Linus The Lionhearted

This is a piece from a cartoon show that will probably never see the light of day on DVD or any other home video format, Linus The Lionhearted. The show ran on CBS on Saturday morning in the 1960's and starred several characters who all started out as trademark symbols for various Post cereals. There was Linus, a lion who ruled a jungle (the star for Crispy Critters cereal), Lovable Truly, a mailman (Alpha-Bits), Sugar Bear (Sugar Crisps) and So Hi, a little Chinese boy (Rice Krinkles). It's certainly not unusual for cereals to have cartoon spokesmen in commercials like the Trix rabbit, Captain Crunch and Quake and Quisp but this is the only time I know of where those characters were put into full length cartoons.

The cartoons weren't bad and deserve to be remembered as more than just extended commercials. The animation was good, the stories, like this Linus example, tended to have an adult level of humor as well as the kiddie stuff and the voice talent included some well known actors who were associated with some of the prime time CBS shows Post sponsored like "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "The Andy Griffith Show". Sheldon Leonard and Carl Reiner are doing the voices here and I remember Howard Morris and Jonathan Winters doing voices in some of the other cartoons.

Obviously the commercial ties of these cartoons make them verboten for release today even though I don't think Post even makes most of those cereals any more so this is a real rarity. Here is Linus The Lionhearted in "Travel Is Broadening".

Thinking Pink

I recently went through the third disc of the Pink Panther Cartoon DVD collection and I was a touch flummoxed by what I saw. The cartoons all looked beautiful from a drawing standpoint but the cartoons themselves varied wildly in quality. Some were funny and some were just odd with a lot of random visual gags that had no flow or internal logic.

After a little Internet digging, I discovered I was watching the last few theatrical cartoons in the series from 1969 and a bunch of the early made-for-TV ones which started up two years later. These were all produced by Friz Freling's company, De Patie-Freling, so it was no surprise that a lot of old Warner Brothers hands like Art Davis, Hawley Pratt and even Robert McKimson, directed these but honestly, the humor sometimes felt like the crappy Warners cartoons of the Sixties. There were oddities like the Panther being a stowaway on board a cruise ship and running away from an attacking deck chair or his taking a pet fish for a walk (!). I'm still interested to see how the series was in its celebrated early days so I put the first disc in the series into my Netflix queue. Friz himself even directed some of those. Hopefully they'll be more coherent.