Some of you older folks may remember Mumbly, the leader of the villainous “Really Rottens” from Laff-A-Lympics. Except he was a hero on his own show, The Mumbly Cartoon Show where I think he was a secret agent or something. The intro calls him a detective. Anyway, here’s that intro.
I stumbled upon this (I saw one of the shorts maybe once years ago but not the opening) and recognized the intro rather quickly.
Hanna-Barbera of course got their start doing cartoons like Tom & Jerry for MGM, and obtained the characters when the movie company shut down their animation division. (Now they’re owned by WarnerMedia after Ted Turner’s Time Warner bought the Hanna-Barbera library for his Cartoon Network and AT&T ended up recently buying Time Warner.) This show aired in 1975 while Mumbly’s show aired in 1976. Could they really not come up with a new theme song? The look of the intro even looks like The Tom & Jerry Show‘s intro in the first few second. Now I wonder if any other shows reused that intro?
This wasn’t worth a full article so I thought it was something different for the morning post.
It didn’t help that Mumbly himself was a rip-off of H-B’s Muttley from their shows “Wacky Races” and “Dastardly and Muttley.” By the mid-1970’s, original ideas were getting scarce at Hanna-Barbera.
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Mumbly was a good guy until Laff-A-Lympics so outside of the laugh and the way they talk (which may be where they got confused) Mumbly and Muttley are quite different.
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