Thursday, August 3, 2017

Summertainment: Tijuana Toads in Never on Thirsty (1970)

Every summer, it rains more in the East than it does in the West. While they suffer with droughts and wildfires in California, Arizona, and Washington, the rain hangs around the East coast like a bad neighbor that won't go away.

For the Tijuana Toads, it certainly appears as though they're going through one of those dry spells. Toro & Pancho, though, have to deal with a watchdog that looks to be smarter than he looks. "Never on Thirsty" borrows that trope from other cartoons, and some incidental music from Ant & The Aardvark.



Six years later, the Toads made their television debut, added to the expanded Pink Panther show on NBC, and rechristened the Texas Toads to avoid stereotyping, which killed the vibe.

Rating: B--.

2 comments:

Silverstar said...

My first ever exposure to the Toads was the NBC SatAM Pink Panther show, so when the Pink Panther & Friends were later syndicated, the shorts aired there in their unchanged form, so I thought that it was the Texas Toads who were later changed into the Tijuana Toads rather than the reverse. Just call me Wrong-Way Norris.

hobbyfan said...

Similarly, my first exposure was on TV (as the Texas Toads), then I went to a theatre that ran a block of animated shorts, and found the truth, that it was the Tijuana Toads first. NBC must've forced the change to avoid alienating Latino viewers.