Dingbat & The Creeps was the original backup feature to Heathcliff during the comic strip icon's first season on ABC. A skeleton, a vampire dog, and a pumpkin with a baseball cap & sneakers were meant to be a parody of comedy teams like the Three Stooges, but even the Stooges had sense enough not to try some of the nuttier stunts the Creeps attempted.
Frank Welker voices Dingbat. Don Messick is Nobody (the Pumpkin) and Spare Rib (the skeleton), the voice of the latter similar to Messick's characterization of Scrappy-Doo, while Welker tweaked his Dynomutt voice for Dingbat.
To illustrate the nonsense, the monsters are let loose in a gym in "Health Nuts":
Edit, 9/11/2020: The video has been deleted. In its place is a title card, acquired from our friends at Twinsanity:
Rating: C-.
4 comments:
I did a micro-blog post about this cartoon on our Tumblr page. Yeah, Dingbat & The Creeps was one of the most bizarre concepts I witnessed as a kid (and given the era of Saturday Morning that I grew up watching, that's saying something). The basic premise of Three Stooges-esque bumblers was affable enough (indeed there have been a few attempts to do an animated Three Stooges in decades past), but making the trio monsters on top of that, and one of them being a monster animal on top of that, was just insanely random.
Not surprisingly, this way-out concept was gone after a single season, replaced by Brad Anderson's comic strip Marmaduke appearing alongside of Heathcliff; however, there were only a few new Heathcliff & Marmaduke episodes made across the show's second season, and the remaining weeks were filled up by reruns of Heathcliff & Dingbat.
Notice, too, that Marmaduke never got another shot, but Heathcliff would return in syndication, enjoying a healthier run that included future sitcom icon Chuck Lorre as a writer.
At least Hanna-Barbera wasn't the one to try this shit. Mark this one under What the Fucking Shit Did I Just Watch.
There have been worse.
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