1960's Archives - Page 2 of 24 - Retro Reminiscing Video and Pictures

The Bullwinkle Show

I think one of the reasons Rocky and Bullwinkle still holds up is that when we watched it as kids, we probably weren’t getting half the jokes! The kids got a flying squirrel, a goofy moose and Boris and Natasha constantly trying to cause trouble, while the adults were getting political satire, pop-culture references and some pretty clever wordplay.

The show actually started in 1959 as Rocky and His Friends before moving to NBC in 1961 and becoming The Bullwinkle Show. What surprised me was how much talent was packed into those voices. Bill Scott, who played Bullwinkle, was also the show’s head writer and co-producer. June Foray voiced both Rocky and Natasha, Paul Frees played Boris, and that great narrator’s voice belonged to William Conrad, who many of us later knew as Cannon.

Here’s another one I didn’t know: Bullwinkle’s name reportedly came from a real person, Clarence Bullwinkel, who owned a car dealership near Berkeley and was known by creator Alex Anderson.

And despite how simple the animation sometimes looked, that almost became part of the charm. A lot of the animation work was done in Mexico to keep production costs down, while the writing remained incredibly sharp.

I went back to these cartoons expecting pure childhood nostalgia, but they’re actually funnier when you’re old enough to understand what the writers were sneaking past us!

Flatsy Dolls: They Were Flat and That Was That!

Here’s one that really could only have come out of the late 1960s — Flatsy, the doll whose big selling point was that she was…flat!

But there was actually more thought put into these than I remembered. The dolls were made of soft vinyl with wire inside so you could bend and pose them, and some came mounted in decorative frames that could actually be hung on the wall. You could even wear some of the dolls on your clothes.

I found something interesting in a 1968 issue of Broadcasting magazine: Ideal was already planning network and major-market advertising for its new Flatsys beginning February 1, 1969. The line lasted until 1973 and grew well beyond the dolls in this commercial, with Fashion Flatsys, mini versions, Flatsyville, Candy Mountain and different playsets.

Even the company behind them has a great story. Ideal traced its beginnings to Morris and Rose Michtom, the couple associated with creating the original American Teddy bear after Theodore Roosevelt’s famous 1902 hunting incident.

And somehow that little jingle did its job — “Flatsys, Flatsys, they’re flat and that’s that” is still being remembered more than 50 years later.

Did you actually have a Flatsy, or is it the commercial and jingle you remember most?

Liberace Feelin’ Groovy

This may be one of the strangest—and most wonderfully 1968—things I’ve come across in a while. That’s Liberace getting “groovy” with The Youngfolk on The Red Skelton Hour on March 5, 1968.

And The Youngfolk weren’t just a bunch of dancers thrown together for the show. They were an actual seven-member Los Angeles folk group who recorded for United Artists and had already made several appearances with Red Skelton.

The song, of course, was Paul Simon’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” Simon & Garfunkel recorded it on August 16, 1966—which, amazingly, was 60 years ago this week. Their version wasn’t originally the big single, though. Harpers Bizarre turned it into a #13 hit in 1967 with an arrangement by Leon Russell.

What I love about this clip is watching television try to interpret the whole flower-power generation for a mainstream audience. Giant flowers, bright colors, “groovy” slang—and right in the middle of it all is Liberace, completely committing to the bit.

Even better, Paul Simon eventually admitted he really didn’t care for this song and once jokingly used it as his own punishment after making a mistake onstage!

Do you remember seeing variety shows trying to get “hip” like this back in the late ’60s?

He & She: One Season on TV, 64 Years Together in Real Life

On Friday I shared a post from Classic Movies Digest celebrating Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss and their remarkable 64-year marriage, so I thought this was a perfect time to bring back the opening to their 1967 sitcom, He & She

They met while attending Northwestern University and married in 1961. Then, six years later, CBS gave the real-life couple their own television marriage. Richard played cartoonist Dick Hollister and Paula played his wife Paula, a social worker — something still fairly unusual for a sitcom wife in 1967

Jack Cassidy nearly stole the show as Oscar North, the egotistical actor playing Dick’s comic-book creation Jetman on television. Oscar later became one of the inspirations for Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Unfortunately, audiences never really found He & She. CBS scheduled the sophisticated New York comedy Wednesday nights immediately after Green Acres, and Richard Benjamin later felt the two shows attracted very different audiences. After only 26 episodes, CBS canceled it

But the industry certainly noticed. He & She received five Emmy nominations, including acting nominations for Benjamin, Prentiss and Cassidy, and won for comedy writing. Allan Burns, one of those winning writers, would soon co-create The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Their careers certainly didn’t end with the show. Paula went on to The Parallax View and The Stepford Wives. Richard starred in Goodbye, Columbus, Westworld and The Sunshine Boys, then became the director of My Favorite Year, The Money Pit and Mermaids

One season together on television — and more than six decades together in real life

Does anyone remember He & She, or is this opening completely new to you?

Who remembers when Bugs Bunny was actually on the Kool-Aid package?

This commercial takes us back to around 1965, when Bugs and Elmer Fudd weren’t just Saturday morning entertainment — they were helping General Foods sell the relatively new Pre-Sweetened Kool-Aid

What I love is that they didn’t just drop the characters into a generic ad. Elmer is still chasing that “wascally wabbit,” Bugs is still one step ahead, and somehow the whole thing turns into a Kool-Aid commercial

Legendary animator Tex Avery, who helped shape Bugs Bunny’s personality years earlier, returned to direct some of these commercials. Mel Blanc was still Bugs, but Elmer was voiced here by Hal Smith, who many of us remember better as Otis Campbell on The Andy Griffith Show

Pre-Sweetened Kool-Aid itself was fairly new, introduced in 1964 so you no longer had to add your own sugar. Bugs became so closely tied to the product that his picture appeared right on the packages

And then this commercial gives us another nearly forgotten memory — Kool-Pops. The frozen treats had been around since at least 1960, giving General Foods another way to turn Kool-Aid into something kids could beg Mom to buy

It’s funny how one short commercial can bring back so much at once — Bugs and Elmer, the old Kool-Aid packets, Kool-Pops, and the days when cartoon characters regularly helped decide what ended up in the grocery cart

Do you remember Bugs Bunny on the Kool-Aid packages — and does anyone remember Kool-Pops?

Tiger Joe

As kids, we used to play army, and this commercial is a pretty good demonstration of what that looked like in the early 1960s. We sometimes make fun of kids today for fighting battles on video-game screens, but there’s an interesting full-circle connection — real warfare now makes extensive use of drones and other remotely controlled systems

The toy is the Tiger Joe Tank, introduced by Deluxe Reading in 1961. This was no little tabletop tank — it was about 26 inches long, moved by wired remote control and actually fired plastic shells. Deluxe even suggested putting a little flour or talcum powder in the barrel to create a puff of “smoke” when it fired

What really caught my attention is the line at the end: “Sold at food markets only.” Deluxe Reading deliberately sold many of its big toys through supermarkets. Those oversized colorful boxes could occupy the hard-to-use upper shelves, putting toys right in front of kids tagging along on the weekly shopping trip

Tiger Joe almost feels more like the kind of present Dad would have picked out, but the marketing actually put it directly in the path of whoever was doing the grocery shopping. I found a 1963 supermarket ad selling Tiger Joe for $12.88 — roughly $140 today — and you could leave a $2 deposit and have one held until Christmas

The company was founded by Henry Orenstein, who years later helped bring the idea that became Transformers to Hasbro

Did anyone get a Tiger Joe for Christmas — or spend the whole grocery trip staring up at one on the top shelf?

The Real McCoys

As kids, we used to make fun of the way Walter Brennan walked. Now I sort of walk like him!

Seeing this Real McCoys opening brought back one memory, but then I noticed where the clip came from and got another one — TNN, The Nashville Network. So this turned into a double reminisce for me: remembering a television show from my childhood through a cable network that itself has now disappeared under that name

The Real McCoys premiered in 1957 with Walter Brennan as Grandpa Amos McCoy, heading up a West Virginia family that relocates to a farm in California. Richard Crenna played grandson Luke, Kathleen Nolan was Luke’s wife Kate, Lydia Reed played Hassie, Michael Winkelman was Little Luke and Tony Martinez was farmhand Pepino. The show was filmed at Desilu and co-produced by Danny Thomas.

And about that walk we used to imitate — apparently Walter Brennan was acting it. A Los Angeles Times account notes that Brennan didn’t actually have the limp himself, although he used that distinctive gait for several of his characters. All these years later, I find out the walk we were copying wasn’t even really his!

Brennan was already a major movie star by then and had become the first actor to win three Academy Awards for acting. Richard Crenna had been the squeaky-voiced Walter Denton on Our Miss Brooks before becoming Luke McCoy, and years later many of us would know him as Colonel Trautman in the Rambo movies. Kathleen Nolan made some history of her own in 1975 when she became the first woman elected president of the Screen Actors Guild.

The show was no minor success either. It reached number eight in the Nielsen ratings during 1958–59 and climbed all the way to number five during 1960–61. After five seasons on ABC, it moved to CBS for one final season before ending in 1963.

Then there’s the second memory in this clip. TNN acquired The Real McCoys in 1999 and aired two episodes every weekday afternoon, actually giving the series its first cable-TV run more than three decades after it ended. TNN itself had started as The Nashville Network, became The National Network, disappeared as a name when it became Spike TV in 2003, and that channel eventually became Paramount Network.

So I started out remembering Grandpa Amos and somehow wound up reminiscing about TNN too

Do you remember The Real McCoys — and how many of you also remember watching those old shows on TNN?

The Fantastic Four

How many of you remember this version of The Fantastic Four? Long before superhero movies became huge Hollywood events, Hanna-Barbera was bringing Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm into our homes on Saturday mornings

The series premiered on ABC on September 9, 1967 — amazingly, the very same day ABC’s original Spider-Man cartoon debuted. Only 20 Fantastic Four episodes were made, but Hanna-Barbera made a real effort to keep the show connected to the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby comics. Alex Toth redesigned the characters for animation, and director Lew Marshall went so far as to clip panels directly from Fantastic Four comic books and hand them to his layout and background artists as reference.

There was also some terrific voice talent behind these characters. Radio veteran Gerald Mohr was Reed Richards, Jo Ann Pflug voiced Sue Storm, Paul Frees handled The Thing and several other characters, and Addams Family fans might recognize another familiar connection — Ted Cassidy provided the booming voice of Galactus. Vic Perrin voiced the Silver Surfer

And that opening certainly helped make it memorable. Ted Nichols wrote the theme and background music, giving the show a slightly jazzy, almost grown-up sound compared with many Saturday-morning cartoons of the period.

There were some interesting compromises too. Hanna-Barbera couldn’t use Namor the Sub-Mariner in one adaptation because the character was already tied to The Marvel Super Heroes, so they created Prince Triton instead. Then when Fantastic Four returned to television in 1978, the Human Torch was unavailable because his rights were tied up elsewhere, resulting in the creation of the little robot H.E.R.B.I.E.

What I find especially interesting is that this little 1967 Saturday-morning cartoon still has an influence today. More than half a century later, The Fantastic Four: First Steps included a cartoon within the movie designed to evoke this Hanna-Barbera version

Did you watch the 1967 Fantastic Four when it originally aired, or did you discover it later in reruns?

Top Cat

There are certain cartoon openings where you only need the first few seconds before the entire show comes rushing back, and Top Cat is definitely one of those for me. The limousine, the fancy restaurant, T.C. helping himself to somebody else’s lunch and then heading back to the alley told us almost everything we needed to know about him before the episode even started

What I didn’t realize back then was how much Top Cat owed to another television comedy. T.C. was essentially Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon answer to Phil Silvers’ fast-talking Sergeant Bilko, always working another angle and trying to stay one step ahead of authority. They even brought over Maurice Gosfield, who had played Private Doberman with Silvers, to voice Benny the Ball, whose appearance was partly modeled after Gosfield. Arnold Stang gave T.C. that unmistakable voice, while Allen Jenkins became Officer Dibble

The theme is another big part of why this opening stuck with us. Hoyt Curtin, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera are credited on “The Most Effectual Top Cat,” which managed to introduce T.C.’s personality and his position as leader of the gang in less than a minute. Curtin, of course, was also behind music for an amazing number of Hanna-Barbera favorites

And here’s something I think many of us forget: Top Cat wasn’t originally a Saturday-morning cartoon. It premiered in prime time on ABC in 1961 and lasted only 30 episodes. Those episodes found a much longer life in reruns, and the show became especially beloved outside the United States. In Britain it was even called Boss Cat because a cat food already had the Top Cat name, while in Mexico Don Gato became popular enough to eventually inspire feature films

Did you watch Top Cat during its original prime-time run, or do you remember T.C. and the gang mainly from Saturday-morning reruns?

Mayberry R.F.D.

How many of you kept watching Mayberry after Andy Griffith left? Mayberry R.F.D. continued the familiar small-town setting, but shifted the focus to farmer and town councilman Sam Jones, played by Ken Berry, and his young son Mike

The series still included many familiar faces, including Aunt Bee, Goober, Howard and Emmett. Its first episode even featured the long-awaited wedding of Andy Taylor and Helen Crump, giving longtime viewers a proper goodbye before the new chapter began

What may surprise many of us is how successful the show remained. Mayberry R.F.D. ranked among television’s top ten during its first two seasons and was still number 15 when CBS canceled it as part of the network’s move away from rural programming

This short clip also reminds us of the days when sponsors like Sanka and Post were announced as part of the program itself. Did Mayberry still feel the same to you after Andy left, or was something important missing?