1956 saw the debut of perhaps the worst animated TV series in creation, courtesy of one of animation’s most outstanding hacks. The series was The Adventures of Pow Wow, and the man behind it was none other than Sam Singer.
A cel from THE ADVENTURES OF POW WOW
Singer’s first show, Uncle Mistletoe (based on a Christmas promotion by Marshall Fields), was unleashed upon the Chicago area in 1948. Singer’s next fiasco was the 1950 six-episode series Paddy the Pelican, which featured animation so limited and rough that it barely earned the description.
Singer finally hit it “big” when he created The Adventures of Pow Wow six years later. Pow Wow found a home on the (not yet) iconic children’s show Captain Kangaroo. These miserable five-minute episodes continued with the Captain until 1958. Screen Gems then picked up the series for syndication.
42 of the 52 Pow Wow episodes were produced in 1956, roughly four per month, using a single animator. By contrast, Warner Bros.’ output over the same year was 29 seven-minute shorts made by a far more populated and collaborative studio. As can be assumed, the quality, under small-time production studio Tempe-Toons, was nothing short of wretched. Sam Singer directed every episode.
Pow Wow was a young native American lad who shared various adventures with his dog, woodland animals, and occasionally a girl known as “Indian Girl”. Most of his adventures took place in silence, with an occasional uncredited narrator trying to make sense of it all. The theme music was the work of one Monty Kelly, but the background music was an incongruous mash of Scott Joplin-style piano rags more suited to silent-era cartoons.
The stories, which centered around Pow Wow’s life as a friend to animals and nature, were primarily written by Ed Nofziger, with an assist from Warner veteran Ben (Bugs) Hardaway. They obviously intended to write humorous slapstick gags, but the atrocious pacing of the Pow Wow cartoons worked heavily against them.
The animation was done solely by Tom Baron. One can trace Baron’s career back to 1935, and he did stints with several major animation studios. He worked as recently as 1992 on a Bozo the Clown TV movie. His animation on Pow Wow was both limited and less than competent. Not that Baron had much to do; in a typical five-minute cartoon, less than half of it was actually animated. Repeated animation (as well as repeated scenes) took up much of the running time. Held poses, choppy editing, and reactions by characters took the place of any semblance of acting.
The designs of all secondary characters were amateurish, but it can be said that Pow Wow himself was not terribly bad; he looks like he could appear in a late 50s Paramount short, and his limited facial expressions are cute at times. Nothing else worked. The cartoons themselves were in color, a first for Singer.
Pow Wow found himself out of a job on Captain Kangaroo by 1957, and his cartoons were shunted to local kiddie shows (I can recall seeing them on the Big Brother Bob Emery Show on WBZ TV in Boston). The verdict: The Adventures of Pow Wow was universally panned by critics; contemporary reviews named it one of the worst television series of all time. I have seen most of Adult Swim’s most abject failures, and they were all a galactic level above Pow Wow.
As for Sam Singer, he continued to find a way to keep producing subpar animated shows such as Trips the Trapper (1959), Bucky and Pepito (1959-1960), Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse (1960-1962). And he took his final bow with Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt (1965-1966), a show so poorly produced its distrbutor (American International Pictures) had to salvage its production by hiring Hanna Barbera to finish the assigned episodes. Singer, as Executive Producer, failed to handle the demands of the production schedule, putting an ending the cartoon series.
Singer’s final notice in the animation world was about ten years later – as the announced via a trade ad in Variety, as credited director of the infamous Tubby The Tuba feature. You know, the one starring Dick Van Dyke, and produced in Westbury, Long Island by Alexander Schure, at the New York Institute of Technology. Mike Lyons wrote about that fiasco earlier this year, here. Singer was fired from this picture – but the finished film has all the hallmarks of a Singer production.
Sam Singer passed away on January 25, 2001, at age 88. He left behind a legacy of poorly animated, poorly written cartoon shorts that he appeared to believe were totally entertaining. The man had no quit in him, replacing one failure with another from 1948 to 1966. If perseverance could win Oscars, Singer would have won one every year.
Note: Twenty episodes of The Adventures of Pow Wow can be viewed on Internet Archive, but you’ve been warned.
Martin Goodman is a veteran writer specializing in stories about animation. He has written for AWN and Animation Scoop – and lives in Anderson, Indiana.
To tell you the truth, I don’t think “The Adventures of Pow Wow” are appreciably worse than many of the other low-budget cartoons that were made for TV during the early years of the medium: Col. Bleep, Spunky and Tadpole, Dick Tracy, the Crusader Rabbit reboot, etc. “Pow Wow” isn’t even Sam Singer’s worst; “Paddy the Pelican”, now, that was a real piece of crap. Personally I find the silent Pow Wow an altogether more appealing character than the vainglorious funnel-headed loudmouth who replaced him on “Captain Kangaroo”. Tom Terrific’s awful cartoons always looked to me like something that had been scribbled on an Etch-A-Sketch.
As for the ragtime accordion music heard in the adventure embedded here, that’s obviously not the cartoon’s original soundtrack. The Pow Wow cartoons were furnished with stock music scored for a few wind and percussion instruments, in keeping with the Mid-Century Modern aesthetic of the times. They also had a narrator; the characters themselves rarely spoke.
The “Indian Girl” is named Pow Wee. Her name gets top billing over Pow Wow’s on the cover of the coloring book pictured here. The boy with the mohawk, Pow Wow’s rival for Pow Wee’s affections, is Chicko Shay, which I’m guessing is a variant of “Chickasaw”. Pow Wow’s dog is named Dodie, and the fox is “Fabian”!
Pow Wee and Chicko Shay give the game away—they’re blatant stand-ins for the girlfriend and rival of Disney’s Little Hiawatha as drawn for the comics, which began in 1940 and were still running Stateside at the time of Pow Wow’s creation. The girl has been altered to give her a second feather, and the rival to make him a little taller; but certain shots and poses suggest that Baron had the Disney comics on hand for reference, so the characters devolve toward their inspirations. In this cartoon, even a few gags are borrowed from the comics.
When I was working with the Danish Disney licensee Egmont 25 years ago, Hiawatha was—incredibly—still a going character. The rival had been absent from the comics for awhile and a new artist was asked to draw him; this artist drew him markedly taller, noting that he was using the “more modern” rival design.
We editors didn’t know what he meant, but the Pow Wow cartoons were still on European TV at the time, and now I realize that he was drawing Pow Wow’s version of the rival.
Based on the description, I expected my eyes to explode or something similar. But the result doesn’t seem so terrible. The main character’s design seems to be taken from the Famous style of the same period. The rest is a little less professional, and the layout is particularly clumsy. But the main problem the series seems to have is that no one knew how to produce limited animation yet. We had to wait for all those terrible HB TV shows to understand that the only way was to hire a good designer and then bore the audience with half an hour of radio actors.
Terrible my tailbone. I thought the HB cartoons were waaaay better than anything Sam Singer ever did. Heck, I felt like they improved ‘Sinbad Jr”.
Yes, the H-B episodes of Sinbad Jr. we a vast improvement – better animation, scripts, voices, music (using Hoyt Curtin’s dramatic cues familiar from “Jonny Quest” – and Jonny himself, Tim Matheson, taking over as Sinbad’s voice).
Ha…there’s more going on in that coloring book cover than in all the Pow Wow episodes combined. The artwork is better too. I’d buy that if I saw it as a kid.
Tom Terrific was everything that Pow Wow was not. Fun voice work from Lionel Wilson, puns galore, kooky criminals (Isotope Feeny, Crabby Appleton, Captain Kidney Bean) and creative story lines. No wonder Tom replaced Pow Wow and is still fondly remembered today.
I cannot agree with Paul Groh’s opinion of Tom Terrific. Tom is one of the best TV cartoons ever made, directed and designed by Gene Deitch for Terrytoons, with much of the animation by Jim Tyer. Who doesn’t enjoy Crabby Appleton or Sweet Tooth Sam or Mr. Instant, the Instant Thing King or all the other characters that Gene and his writers created. They saved money on Tom by not painting the cels, letting the ink lines do the work. Tom’s adventures were made in black and white.
On the other hand: the animation of Pow-Wow needs pencil testing to fix the timing. Several gags, such as the mouse trap in the bunch of flowers, are spoiled by key drawings not held long enough to read. Tom Baron received his training at the Fleischer studio, so it’s no wonder that his drawings have that Fleischer/Famous design look to them.. The dry brush works sometimes, and sometimes not at all, like when the Mohawk Indian child is swinging around a tree branch. The backgrounds don’t pan at the right speed on the walks, making the characters look like they are skating on the ground. Some of the draftsmanship is fine, like when the goat runs and turns around running. The Paddy the Pelican cartoons are very simply animated, the good thing about them is that the original drawings are used, giving a rough animation feel, many years before the Xerox process. Paddy looks like a first cousin to Punchy Pelican from the Frank Tashlin Columbia Phantasy cartoons, he has that 1940s character look. The voice acting in the Paddys is the worst thing about them, especially Paddy’s singing voice on the main titles.
Here’s one with a voice, sound effects and needle drop music: https://youtu.be/JenwNV-EXJA?si=5WbKh0tP09QUEshg
What surprises me most about Pow Wow is that somehow – like most of these forgotten 60s series – there was a syndication package made in the 90s. I don’t believe it was ever aired over here (thank goodness) but it got limited airplay in some European and Asian countries. Here’s a full show in Polish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQp96NWWqhg
I don’t know what’s up with the soundtrack on most color uploads of the show. The lack of narration makes these even more dreadful. Here’s an original episode (in B&W): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JenwNV-EXJA
My hot take? This still isn’t the lowest of Singer’s work. The layouts and stories are serviceable, and at points, even good. Even Paddy had nice looking drawings (though his voice acting ruins the piece). But Bucky and Pepito? No saving grace there.
Hello all!
Just a quick note to say while I don’t recall seeing PW on “Big Brother “ on WBZ tv in Boston I do remember those toons being shown on the western themed kid show “Boomtown “ hosted by Rex Trailer. Flashing forward a number of years I saw PW, along with “Bucky and Pepito” on American Forces Television in (West) Berlin, Germany in the early 70s.
Here is a post from 10 years ago about Pow Wow.
https://tralfaz.blogspot.com/2015/01/hes-not-sam-tastic.html
The cartoon’s legacy is Singer signed a distribution deal with Columbia, which soon regretted it. That’s when George Sidney went to the studio said there were a pair of guys named Hanna and Barbera that had a studio that could make cartoons for Screen Gems.
Singer’s film editor sure loved those Spencer Moore cues. He used them before H-B put them in Ruff and Reddy.
And I’m on the side of Tom Terrific.
The biggest budget in Hollywood with animation on ‘ones’, and it would still be crap.
I’d heard of these cartoons, but I’ve never seen one before now. Yecch! Bob Keeshan always had high standards for who and what appeared on “Captain Kangaroo,” so I’m surprised that he ran “Pow Wow.” Maybe that was a CBS management decision and he had no say in the matter. “Tom Terrific” was about a ten thousand percent improvement!
It seems that animation has always had its “bargain basement” or “poverty row” area of cheapo-deluxe studios. Consider the godawful output of Van Beuren, which predated Sam Singer’s dreck by a couple of decades. I’d almost rather watch Pow Wow’s dreary adventures than one of THOSE atrocities!
I feel like the mention of bargain basement cartoons are mostly the ones from the public domain. Since all of Van Beuren’s cartoons are in the public domain. I guess it all make sense now since a lot of the public domain cartoons have really crappy art on the vhs and dvd and they are al ot cheaper than the official cartoon tapes. Many of the famous cartoons before 60s, Fleischer color and superman cartoons, ub iwerks cartoons, the new 3 stooges cartoons, and the Looney tunes before 1944 are featured alot on the public domain vhs tape. I remember watching a video of how someone would rather buy a cartoon vhs tape that is cheaper from the competition alone and this is one of them.
On SCTV, John Candy played Orson Welles singing the POW WOW theme.
Sorry–Right show, wrong actor and character.
Click on the link in Yowp’s post, and check out the first comment.