Roger Ramjet-modified “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

156 episodes were produced, aired between September 11^th 1965 and 1969, during which time Crippen attempted to broaden his portfolio with The Joey Jingle Show, but the pilot went unsold; ironically, networks were really only buying superhero shows at the time. Post-Roger, Crippen produced animated segments for Sesame Street and continued to work in the industry into the 21^st century, retiring in 2001 after his last job as a timing director on Godzilla: The Series. Following its first run on NBC, the series has been shown in syndication and overseas, and a DVD boxset was released in 2005.

Captain Fathom (syndication): Founded by Clark Haas Jr in 1957, Cambria Studios Productions is best known for its three shows created using the Syncro-Vox technique patented by Edwin “Ted” Gillette in 1952. Syncro-Vox took footage of moving lips and superimposed them over frames of animation, creating a (crude) illusion of a speaking mouth. Notoriously cheap, Gillette developed the technique to animate talking animals and by the late-1950s Gillette was a partner at Cambria, employing the technique on adventure serial Clutch Cargo, created by Haas and using very limited animation. 52 episodes of Clutch Cargo were broadcast in syndication in 1959 and 1960, and Syncro-Vox was next used on Space Angel, a show created by Dick Darley, who’d also created live-action ABC show Space Patrol in 1950 and directed the first episode of The Mickey Mouse Club.

As with Clutch Cargo, Space Angel used very limited animation but was an improvement on its predecessors due to the fact that the character designs – and many of the static images – were by comic book legend Alex Toth. Toth had moved to Los Angeles in 1956 while working for Dell Comics and Space Angel was his first work in the animation industry. The Space Angel of the title was astronaut Scott McCloud, who piloted the Starduster as an agent of the Earth Bureau of Investigation’s Interplanetary Space Force, he and his crew enjoying a 260-episode run between 1962 and 1964.

Cambria produced two new shows for 1965, but The New Stooges was traditionally animated, if still in a decidedly limited fashion. Toth stayed on to design Cambria’s next Syncro-Vox show, Captain Fathom, which debuted in Fall 1965 in syndication in the usual twin Cambria form, with 130 five-minute episodes, many of which could be combined into five-part serials to fill the usual thirty-minute programming slot or left as they were to become one segment of a variety block. The show featured Bill Fathom, captain of the submarine Argonaut and commanding a crew that included Cookie, Ronnie, Scotty, Miss Perkins, and a porpoise named Flip. He and his crew would sail the seven seas, encountering lost islands, ghost ships, supposedly extinct species, and pirates. Always pirates.

Captain Fathom was not a new idea; a pilot for a proposed live-action series had been made in 1955, starring Don Megowan as the titular submariner. The 1955 Captain Fathom was created by retired US Navy Rear Admiral Thomas M Dykers and German novelist Curt Siodmak, who’d fled Germany in 1934 to become a scriptwriter in London before moving to the US in 1937. Siodmark wrote the script for films including I Walked with a Zombie, The Beast with Five Fingers, and Bride of the Gorilla (which he also directed), and the story for Earth versus the Flying Saucers. Quite how Cambria came upon the 1955 pilot is unknown, but the two were explicitly linked by the bizarre Clutch and Friends in 2017, which featured the various nieces of Clutch Cargo introducing his adventures and those of his friends, including Bill Fathom.

Milton the Monster (ABC): Even though he’s far from a household name, no list of animation legends would be complete without the inclusion of Hal Seeger. Born in Brooklyn in 1917, he began his career working for the Fleischer brothers in the early 1940s, enjoying an interesting sideline writing the scripts for a series of musical films starring the likes of Cab Calloway and Dusty Fletcher. Seeger opened his own studio – Hal Seeger Productions – in the late 1950s, which enjoyed its first hit in 1962 when they produced an Out of the Inkwell revival, bringing silent era funny Koko the Klown into the 1960s. In 1964, a year after Warner Bros had shut down their own animation studio, Seeger was hired to produce new opening and closing animations for The Porky Pig Show, which re-used old Loony Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons for a Saturday morning crowd on ABC.

In October 1965, Hal Seeger Productions went one better and produced a full show for ABC. Created by Seeger’s wife, Beverly Arnold, Milton the Monster was a Frankenstein’s monster-like character, but one with a pleasant disposition due to his creator – mad scientists Professor Montgomery Weirdo – using too much “tincture of tenderness” in his production. Arnold also provided uncredited voice work, with the main roles of Milton and the Professor voiced by Bob McFadden (who also voiced Franken Berry in the General Mills cereal commercials and would later voice Snarf in Thundercats) and Dayton Allen (who had a storied career that included multiple roles on Howdy Doody, the voice of Deputy Dawg, and the man in the street on The Steve Allen Show).

Milton’s adventures – which also featured Igor-like sidekick Count Kook and fellow monsters Heebie, Jeebie, and Abercrombie the Zombie – were accompanied by several other shorts, chief amongst them being Fearless Fly. Similar to Hanna-Barbera’s Atom Ant, Fearless Fly was an insect superhero, his alter ego of Hiram the ordinary housefly ducking into a matchbox to change into his costume (a red sweater) and don his special eyeglasses, the source of his power. Allen voiced the Fly, and he would occasionally encounter Professor Weirdo as the two features crossed over. Cowboy detective Flukey Luke, Stuffy Durma the Millionaire Hobo, sly fox Muggy Doo, and bratty teenager Penny Penguin completed the line-up, with each episode featuring a Milton, a Fly, and one other, seemingly at random.

Twenty-six episodes were produced, which had a first run between October 1965 and April 1966, with re-runs staying in the Saturday morning schedules for the next two years, by which time Seeger’s most iconic show – the Batman-aping Batfink – had begun its run in syndication. After finishing Batfink, Seeger shuttered his studio, claiming the animation industry was a rat race and that he’d made six-figure losses during his time running the company. He was tempted back for just one more production – “Popeye Meets the Man Who Hated Laughter,” part of 1972’s The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie, a weekly showcase featuring characters from multiple shows, some of which acted as backdoor pilots.

The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show (NBC): On Sunday September 12^th 1965, The World of Secret Squirrel and Atom Ant introduced NBC viewers to two brand-new features from Hanna-Barbera, each designed to cash in on the dual superhero and spy craze that was all over TV and movie screens at the time. The one-off show was followed three weeks later by the Saturday morning debuts of The Atom Ant Show and The Secret Squirrel Show, filling a one-hour block between re-runs of The Jetsons and season two of Underdog, which was eventually combined into The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show during the Winter.

Originally voiced by The Andy Griffith Show‘s Howard Morris, and later by animation legend Don Messick, Atom Ant was the superhero half of the partnership, operating out of a converted anthill in the countryside, alerted to crimes by his supercomputer. With his local police force severely underfunded – they have two policemen and one dilapidated police car – Atom Ant is called upon to fight the likes of Ferocious Flea, Big Fats Dynamo, Professor von Gimmick, and others, all defeated following his catchphrase cry of, “Up and at ‘em, Atom Ant!” Atom Ant was companied in his half-hour of the block by two other features, The Hillbilly Bears and Precious Pupp. The former starred the Rugg family, good old southern folk who were always feuding with their neighbours, while Precious Pupp was an absolute menace, except to his beloved Granny Sweet, who carried him everywhere on her motorcycle.

Secret Squirrel (voiced by the legendary Mel Blanc) was an agent of the International Sneaky Service, receiving orders from Paul Frees’s Double Q, and dispatched on missions with his sidekick, Morocco Mole (also voiced by Frees, but doing a Peter Lorre impersonation). Designated Agent 000, Secret Squirrel often went head-to-head with his archenemy, Goldfinger-parody Yellow Pinkie, but also clashed with the Masked Granny, Hi Spy, and others. As with Atom Ant, Secret Squirrel had two accompanying features in his half of the block. Paul Frees again voiced the title character in Squiddly Diddly, an aspiring musician always running afoul of Bubbleland’s Chief Winchley, while Jeanette van der Pyl brought life to Winsome Witch, a friendly but useless witch who uses the magic words, “Ippity-pippity-pow!” to cast her backfiring spells.

All six segments survived the Winter amalgamation and returned for a short run of new episodes in September 1966, taking each show up to twenty-six episodes, suitable for syndication. Both Atom Ant and Secret Squirrel also got the comic book treatment, with tie-in books published by Gold Key in October 1965 and July 1966, with back-up strips featuring their respective TV partners, and Secret Squirrel even got an LP record, titled Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole, with four songs accompanying an adventure story. Past their original runs, the various characters from The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show popped up in other Hanna-Barbera productions, most notably Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, where Secret Squirrel hires Harvey to get Morocco Mole out of Guantanamo Bay, and Atom Ant is accused of radioactive contamination.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: Something is out there and it’s 1988!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: pre-1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1965 (part 1, 2, 3)

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1967 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1968 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1969 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1970 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1974 (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)