THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1973 – 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!

1973-74

With a massive 31.2 rating, CBS’s All in the Family had no competition for the top spot as 1973’s most popular show, with over twenty million viewers tuning in weekly to see what daft old racist Archie Bunker would do next. In fact, CBS controlled the top ten shows to such an extent that only NBC’s Sanford and Son (like All in the Family, a British transplant) earned a spot on the rundown. NBC really couldn’t cope with a CBS line-up that also included The Waltons, M*A*S*H, Hawaii Five-O, and new arrival Kojak, and Police Story seemed to be their only new show to make any impact.

ABC, though, had new smash The Six Million Dollar Man at number eleven, and scored decent placings for Kung Fu, The Streets of San Francisco, and the debuting Happy Days. Although ABC would have preferred to land more blows on the Tiffany Network, they could still rely on Monday Night Football and their various movie slots to pull in viewers, although their schedules – like those of CBS and NBC – were very light on sci-fi and fantasy shows. But what about Saturday mornings, when kids got up before their parents and fixed themselves to the TV for four hours? This is the story of 1973’s cartoon attractions…

Goober and the Ghost Chasers (ABC): After Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! had scored big in 1969 with its mix of teen protagonists, silly taking animal, and more mysteries than you can shake a stick at, Hanna-Barbera repeated the formula at every opportunity, often with mixed results. First up was Josie and the Pussycats (with a snickering cat in the Scooby role), swiftly followed by The Funky Phantom (a civil war ghost), The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan (Chu Chu the dog), and Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space (Bleep the alien).

Flushed with success and not wanting to veer too far from their Scooby/Flintstones formulae, 1973 brought two new Scooby clones in the shape of Speed Buggy (see Titans of Telephemera: Hanna-Barbera, part two) and Goober and the Ghost Chasers. Goober was an Afghan hound, voiced by ventriloquist Paul Winchell, who tags along with three teen reporters for Ghost Chasers Magazine. Ted and Tina were roughly analogous to Scooby’s Fred and Daphne, with Gilly a mix of Velma and Shaggy, and the foursome travelled around in a weird looking van that might as well have been called The Mystery Machine.

Where Goober and Scooby differed were in the former’s ability to turn invisible, something that happened when he got scared, and in the curious phenomenon of an appearance by The Partridge Family (voiced by their live-action counterparts) in eight of the first eleven episodes. In all, sixteen episodes were produced, airing between September and December 1973, with the last new episode airing before the tie-in metal lunchbox and Wonder Bread trading card set were released.

Both Goober and Speed Buggy were one-season wonders, replaced in the 1974 line-up by Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch (another car) and Partridge Family 2200AD, which saw Goober’s guest stars given their own show, solving time-travelling mysteries with the aid of, yes, a robot dog. Several episodes of Goober and the Ghost Chasers were released on VHS in 1986 and the complete series is available as a manufacture on demand DVD from Warner Archives. As always, though, if you know where to look you can sample some ectoplasmic excitement for yourself…

Bailey’s Comets (CBS): Joe Ruby and Ken Spears had met at Hanna-Barbera in 1959, where they worked as staff writers, eventually opting to go freelance but still pitching the studio on concepts like Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and Jabberjaw. They also worked with Sid and Marty Krofft, and with DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, and it was for the latter that they created Bailey’s Comets, a spin on the formula that exploded after 1963’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World became a smash hit.

Bailey’s Comets are a team of roller-skaters, led by Barnaby Bailey (voiced by Carl Esser), engaged in a cross-country race with other teams of skaters to discover clues that will lead them to a million-dollar prize hidden somewhere in America. Alongside Bailey were his girlfriend Candy, bossy redhead Sarge, ditzy Bunny, and the banana-crazy Pudge, and with the help of skate-based inventions from team mechanic Wheelie they race through thirty-two episodes (two per half hour show) in their search for gold.

Standing in their way are a wacky selection of rival teams, including The Texas Black Hats (cowboys on skate-wearing horses), The Jekyll-Hydes (English nobles who could turn into monsters), The Cosmic Rays (aliens), The Broomer Girls (witches with roller-skates on their brooms), and The Mystery Mob, a team whose identity is unknown to the other skaters as they are constantly hidden by a cloud of dust.

Someone at either DePatie-Freleng or CBS must have felt optimistic as, by the end of the first season, the prize had yet to be claimed, but there was no second season for Bailey and company. Ironically, it was replaced in the line-up by re-runs of Scooby-Doo and Ruby and Spears moved on to act as story consultants for the live-action TV version of Planet of the Apes, eventually forming their own production company, Ruby-Spears Productions, in 1977.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids (NBC): Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! had been inspired by The Archie Show and had initially been created with the kids as a touring rock ‘n’ roll band. No idea – good or bad – is ever truly forgotten in TV and after Josie and the Pussycats (another Archie property) had struck gold in 1970 for Hanna-Barbera, the studio decided to create its own group of teen heartthrobs, this time working as undercover government agents.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids debuted on September 8^th 1973 and those tuning in were introduced to the titular band, led by hunky Butch and also including beautiful Merilee, uptight Steffy, and drummer Wally (voiced by Micky Dolenz). The team were given their missions by a supercomputer named Mr Socrates who is also somehow allergic to Elvis, Wally’s mischievous dog.

Songs for the show were composed by Hoyt Curtin and Paul DeKorte, and four songs from the show were released on a pair of singles from Romar Records, run by the man who discovered Frankie Avalon, Robert P Marcucci. A proposed album never appeared but the music was just the backdrop to the crime-fighting action, with the gang facing down counterfeiters, boat thieves, kidnappers, gold smugglers, and more.

A single season of just thirteen episodes was all that Butch and company received, their brand of bubblegum pop outdated by 1973, although the band did make several appearances in Sealab 2021, Adult Swim’s ironic remix of the original series, and turned up in Jellystone, the Cartoon Network’s anarchic alternative world where all the H-B characters live in the eponymous town. The show is available on DVD from Warner Archives and although there is little in the way of full episodes on popular free video-sharing sites, you can thrill to a compilation of the band’s “hits” on YouTube.

Jeannie/My Favorite Martians (CBS): It wasn’t all crime-fighting dogs and teen heartthrobs that made up the 1973 Fall Saturday morning line-up, there were also a pair of 1960s sitcoms brought back as cartoons, using the wider scope available for animated adventures to take those concepts way beyond their live-action counterparts.

Jeannie, from Hanna-Barbera, was a take on I Dream of Jeannie, the popular Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden affair that ran from 1965 to 1970 on NBC. In this version, the sultry genie’s bottle is washed up on a beach and found by teenage surfer Corey. Jeannie is now also a teenager and has apprentice Babu in tow, his failed attempts at magic providing comic relief for the Archie-style high school adventures that see Corey and Jeannie engage in a cautious dating ritual.

Airing as the first part of an hour-long block with Jeannie was My Favorite Martians, a spin-off from the singular My Favorite Martian which ran for three seasons from 1963 on CBS. The original starried Ray Walston and Bill Bixby as the titular Martian (known as Uncle Martin) and his human host Tim, but they opted out of Filmation’s cartoon sequel, replaced by Jonathan Harris and Howard Morris. The premise saw Martin’s nephew Andromeda arrive to cause chaos for the pair, along with Tim’s niece Katie.

Neither show managed to gain as much of a following as the original sitcoms and both were gone after just sixteen episodes, consigned to spin-off hell alongside AfterMASH, The Brady Brides, and Tabitha. They’ve never been released on home video and, although Jeannie and Babu have appeared in occasional Hanna-Barbera productions, it’s probably for the best that they’re long forgotten (except on YouTube, where the complete runs of both are inexplicably available).

Next time on The Telephemera Years: Set the controls for the year 2000 where CONSPIRACY abounds!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (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: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1977 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1980 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1982 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1984 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)