Hastor
Secret Squirrel is a great show, and Super Secret Squirrel, which was part of the "2 Stupid Dogs" show in the 90's was even better. I know is name is secret Squirrel, but its still odd to me that everything he has is imprinted with "SS" as this was of course a Nazi thing in WWII. They never say exactly which country he's working for! The SS all over the place creeps me out though! Now if we can just figure out who Dasterdly and Muttley were working for on their show that was all about stopping Yankee Doodle Pigeon. Doesn't sound like America, though they were bad guys, they were lovable bad guys. Maybe its a Hogan's Hero's type of thing. Oh well, great cartoon all around!
rogerc172
Had to do some thinking looking back as to what about this cartoon earned my preference. It is now on the toon cable channel & being curious about what I'd think of it as an adult, I took a gander at a few episodes. I don 't know if I can say that it's more intelligent than other cartoons of its time. In many ways it's more campy & far-fetched than a lot of them. Being a spoof to the James Bond, & other secret agent features dating as far back as the Maltese Falcon, the campiness worked. At age 6 however I wasn't familier enough with all these other ones to see the connection. Although I knew about Goldfinger, & now know that the most recurring villain-Yellow Pinky-was named after him & was a cross between him & Casper Gutman from The Maltese Falcon, I'd never seen the latter at that age & didn't know that a pinkey was a finger.Seems like most of the cartoon animals of that time(Hanna Barbera),such as Yogi Bear,Huckleberry Hound, Hokey Wolf ect. were to some extent wannabes. Wheel & deal for a meal types.Yogi Bear always trying to manipulate the Ranger for instance. SS by comparison seemed to have an edge in that he had a more established function among the characters so I saw him as rising above the toon animal archetype.Like I said before SS was at least as silly as the other cartoons of the time, but in the silliness & cliches he & his sidekick Morroco Mole(Paul Frees)were established professionals, albeit the spy profession. Instead of bugging Chief QQ(Double Q-no doubt instead of Q.Don't think there was an "M" equivelant)for a "meal ticket", Chief called on them to keep the world safe for democracy. Spoilers? Thanks to this cartoon, I found the James Bond movie Goldfinger even harder to take seriously than I otherwise would have, because Goldfinger reminded me so much of Yellow Pinky. I had to remind myself that wouldn't have been the case if I'd seen Goldfinger first.When a previous post mentioned a villian who reminded them of Casper Gutman of MF, I looked it up in IMDB to see if I could figure out which villain it was. Description seemed to fit Yellow Pinky, & upon checking out Maltese Falcon I had no doubt YP was the dude. Gutman's voice wasn't as deep, but he had the same distinctive laugh.The name was no doubt of Goldfingerian descent, & all 3 villains look quite a bit alike, & are part of a common liniage fat-but-sophisticated-villain archetypes that is far from unheard of in the spy genre.Thanks to his brown-nosing side-kick, I sometimes refer to actor Peter Lorre as the actor with a voice like Morroco Mole!!PS:I know Paul Frees did MM(Mel Blanc was SS), but it reminded me of Lorre...Vice Versa as I saw SS 1st
wbhickok
This Hanna-Barbera cartoon from the mid-sixties is still one of my favorites, the rare combination of the legendary Paul Frees and Mel Blanc working together is an extra treat. Also, the villain who was a spoof of Caspar Gutman in 'The Maltese Falcon' is hilarious. A great memory from childhood.