Monday, March 23, 2015

Terrible Shows I Like: The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

 
I thought I knew my Hanna-Barbera. Not just The Flintstones and Jonny Quest and the other big guns, but all the Scooby knock-offs that filled my Saturday mornings in the 1970s – Clue Club, Funky Phantom, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids. I can banter on The Hair Bear Bunch, discuss the finer points of Devlin and name each member of the Chan Clan.

So it was humbling when, last year, I discovered an H-B series that I had not only never watched, but never knew existed.

The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn debuted in 1968 on NBC, airing Sunday nights at 7pm. Canceled after 20 episodes, the series was rerun as part of The Banana Splits Hour in the 1970s. 



That’s the part that confuses me because I watched the Banana Splits as a kid and remember several of the features between the Splits’ skits, like The Three Musketeers (who could forget that annoying pissant, Tooly?), Arabian Nights and the wacky serial Danger Island. But if I had watched Huckleberry Finn I would remember, because bizarre concepts like this one are hard to forget.

For those as oblivious to its existence as I was, here’s a brief introduction. Mark Twain’s iconic literary characters Huck Finn, Becky Thatcher and Tom Sawyer (all played by real actors) are chased into a cave by the villainous Injun Joe. They emerge on the other side and become lost in an ever-changing world of Hanna-Barbera animation. 





For the remainder of the series, the three young friends wander into jungles and deserts and pirate ships and frozen wastelands, surviving various escapades while always trying to make their way back to Hannibal, Missouri.

I found it all rather ridiculous on first viewing. Why these characters, and not three present-day teenagers with whom young viewers could more easily identify? Perhaps the idea was to leverage their built-in name recognition (this was the era before Huck Finn was banned from school libraries). But while it’s more enjoyable to read Twain than most novels assigned in English class, I doubt there were many students eager to follow Tom, Huck and Becky into more adventures.

The cast was unable to convey the same qualities that made the characters memorable in the books. Michael Shea’s Huck is not the crude outcast Twain envisioned, but a wide-eyed, easygoing country boy given to exclamations of “Criminy!” while fleeing from Mongol hordes or Egyptian mummies.

Lu Ann Haslam’s Becky is sweet but not as clever as she had to be in the book to catch Tom’s eye. Here she’s given little more to do than cheer on the boys as they deal with the villain of the week (“Hurry, Tom!” “Watch out, Huck!”). Only Kevin Schultz’s Tom Sawyer retains some of the mischievous wit and heroic streak he had in Twain’s novels.  



The blend of live-action with animation was uncharted territory for Hanna-Barbera, though audiences had certainly seen this trick before – most famously perhaps in Mary Poppins. It’s handled well here, which is surprising as the H-B studio has never been synonymous with technological wizardry.

The young leads do their best to react to hand-drawn backgrounds and characters, with inconsistent results. In “Menace in the Ice,” you would think barefoot Huck might look a little more uncomfortable after walking across miles of snow.

So, not a great show, though I will understand if I hear opposing views in the comments from those who grew up with it. Nostalgia certainly makes it easier for me to happily overlook the flaws in Wonderbug and The Secrets of Isis.

But against my better judgment, I do enjoy it.  There’s irresistible comfort in watching H-B animation from this era, and hearing the familiar voices (Don Messick, Janet Waldo, Daws Butler, Paul Frees) featured in all of the company’s shows.

And just when you think you’ve got its formula figured out, The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will surprise you. In an episode called  “The Gorgon’s Head” there’s a quiet moment when Huck and Becky talk about how long they’ve been away, and how summer has turned to fall back in Hannibal, and about the people that must be missing them. You’d never see that kind of raw emotion in Speed Buggy.

I also really like the theme song, another H-B asset (sometimes their songs are better than the shows!). It plays over a live-action closing credit sequence set on a Mississippi steamboat, which makes me wonder if it takes place before the characters got lost, or is meant to be reassurance that they eventually do find their way home. It’s the only time you see the three friends really happy.  



Sadly, there was no final episode to provide any resolution. But how great would it have been if Hanna-Barbera characters had been included in 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit? When Eddie Valiant drives into Toon Town, we might have glimpsed Tom, Huck and Becky, now in their 30s but wearing the same clothes, still trying to find that elusive cave that will take them back to Missouri.

Other Terrible Shows I Like:


8 comments:

  1. I had to read "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (which may have been entitled "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" for the edition I read) for my 11th grade English class. (Yes, I had to put up with the dreaded N-word. I'm half Filipino myself.) I had watch the 1985 feature film "The Adventures of Mark Twain" in eighth grade. Mr. Twain's memoir "Life on the Mississippi" was adapted into a movie of the same name that originally aired on PBS in 1980. A young, pre-"All My Children" Marcy Walker appeared in the movie version. The Southern accent she utilized sounded so cute!

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  2. I remember this show from The Banana Splits Hour which I watched sporadically after school in the 70's. I had no idea it had been a stand-alone show, I had always thought it was made to be a component of Banana Splits. I remember being frustrated that I couldn't follow the story straight through; I don't remember if it's because I didn't always make it home in time or because the local UHF station showed the Banana Splits episodes out of order. Whatever the reason, I liked it but would have liked it much better if I could have followed it consistently. It's a shame it isn't available on disc. I see there's a Region 2 release of The Banana Splits Season 1, but the description on Amazon lists only The Three Musketeers, Arabian Nights and Danger Island as component features.

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  3. I also remember it as part of the Banana Splits Show, in syndication, where The Adventures of Gulliver also joined the package. I have to say, the others at school talked up Danger Island and the Musketeers a lot more than Tom and Huck.

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  4. My brother and I use to watch "The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" every Saturday morning along w/ "The Adventures of Gulliver." You can't compare this to a Twain novel. It's Saturday Morning cartoons that we enjoyed around late '60's or early '70's. I caught a few on youtube and at onetime the Boomerang channel aired them years ago. I'm still waiting for both to be released on DVD but doubt it will ever happen.

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  5. http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/New-Adventures-Huck-Finn-The-Complete-Series/22303

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  6. I remember this show when I was a kid in Chicago. I probably saw it on Banana Splts, but somehow remember it being rerun on Saturday afternoons on WGN. I was only 4 when it originally ran in the half hour slot before Disney. That was the mistake NBC made in scheduling the show. It was imaginative and fun, but it may not have been seen in all markets. Bak in the 60s, there were fewer TV stations. Sometimes, in the smaller markets, there were only 2 stations and one station would have a primary network affiliation while that station would fit in the programming of a second network affiliation wherever it could. Likely, the show was either pre-empted by sports often or broadcast at an odd time. If it had been shown after Disney (Disney at 7/6 Central and Finn at 8/7, the series might have lasted longer because The Mothers-in-Law followed and was very popular. It might also have been shown at 8/7 Central on Friday or Saturday night, it would have gained more of an audience. It may also have only been ordered as a fill in for Wild Kingdom, which had the time slot in 1967-68 and regained the time slot in February of 1969. It definitely is easier to broadcast and pay for a show with a built-in sponsor than air an expensive experiment where the network had to convince a sponsor to carry the show. I suppose that almost any show presented to a network with a built-in sponsor would go on the air first. TV afficiandos probably know stories about the early days of TV where sponsors and stars were paired. Texaco didBerle and Hope while the Jack Benny Show (as we know it today) was at one point "The Lucky Strike Show with Jack Benny".

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  7. I loved watching the steamboat at the end. I now believe the video of the boat itself came from the 1943 movie DIXIE. For that movie, the CUMBERLAND was "played" by the San Francisco Bay sternwheeler, the Captain Weber. Unfortunately, the Captain Weber was destroyed by fire, the same year the movie was released. https://steamboats.com/jpgs/CaptainWeberFire43withCaption.jpg

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