Lo-Tech Cartoons

I was a lucky kid. On Saturday mornings and after school I got to watch cartoons on television featuring comical and cute characters who were most often animals. Even the villains in these cartoons were cute in a kind of non-threatening way. But the most interesting thing about all the cartoons I watched on the tube as a kid was the wonderful absence of high technology. The big four cartoon makers in the 1950s and 1960s were Warner Brothers, Disney, Walter Lantz and Hanna-Barbera. A lot of their cartoons were made in the 1940s and were also aired prior to theatrical movies.

Warner Brothers cartoons were my favorite, with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck sharing the highest honors, followed by Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester the Cat and Yosemite Sam. The interesting thing about all these characters is that they were not really good guys. Bugs Bunny was a rabbit who loved to rattle anybody’s chain. He was a pest and a menace but you just had to like him. Daffy Duck was temperamental and vengeful but who cared? He was a laughable goof with a pronounced lisp and ideas that always backfired on him. Foghorn Leghorn was a lazy southern rooster who liked to devil a stupid, lazy dog. Sylvester was a stupid cat (with a very pronounced sloppy lisp) who could not outsmart a little, sissy, yellow bird. And Yosemite Sam was a southern outlaw who hated Bugs Bunny more than anything in the world. And none of them carried ray guns or cell phones or had pals with cyborg heads and cloned anime bodies. Hip-Hip Hooray for non-computer-generated cartoons.

I seemed to outgrow Disney’s cartoon characters when I reached puberty. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy were fun when my feet still didn’t touch the floor at the table but they became boring as I got older. Walter Lantz’s Woody Woodpecker, Chilly Willy and Droopy weren’t very funny anyway and I actually disliked Woody Woodpecker because he was an impish little brat more than anything else. Still, they were wonderfully low-key and low-tech.

Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters took over where Disney and Walter Lantz left off. Yogi Bear and Quickdraw McGraw were hard to beat. But Huckleberry Hound and Auggie Doggie were my favorite. They were dogs. One was blue and grown up and stupid and the other was a brown beagle kid who always managed to get into trouble with his father, Doggie Daddy. Liking cute cartoon characters today would not be cool or masculine but I have no regrets about my past fondness for these kind of cartoon characters. I still like them but I can’t find them on the tube anymore.

The human exception to the cute animal character rule, as far as Hanna-Barbera was concerned, were The Flintstones and The Jetsons. I really like Fred and Barney and thought Wilma and Betty were "neat" (i.e. "cool") cartoon wives but nothing beat the space-age Jetson family for me. I liked them all and never missed an episode.

Still, with all the color and imagined three-dimensionality of my favorite cartoons, the first one I ever viewed on TV remains my favorite to this day. When I watched Captain Kangaroo in the late 1950s and they finally got around to airing another episode of Tom Terrific, I was in cartoon heaven. Tom and his dog Manfred and the arch villain Crabby Appleton were merely black stick figures on a white background but they immediately stole my kid heart and captured my boundless imagination.