The Original Ghostbusters. No, really. Bob Burns, Larry Storch and Forrest Tucker.

To wrap up Hallowe’en Month at When It Was Cool, let’s look at some spooky 1970s Saturday morning TV shows.

First, the original Ghostbusters from 1975. Spencer (Larry Storch), Tracy the Gorilla (Bob Burns) and Kong (Forrest Tucket) are bumbling detectives fighting vampires, monsters, ghosts and the like. There’s a little bit of Borscht Belt comedy, some vaudeville humor and a lot of silly gags. Some famous character actors show up as bad guys like Ted Knight as a ghost, Bernie Kopell as Dr. Frankenstein and Jim Backus as Eric the Red. If you loved F-Troop, you’d probably enjoy Storch and Tucker here.

Then, after the success of Scooby Doo for Hanna Barbera in the early 1970s, there were quite a number of mystery-solving teens with animal sidekicks and we spotlight a couple of them: The Funky Phantom and Goober and the Ghost Chasers.

Kids, when we say popular culture was always better in the old days, just point to some of these and say “Not so fast.”

In this episode, we look at what happens when a studio makes a sequel without its creator and without its star and its more successful cartoon analog.

In 1968, Mirisch Films decided to make a third Pink Panther without Blake Edwards, Peter Sellers and Henry Mancini. And we got Inspector Clouseau, directod by veteran comedy producer/director Bud Yorkin and starring Alan Arkin, in between making The Russians Are Coming and Catch-22. If every a film was less than the sum of its parts, it’s this film, which just doesn’t work on so many levels. But its an interesting study in what happens when you remove the creators that make something special.

We also take a look at The Inspector, the animated film/tv series that actually preceded the aforementioned film by three years. The second animated spin-off series from the Pink Panther franchise debuted a year after the first Pink Panther cartoon won an Oscar. The Inspector (and his assistant Doux-Doux) are voiced by Pat Harrington Jr and The Commissioner is originally voiced by the recently-departed Larry Storch and later by Paul Frees. There were 34 cartoons eventually made for either the movies or Saturday morning TV, with such great episodes titles as Napoleon Blown Aparte and Toulouse La Trick. Full of traditional cartoon gags like exploding bombs and surrealistic situations, your tolerance for them in 2022 may be determined by your tolerance for comedy French and Spanish accents.

The Plot Podcast - Episode 8 - Spooky Seventies Saturday Morning TV

The Plot - Episode 4 - Inspector Clouseau / The Inspector