We all know that Filmation made its first inroads with Superman in 1966. However, earlier that same year, the studio nearly broke ground with another icon---The Marx Brothers!!
It had been years since the last Marx movie. Groucho was now a TV fixture, and at this point was doing game & talk shows. Still, the fledgling studio acquired a license to adapt the legendary team, minus Zeppo, of course, in a pilot for a proposed series, less than a year after the Three Stooges began a series of animated cartoons for syndication.
In "A Day at The Horse Opera", the brothers are in the Old West as a 3-man medicine show, then run afoul of a Native American chief (Joe Besser, ex-The Joey Bishop Show), who wants to marry off his daughter to what he believes is "The Great Stone Face"---and guess who is a perfect likeness of said statue?
Pat Harrington, Jr. (The Inspector) is Groucho. Ted Knight voices Chico. Don't know about Minnie-Ho-Ho.
Rating: B.
2 comments:
Odd how no one wanted to take a chance with this. It wasn't any worse than the Cartoons based on the Three Stooges or Abbott and Costello. As a Marx Brothers fan, I didn't find it earth shaking, but I've seen much, much worse.
Hanna-Barbera, which landed the Abbott & Costello license a year later, also did the Laurel & Hardy shorts, and both sets, like the New 3 Stooges, were produced for syndication. I'm thinking network suits assumed the kids probably hadn't seen the classic movies......!
Post a Comment