Hear ye, Hear ye, Potato drew something that is totally not an outdated meme or anything.
(Based on this fanfic)
(Also, for those wondering, the character on the bottom left is Dread Baron and bottom right is Daisy Mayhem)
(TRANSCRIPT UNDER CUT)
Dastardly: Guys, I have something to confess...
Dastardly: In 1958, I shot a boulder which hit the train car the sheriff and deputy who were trying to arrest us (me and Dirty), which was a passenger car. I killed 30 people.
Who did you expect, Dick Dastardly? No, its just his brother/cousin/copy, the Dread Baron from the 1977 Hanna-Barbera crossover show, Laff-A-Lympics.
Seeing Dread and Mumbly on the show for the first time as a kid was confusing, as I'm sure it was for other people who also watched the show for the first time. Who is this guy, what show is he from, who is Mumbly, and why do they look like Dastardly and Muttley? Well, for more info about the characters, read down below.
(i swear i think im going to get a copyright strike soon on my channel by posting these, but oh well lol. the internet deserves more of these characters on an accessible platform)
According to various sources, apparently Hanna-Barbera had some copyright issues for their show Wacky Races with Heatter-Quigley, the game show production company (which owned Hollywood Squares) that also owned some of the rights to the show. HB didn't seem to have any problem with making two spinoffs from Wacky Races, so I don't know if the rumors are entirely true, but it's the best explanation I've seen.
At any rate, Dread Baron and Mumbly were made as expies (legal copies so HB wouldn’t get in trouble, and no one would be the wiser) from Dick Dastardly and Muttley, and they were used for a good number of years for both Laffalympics and the 1987 TV movie Yogi Bear and the Magical Flight of the Spruce Goose. They were used so that the studio could avoid any lawsuits at the time.
Mumbly was used first on his own show in 1976 called simply The Mumbly Cartoon Show, where he starred as a canine detective alongside his "gloryhound" partner Shnooker. While Muttley himself was a popular character, the idea for Mumbly was to just redo the character design while keeping all the other characteristics, which doesn't really work too well to me. It's Muttley, and yet it isn't. I think the show also tried to show the character in a heroic light since the old Magnificent Muttley shorts from the 1969 show worked well enough in showing Muttley as a hero. Mumbly was also pretty much a more cheery version of Droopy, where the show employed a lot of gags from the old Droopy cartoons, but they were way less inspired. This was all before the 1993 show "Droopy, Master Detective", by the way.
A week after the last episode of the Mumbly Cartoon Show was shown on TV, Laffalympics premiered on September 10, 1977. Dread was pretty much a more lowkey version of Dastardly, but he still said "drat" a lot. Some fans ask how could Mumbly turn to villainy, but they needed an animal mascot for the villain team, the Really Rottens, and Mumbly was the only legal, partially famous “evil” animal available, so he was chosen to do it.
Would the show be better if it included Dastardly? Who knows, but I think the show would've treated him the same as Dread, so I think the character dodged a bullet, in a sense. I really disliked this show as a kid, and rewatching the show now as an adult, I still dislike it. The show was poorly animated, had horrible writing, and it focused too much on the games and not on the characters, which I disliked. The show cared so little about itself that by the end of its run they started calling Mumbly as Muttley. That, or they got confused with their own characters. Pretty ironic in a way, for a corporation that thrived on making copies of their own characters again and again.
If anyone is still reading this, I'd recommend you to check out the Laffalympics comics instead: it has great humor, great character writing, and at some moments some great drawings and art. It also doesn't focus too much on the sports themselves. It's everything I wanted in such a crossover.
The show still has its fans, up til today! Especially since this was one of the biggest crossover events HB had done at the time, and many kids were excited to see all their favs playing along with each other, especially scooby.
In 1987, long after Dastardly and Muttley returned to the small screen for Yogi's Treasure Hunt, Dread Baron and Mumbly returned for the last time for the Spruce Goose movie, voiced interestingly enough by Dastardly's own voice actor, Paul Winchell. The movie feels like an extended episode of Yogi's Treasure Hunt, including the fact that both Dread and Mumbly were looking for treasure, and that they had somehow stole Dastardly's plane to get to it. I have a feeling that they were supposed to be Dastardly and Muttley, but they were changed for copyright reasons. I guess making a show with them is ok, but making a TV movie with them is a no-no.
The whole copyright thing was eventually rectified, I believe, and the Dread Baron and Mumbly characters have been in retirement for over 30 years, but who knows? Maybe someone will resurrect them for some sort of metajoke in a future show.
Fun Facts: Shnooker's voice actor, John Stephenson, was also the voice of Dread Baron for laffalympics. He also did the voice for Mildew Wolf for the show. Mildew was originally from his own show called "It's the Wolf", where he was originally voiced by Paul Lynde. Paul Lynde couldn't continue the voice because he became one of the main stars on Hollywood Squares, where he was famous for both his humorous lines and for always being center square. Paul Lynde was also the original voice actor for the Hooded Claw: a villain who starred on the Wacky Races spinoff show The Perils of Penelope Pitstop.
