While Al Capp's seminal comic strip, L'il Abner, never became an animated series, one of the supporting cast made the transition, and it wasn't very successful.
Hanna-Barbera acquired a license in 1979 to bring the armless, shape-changing Shmoo to television, but by taking him out of his familiar milieu and pairing him with a generic group of amateur crime-solvers, who were also running a small comics company for their primary vocation, they felt required to christen the series, The New Shmoo:
Two months into the season, the series was merged with Fred & Barney Meet The Thing to form the equally ridiculous 90 minute Fred & Barney Meet The Shmoo, but all that did was postpone the inevitable. Shmoo shuffled off the air after 1 season, and the rights lie with either the Capp estate or with WB, as I believe reruns have aired on Boomerang in recent years.
Today, if someone wanted to revive the Shmoo, it would be a CGI series, you can bank on it. And it might work the second time around.
Rating: B-.
4 comments:
I remember this show! It's been forever since I've even seen the opening credits and reminded me that Shmoo wasn't always teamed up with Fred & Barney!
I never knew who Shmoo was since the Lil Abner comics weren't running in any of our area newspaper strips, although my parents DID know. I thought Shmoo was an entirely new creation! Silly me!!
It looks like the creators were looking to merge Scooby Doo, Goober & The Ghost Chasers and Fangface all in one show. No wonder it didn't do well.
The merged Fred & Barney Meet The Shmoo was more of a misnomer, really, since they only appeared together in interstital skits, IIRC.
As for Shmoo's solo series, H-B can be counted as guilty of plugging Shmoo in as another Scooby-Doo clone, but what else could they have done back then? That was the formula that was successful, regardless of how many failures came from that.
I watched some of the Scooby-Doo shows growing up, but at the time, the only clones I saw were Josie and The Pussycats, and The Amazing Chan and The Chan Clan. I also didn't know they were supposed to be rehashes of Scooby, guess I just couldn't see that they weren't differentiated enough. I wouldn't even know of this show until years later, when I discovered it online and I began watching it there earlier this year. I've gone through most of the series and I'm neutral to it. Although it may be average, I didn't find it to be that bad, I still consider it to be much better than Fangface anyway (based on a couple video reviews I watched on that). Regardless of the gripes several others may have with this and other Scooby clones (though understandable), this one I consider my most favorite of all the Scooby rehashes I saw. Even though there are certain, other H-B shows I like more than this, I still find it enjoyable enough, despite for what it is. At least it was also the very last of the Scooby clones, emerging at the tail end of the 1970s and I thought this ended that trend on a decent note, even though H-B found its next show-cloning trend with the Smurfs in the '80s. One reason I'm so unbiased towards this is because I've always had a thing for shape-shifting characters like Shmoo and at least he was more useful than Scooby. To name one thing that is slightly different: The "you meddling kids" line or some variation of it was rarely used in this. Nita is one of my favorite H-B characters, due to, besides being a fine muchacha, at least she never was a damsel-in-distress, unlike the Scooby franchise's Daphne Blake (though I read somewhere else she wasn't that in later Scooby shows). Interestingly, this was one of the first to feature the original H-B swirling star logo in the intro and after the end credits. It may not be one of the most perfect or even satisfactory, but I'm fine with it and would rather watch this than the mindless junk that's aired in recent years, as this still has more intelligence. Even if this and others didn't quite reach the level of Scooby.
Um, okay.
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