My Not-So-Favorite Intros: Fangface

I love a lot of Ruby-Spears content. From Centurions to Mega Man the team of Joe Ruby and Ken Spears produced a lot of really good action shows, and some decent comedies and superhero parodies. Not on any of those lists is Fangface, one of their first shows, featuring a werewolf who fights monsters alongside their teenage friends. Even I’m seeing the Scooby-Doo parallels with this show and I don’t immediately list every “teens solve a mystery” as a Scooby-Doo knockoff. There are quite a few but I don’t necessarily agree with the full list.

Fangface was one of their earliest shows, airing between 1978 and 1980, the second season introducing a nephew with the same curse. Recently my reviewer colleague The Rowdy Reviewer re-posted his old review of the show and that’s what inspired me to look up the intro…which is just as unimpressive as I remember.

I’m not against a show adding exposition into the intro to catch up new viewers who came in late, to get them up to speed. However, here it sounds like they read the copy from the show pitch to ABC and called it good. Compare to the aforementioned The Centurions, where they at least tried to make it sound dramatic. The narrator here doesn’t even make it sound funny or even interesting. It’s a dry read in a narrator’s voice and that’s it.

I’m also sure you noticed the Scooby scene ripoff from the Scooby-Doo Where Are You intro so I’m not even going to bother posting it. I think there are moments from other Hanna-Barbera mystery solving shows as well that “inspired” the shots of the monsters. It’s kind of lazy. I know Ruby-Spears Productions was just starting out from their HB days but it would be like Joe and Bill using the Tom & Jerry intro as their inspiration…and I don’t mean the time they ripped off themselves with the Mumbly Show intro because that was years later.

Season two would introduce Fangpuss, but that was when Ruby-Spears collected their comedic adventure shows into The Plastic Man Comedy Adventure Show (though it included Goldie Gold & Action Jack, which was light in tone but hardly a comedy), so it doesn’t have its own intro. However I’m pretty sure it would be the same thing given that the Plastic Man Comedy Adventure Show as well as the previous Plastic Man cartoon  suffered from the same problem. If it later got its own intro in syndication I couldn’t find it on YouTube.

I know they were starting out but you’d think they were part of Hanna-Barbera long enough to come up with a better intro than this. They even worked on Scooby-Doo Where Are You? and that had a better intro. Scroll back up and watch that review from Rowdy and you’ll see the show itself also wasn’t very good. Luckily they got better. I’ll show you tomorrow with that Centurions intro.