MarkTheShark
03-30-2009, 08:33 AM
Yeah, I've collected a lot of stuff on the Jay Ward and TTV cartoons and maybe I'm somewhat knowledgeable about them...but this has me stumped.
Recently I got hold of copies of a few Underdog shows from some rerun version...the format of these shows is all four parts of a four-part storyline together in one half-hour, with a "short cartoon" (a minute and a half), which is...TWINKLES!:confused:
The only time I know of Underdog airing in the "four parts in one half hour" format would be the 1969-1973 NBC Saturday morning reruns. And the conventional wisdom is that the Twinkles shorts were "phased out" by the late 1960s. Some sources say it was because they were essentially commercials, but if you actually watch them, the Twinkles cartoons themselves are completely separate from any commercial message. It's possible they were considered objectionable for the same reasons "Linus The Lionhearted" was considered objectionable...but by the mid-1960s, General Mills was still making Twinkles cereal, but had retired the elephant as a mascot. I know the Twinkles shorts were still airing as part of the 15-minute "King & Odie" show in the mid-1960s, but this seems like it has to be later than that.
Unless these are just random scraps of segments cobbled together, and they didn't actually ever air like this. (They are all in color, but there are some odd things in some of them, like different versions of the "Underdog song" appearing two or three times in a half-hour -- this leads me to believe some of this may have been spliced together by some collector somewhere down the line.)
I got these through a fairly well-known online source, by the way...it just shocked me that there were some Twinkles out there in color. I wouldn't say they're "good," but they definitely qualify as rare and unusual...
Recently I got hold of copies of a few Underdog shows from some rerun version...the format of these shows is all four parts of a four-part storyline together in one half-hour, with a "short cartoon" (a minute and a half), which is...TWINKLES!:confused:
The only time I know of Underdog airing in the "four parts in one half hour" format would be the 1969-1973 NBC Saturday morning reruns. And the conventional wisdom is that the Twinkles shorts were "phased out" by the late 1960s. Some sources say it was because they were essentially commercials, but if you actually watch them, the Twinkles cartoons themselves are completely separate from any commercial message. It's possible they were considered objectionable for the same reasons "Linus The Lionhearted" was considered objectionable...but by the mid-1960s, General Mills was still making Twinkles cereal, but had retired the elephant as a mascot. I know the Twinkles shorts were still airing as part of the 15-minute "King & Odie" show in the mid-1960s, but this seems like it has to be later than that.
Unless these are just random scraps of segments cobbled together, and they didn't actually ever air like this. (They are all in color, but there are some odd things in some of them, like different versions of the "Underdog song" appearing two or three times in a half-hour -- this leads me to believe some of this may have been spliced together by some collector somewhere down the line.)
I got these through a fairly well-known online source, by the way...it just shocked me that there were some Twinkles out there in color. I wouldn't say they're "good," but they definitely qualify as rare and unusual...