"Saturday Morning Cartoons"Dept.:They had me at the first shot of the pterodactyl with this one when I was a young'un. We didn't have on any of our local stations when I was little but I remember seeing a few while we were vacationing in the US and it blew my mind. Folks - this is what a kids cartoon opening in the 60s was all about - the promise of adventure and swinging jazz music, villains with henchmen who carry rifle sized particle-beam weapons and wear goggles and bullet-proof unitards as they float over a canyon in an anti-gravity Dixie cup that holds three of them at a time. Shortly after this it moved to the "Four Kids And A [fill in the blank]" format (
Scooby Doo,
JabberJaw,
The Funky Phantom, even
Speed Buggy...), but this was as good as it got for a while.
Dig the jazz flute around the point where Jonny's name shows up on screen!
Thurl Ravenscrofft is someone who's name I often mention out here. He was the singer for "You're a Mean One,Mr Grinch" and "Grim Grining Ghosts" (the Disney HAUNTED MANSION theme) but was best known as the voice of Tony The Tiger for almost 50 years. Thurl did the patter singing in the opening for Atom Ant.
Allan Melvin did a lot of cartoon voice work - hear him here as the evil "Big Fats" (and in a very strange way sounds like Gilbert Gottfried on steroids). Howard Morris (Ernest T. Bass on
The Andy Griffith Show, and also the voice of Jughead in the Archie TV cartoons an a lot of other characters) is Atom Ant.
The financial success despite critical drubbing of SPEED RACER last week still means that we might still see a movie version of THE WACKY RACES. Paris Hilton as Penelope Pitstop, anyone? Remember - monkeys and apes make everything better.
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