Rankin-Bass adapted Kenneth Grahame's Reluctant Dragon & Mr. Toad for ABC in 1970, but unlike their rebooting of King Kong into a Saturday morning superhero 4 years earlier, kids just weren't into the adventures of the characters from the books Reluctant Dragon & Wind In The Willows, which had previously been adapted into a theatrical feature for Disney nearly 30 years earlier.
ToonTracker uploaded the open & close of the show to YouTube:
The series was cancelled after 1 season, and Rankin-Bass replaced it on the ABC schedule the next year with another licensed property, one you might've heard of. A little group out of Indiana known as the Jackson 5ive, which lasted two seasons. I admit I never saw Reluctant Dragon, save for the above, and having never seen any full episodes, I cannot give it any sort of rating.
2 comments:
Oh, I remember this one very well from my tadpole TV watching days--though ABC had moved it to Sunday morning after its abortive first season. The "Mr. Toad" episodes were dull as dishwater but I thought the "Dragon" cartoons were amusing. Of course, I was only eight years old then so my palate wasn't as sophisticated as most.
"A daisy!" (Ah-choo!)
Funny thing was, after a while, the local ABC affiliate at the time dropped ABC's Sunday block, save for "Discovery", in favor of a locally produced show that introduced footage from Italy, which was, for lack of a better description, surreal.
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