Clue Club
Raise your cereal spoons in salute; it’s time, once again, to go back to a September when Saturday morning cartoons ruled the networks.
Continuing a tradition that began five years ago here on Cartoon Research and has been part of each fall, here is a look back at what the “Big Three” networks offered up from the early mornings to lunchtime, when Bowling for Dollars, American Bandstand, and other shows would signal the end of Saturday morning cartoons for another week.
Here, we travel back fifty years, to the Saturday morning line-ups of 1976. The Bicentennial had just passed that summer, and Laverne and Shirley were debuting in prime time.
Against that backdrop, here is what was being watched on Saturday Mornings:
ABC
ABC debuts saw the return of Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby-Doo, who remained popular and returned in an hour-long format that introduced a new character in The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour. The latter character was a mechanical dog (voiced by Frank Welker), who served as a sidekick to the superhero Blue Falcon (Gary Owens). Despite Blue Falcon being an earnest hero, Dynomutt was pure comic relief, as his automated abilities, such as extending his neck and motorized gears, usually landed in disaster.
The massive popularity of Jaws from the year before helped inspire Jabberjaw, another Hanna-Barbera show that debuted this fall. Set in an underwater world, where cities exist under domes, the show used the Josie and the Pussycats/Scooby-Doo formula. The title character was a massive shark (voiced by Welker, imitating Curly from The Three Stooges), who is a drummer in the human band, The Neptunes. Each episode revolved around the band getting involved with a nefarious criminal and a subsequent mystery.
Hanna-Barbera also brought us Mumbly this fall. A blue carbon copy of the snickering Muttley (both voiced by Don Messick), this version sported a Columbo-like trench coat and solved mysteries. The character debuted as part of The Tom and Jerry/Grape Ape/Mumbly Show.
Also debuting on ABC this fall, The Krofft Supershow, a live-action series from Sid and Marty Krofft that combined elements of a variety show with comedic and adventurous segments like Wonderbug, Dr. Shrinker, and Electra Woman and Dyna Girl. This fall also included the live-action kids game show Junior Almost Anything Goes.
CBS
On CBS, two new animated shows debuted. Hanna-Barbera’s Clue Club followed another mystery-solving group of teenagers, assisted by their two dogs, Woofer the bloodhound (Paul Winchell) and Wimper the basset hound (Jim MacGeorge). Watch the opening titles below.
Filmation brought back one of the most famous fictional characters with Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle. Based on the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, this was the first animated series based on the character.
CBS also debuted the live-action series Ark II, a science fiction adventure, and the game show Way Out Games.
Returning shows included the animated The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, and the live-action Shazam!/Isis Hour, from Filmation.
NBC
NBC’s debuts in 1976 were mainly live-action shows: Monster Squad, where the classic movie monsters team up to fight crime (not to be confused with the much different 1987 movie of the same name).
There was also the live-action Big John, Little John, about an adult man (Herb Edelman) who drinks from the Fountain of Youth and can periodically transform into a twelve-year-old version of himself (Robbie Wrist). The series was created by producer Sherwood Schwartz (Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch).
Muggsy, another live-action show, focused on a young girl named Margaret “Muggsy” Malloy (Sarah MacDonnell), who lives with her older brother Nick (Ben Masters), a cab driver, in a truck converted into an apartment as they face the challenges of living in the inner city.
The live-action series The Kids from C.A.P.E.R. also debuted. It was about the title team of teens who solve crimes, produced by Don Kirshner, the man behind The Monkees and The Archies. And there was McDuff, the Talking Dog, a self-explanatory series about the ghost of a 100-year-old sheepdog (voiced by actor Jack Lester) who can talk to a veterinarian (Walter Willison).
Some new animation debuted on NBC this fall. Part of The Pink Panther Laugh-and-a-Half Hour-and-a-Half Show featured a new segment entitled Misterjaw that, like Jabberjaw, reflected the popularity of Jaws. These cartoon shorts, centered on a shark (voiced by Arte Johnson) who sported a top hat, vest, and bow tie, and would leap out of the water and surprise bathers by yelling, “Gotcha!” He was assisted in his adventures by a small, bowler-hat-wearing fish (Arnold Stang).
Additionally, The Woody Woodpecker Show, a mainstay for years on NBC Saturday mornings, returned this year.
And so, as Elton John and Kiki Dee sang “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” on the radio, and we prepared for a big-budget remake of King Kong that would arrive in theaters that December; we bid farewell to a reflection of these shows from fifty years ago, and an era now past, when cereal-filled Saturday mornings were a part of our lives.
Michael Lyons is a freelance writer, specializing in film, television, and pop culture. He is the author of the book, Drawn to Greatness: Disney’s Animation Renaissance, which chronicles the amazing growth at the Disney animation studio in the 1990s. In addition to Animation Scoop and Cartoon Research, he has contributed to Remind Magazine, Cinefantastique, Animation World Network and Disney Magazine. He also writes a blog, Screen Saver: A Retro Review of TV Shows and Movies of Yesteryear and his interviews with a number of animation legends have been featured in several volumes of the books, Walt’s People. You can visit Michael’s web site Words From Lyons at: 
“Robbie Wrist”??? You must mean everybody’s favourite cousin Oliver, Robbie Rist. Be careful with that voice-to-text stuff, my cull.
Between youth orchestra rehearsals and driver’s ed, I had little time for Saturday morning TV in 1976, but I did occasionally find time to sample the new network fare. I remember watching “Electra Woman and Dyna Girl” with my father at least once. “Charlie’s Angels” also premiered in prime time in 1976. My dad and I used to watch that together, too.
And “Monster Squad”! Now there’s a show I haven’t thought about in fifty years! It had a silly sense of humour that appealed to this longtime fan of “The Munsters”. I remember one episode with a villain called Half Nelson, whom the Wolf Man trapped in a full Nelson.
It’s sad to see Freddie Prinze hosting “The Great NBC Smilin’ Saturday Morning” special, as he would take his own life less than a year later. His son and namesake would go on to play one of the all-time great Saturday morning cartoon characters, Fred Jones, in the live-action Scooby-Doo movies.
“Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle,” a French pornographic animated feature film parody of the Tarzan stories, came out in 1975. It flopped in the U.S. but was a major hit in Europe, so much so that it convinced the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate to authorise an animated Tarzan series from Filmation.
Thanks for this look back at all the Saturday morning programs in the fall of 1976. To you I raise my heaping spoonful of Cheerios!
I was eight years old.
I remember the CBS & ABC offerings; I’m sure I remember viewing “Pink Panther” on NBC.
“Clue Club” has that slick Hanna-Barbera look that assured solid, competent entertainment. I don’t recall ever watching the show but the opening and closing are expertly done.
The year referenced was my senior year in high school, and while I don’t recall what my Saturdays consisted of apart from mowing the lawn, Saturday morning cartoons were evidently off my radar. I’m sure I must have occasionally tuned in for one of my old favorites such as Bugs Bunny or Woody Woodpecker, but my interest in the new shows was practically nil. And before the school year was up, I would be working at a restaurant evenings and weekends. There was also the high school musical “Mame” in which I played a fairly major role. So those were taking up my time.
Thus, this whole slate is relatively unfamiliar to me, which makes it quite entertaining to look back at now. The one show I do remember is the CBS Children’s Film Festival hosted by Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. The films that I can recall were quite thought-provoking for youngsters, not quite the innocuous fare one might have expected.
Even though my own interest was losing steam as I moved toward adulthood, it’s refreshing to know that the Saturday morning lineups were carrying on just fine without me.
I did see an episode of Clue Club and, aside from the dogs, the principals lacked any interesting personality and the stories were pure Scooby-Doo forumla. You didn’t miss anything. Although Pepper, the blonde, was cute as anything. I think Bob Hastings was the voice of the kid in the deerstalker hat.
Even back in 1976, I had the distinct impression that Woofer and Wimper were (cough, ahem) “inspired” by the Buttram/Lindsey farm dogs in ARISTOCATS.
And Paul Winchall was one of the voices in that film (in a rather now politically incorrect role).
Always has to be one of you.
Then, by your own self-appointed ethics, later “bully” Paul J. Smith.
Hey, don’t pick on me. Besides, I’m not the only person around here that has the opinion on those shorts.
Hey, I’m not the only person that has that opinion on those shorts.
Clue Club made its debut a month early on August 14, 1976 as CBS dropped Scooby-Doo in preparation for his move to ABC. I liked Clue Club; the kids were quite appealing (especially Dotty) and Wimper’s cynicism contrasting Woofer’s know-it-all know-nothing gave it a comedic kick.
Yes, some fond memories here for me, especially The Pink Panther’s 90-minute format, which I always wondered for years why it only lasted one season, not realizing that it got low ratings, until reading the fact many years later. I always liked “Misterjaw,” too, with the voice characterizations being particularly good here, with Arte Johnson, Arnold Stang, and Paul Winchell. I also remember watching “Big John, Little John” regularly, actually watching all 13 episodes.
I stopped watching Saturday morning TV once half the shows became live action entries, which were cheaper than cartoons to produce.
I’m assuming “The Woody Woodpecker Show” had the unofficial fifth “season” (Wild Brain is seemingly somehow overly obsessed with it on Youtube) which mainly was “The Worst of Paul J. Smith” and had the final Woody Woodpecker, Chilly Willy, and The Beary Family cartoons from 1966-1972 when Smith was the only director at Lantz. While there were some reliefs in the form of some of the last shorts of Sid Marcus and some of the earliest color Lantz shorts from the ’30’s (including the non-P.C. “A Haunting We Will Go”), there were few and far between.
Speaking of Marcus, for inexplicable reason, two of his shorts (including “Three Little Woodpeckers” which was a personal favorite of Lantz himself) were not included. Was having all of the “Paul J, Smith only” era shorts really that important?
As I recall from watching the Woody Woodpecker Show on Saturday mornings in the ’70s, it’s true that there was a preponderance of later Lantz cartoons. Probably that was because there were just so many of them. However, they did occasionally show a bona fide classic often enough that it was worth tuning in regularly. At least, I thought so.
On the other hand, whenever Universal cartoons were shown before a movie in the cinema, those were invariably late-period Paul J. Smith. It was always a good excuse to duck out to the lobby.
I never watched “Clue Club”, not having been a devotee of the whole mystery-solving-kids-and-their-slobbering-dogs genre until well into this century, but out of curiosity I found some scenes from the show online and had a look at them. There was one funny scene where Pepper is hiding from a villain in a scarecrow costume, but she cries out and gives herself away when a mosquito bites her on the seat of her blue jeans. The funny part was, the mosquito bite was accompanied by an “El Kabong” sound effect. KABONG!
What a fun trip back to 1976 — I had no idea so many shows debuted that same fall, from The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour to Clue Club and Misterjaw. It’s wild how the Jaws craze alone spawned both Jabberjaw and Misterjaw in the same season. Looking at those chunky Hanna-Barbera character designs today, I can’t help thinking how anime-style art has exploded lately, with AI image tools letting fans reimagine these classic characters as their own anime-inspired illustrations. I actually tried recreating Dynomutt as a retro mecha hero using gpt image 2 and the results were surprisingly charming!
By 76 I was collegiate and visited Saturday mornings as a tourist, usually checking out new shows. I did tune in for multiple episodes of Kroftt Supershow for Dyna Girl and the cuter members of Kaptain Kool and the Kongs. Also kept hoping they’d show more of the Krofft’s indoor amusement park, which was supposed to have a pinball machine ride.
When did packaging separate shows into hours or hour-and-a-halves become a thing? Did somebody decide none of the DePatie-Freling stable could sustain a half hour without the Pink Panther? Or that Schmoo, Captain Caveman, and The Thing needed to be packaged with the Flintstones? Or that kids would more eagerly embrace unrelated episodes of Shazam! and Isis if presented as a single unit.
I’m wondering if there was some financial incentive for the studios to package shorter shows into 60 or 90 minute episodes, or for the networks to buy them in that format.
Mark Evanier at News from Me website has written about the Hanna Barbera combinations
(Do a search on his website for “ASK me: The H-B Shmoo”)
They occurred at the request of programming head Fred Silverman, who believed that audiences were more likely to watch both shows if they were combined, rather than as separate entities. Even if the the 2 shows seemed aimed at different audiences
Nothing to do with financial incentive for HB, and for animation enthusiasts it is a pain when there is only one set of credits combining those for both shows.
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@Dbenson: Last year, Mark Evanier commented on his blog about the packaging of separate shows into hour-long blocks: “Fred Silverman was a firm believer in the concept of programming ‘blocks.’ This is the theory that if you’re putting on a half-hour Scooby-Doo show and a half-hour Dynomutt show, both will do better if you splice them into The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour…and it doesn’t really matter if the two shows have anything in common or connect in any way. He did this kind of thing often and because Fred was considered an expert at programming Saturday morning, others followed his lead.”
In a nice bit of good timing, Clue Club will be airing for a week on MeTV Toons’ Cartoon Carousel next week, beginning on Monday October 5th.