A while back, I asked some blogger friends if they’d want to write a piece for my Share Your Nostalgia feature. In the past we have looked at Favorite Childhood Toy and Favorite Childhood Book. Today, we go back to Saturday mornings. This was when we sat in front of the TV with our favorite cereal and watched hours of cartoons. So I asked my guests to write about their favorite cartoon or cartoon character growing up.

Today’s guest blogger is Paul, who along with Colin, run the Once Upon A Time in the 70’s Blog. It features music from the 70’s, 70’s Pop Culture, Movies and TV from the 70’s, and Life in the 70’s in general. If you’re looking for a trip back to the groovy years of disco, this is the site for you.

Will Paul be featuring a cartoon or cartoon character from that decade? Let’s find out together. Take it away, buddy….

Sharing your nostalgia is a great way to dive deep into thoughts and memories you haven’t considered for some time, so I was delighted when Keith reached out to ask us to write about our favourite animated characters.  

Animation has come a long way since I first started watching cartoons and although I’m a big fan of modern shows like Family Guy there’s something about old-school cartoons that take me back to a happy place, so for this task I was compelled to reconnect with my 10-year-old self.

As a child of the 60’s, cartoons were undoubtedly the highest form of entertainment available to our generation, consider also that there were only two television channels available for the first six years of my life in the UK and I was 24 and married by the time we reached four channels.

Growing up in Scotland I don’t remember many British cartoons of note although there was a popular series of science fiction based supermarionation shows created by Gerry & Sylvia Anderson – Fireball XL5, Stingray, Captain Scarlett and Joe 90, being the stand outs.

As a kid I was aware of the Disney universe of course but the most watched, most loved cartoons in our stratosphere were Looney Tunes and Hanna Barbera productions. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Tom & Jerry, Yogi Bear and The Flintstones were all favourites but if I had to pick one cartoon that always grabbed my attention it would be Top Cat.

It’s worth noting that in the UK, the show was called Boss Cat as there was a well-established brand of cat food already utilising the Top Cat name in the 60s, however, despite the name change, the original “Top Cat” theme was still used, which confused the hell out of us.

Okay so why Top Cat, I hear you ask?  

Well, the best cartoon characters for me have always been multi-dimensional, for instance, when you watch the Road Runner, you know before the start of each episode that Wile E Coyote is never going to catch him. Similarly, Tom is never going to get the better of Jerry, whilst Sylvester has as much chance of lunching on Tweety Pie as Dick Dastardly and Muttley have of ever winning a round of Wacky Races.

As entertaining as these cartoons are, you know exactly how each episode is going to play out, there’s zero jeopardy.

That’s why I always preferred characters like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck or Foghorn Leghorn, all of whom may come out on top more often than not, but who were often victims of their own hubris and were never quite as smart as they thought they were.

Top Cat (close friends get to call him T.C.), fell into this bracket, he always assumed he was the smartest cat in the room (or alleyway), but his stunts often missed the mark. This of course can be traced back to the cartoon’s origins and the fact that T.C. was based on Phil Silver’s ‘Sergeant Bilko’, a fast-talking hustler who’s get-rich-quick schemes rarely paid off.

Every cartoon requires an antagonist and Officer Dibble was the hapless policemen tasked with keeping T.C. and his crew in check, however, he was no stereotypical bad-cop, Dibble was a friendly enemy and the audiences’ sympathies often lay with him.  

Whilst TC and Dibble are the protagonist’s, part of Top Cats appeal was its ensemble cast featuring T.C.’s crew who all had their own personalities and foibles….

Benny the Ball, is TC’s loyal, naïve and diminutive best friend.

Fancy-Fancy, is the Cary Grant talking womanizer of the bunch.

Choo-Choo, is the shy, sensitive one.  

Brain, is the ditzy, slow-witted one.    

Spook, is the cool-cat, the Miles Davis of the bunch.

I read somewhere that the Dead-End Kids, a tough street gang who appeared in early Jimmy Cagney movies were an inspiration for the writers, which makes sense as T.C. and his gang lived on the streets of New York, railed against authority and used their wits to get by, just like the Dead-End Kids.

I was staggered to learn that Top Cat was cancelled after only 30 episodes in 1962, I could have sworn that I had consumed hundreds of episodes as a kid and perhaps this scarcity of supply is another reason why I appreciate the series so much.

It’s also weird to think that I watched all these iconic cartoons in black and white until 1970 but I can only remember them in colour.  

Animation has obviously moved on so much but as a kid you didn’t worry about things like production values and with one television per household, I was just delighted to get any screen time, particularly whenever Top Cat appeared on our screen.