Before entering the superhero business full bore in the mid-60's, Hanna-Barbera experimented first with funny animal heroes. Quick Draw McGraw, for example, was given a masked alter-ego, El Kabong, a parody of Zorro, but it wasn't much in terms of maintaining a secret identity. File it under "transparent".
In 1962, as part of the syndicated Hanna Barbera New Cartoon Series, Touche Turtle sallied forth to combat evildoers. The setting could be medevial times or contemporary, but the only constants were Touche (Bill Thompson, the voice of Droopy) and his canine assistant, Dum Dum (Alan Reed, The Flintstones).
My first exposure to Touche was in the early days of cable and reruns aired weekdays on WSBK. However, it was originally intended as a weekly series, with a new episode each week for 52 consecutive weeks. Unfortunately, the series didn't click as well as it could have, and was cancelled after 1 season.
Touche would return as part of Yogi's Gang, but hasn't been seen since.
Rating: B.
2 comments:
Believe it or not, I'd never seen Touche Turtle until he turned up on the Yogi's Ark Lark show.
I didn't know who he was (certainly not his sidekick, "Dum Dum") or why he was on the ark, even though I did know all the other characters aboard.
A Touche short was used as time filler on Boomerang a while back and that was the very first time I had actually seen him in action. Naturally I recognized Alan Reed as Dum Dum. However, I found his shorts rather meh.
Funny how syndication works.
I think now we can figure out the chronology of Hanna-Barbera's heroes. Touche is hard to figure in that context because, as I wrote, they put him at various times and places with no regard to continuity (which was a foreign concept in those days, of course).
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