It’s a fascinating exercise watching a cartoon show you haven’t watched since you were a kid.
Some of the cartoons, such as Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, The Flintstones or any and all Looney Tunes shorts, hold up really well, every bit as charming and fun as they were when, snuggled up under a doona on a day/night bed (like a foldable futon with cushions) in the mid-year school holidays, ans safe from the bullies that plagued my school years, every cartoon felt a glorious escape to somewhere fun and full of adventure.
Others, however, while still a lot of fun to watch – nostalgia is a potent force, my friends – end up feeling more than a little batshit crazy and not quite as easy to lose yourself in when you’re an adult.
Take Lippy the Lion (Daws Buttler) and Hardy Har Har (Mel Blanc), the five-minute shorts of which first aired as part of The Hanna-Barbera New Cartoon Series from 3 September 1963 to August 26, 1963, alongside Wally Gator and Touché Turtle and Dum Dum, two other great favourites of mine.
While I can’t remember if the local commercial TV station aired that show in the 1970s or spilt it up into its constituent shorts, I remember loving the hilarious way in which the two titular characters, who dressed as hobos from the Great Depression era but somehow ended up battling pirates and invading Martians and mad scientists living in as-mew medieval castles, got into all kinds of hilarious scrapes.
As usual with these types of odd couple scenarios, one, Lippy the Lion, came up with the hare-brained schemes, certain that that way lay success, while the other, an Eeyore-esque Hardy Har Har with his trademark lament of “Oh dear. Oh me. Oh my.” was tasked with carrying them out and suffering greatly when they inevitably went horribly wrong.
As a kid, of course, it’s all endlessly silly and very funny because what’s not funny about a shark lobbing a ticking bomb back onto a raft out at sea or a pirate blasting his own boat to smithereens with an errant cannonball?
But as an adult, and yes, even with my inner child fully engaged which he almost always is, even as I celebrate my 60th birthday, it all feels a little ridiculous, with their ability to time travel, while good for storyline malleability, crucial for a series with a threadbare premise which ran for 52 episodes, straining the bounds if grown-up credulity.
Still, as I watched the first five episodes, and giggled at the absurdity of it all, I was reminded that there’s something to be said for surrendering yourself to the ridiculous and letting yourself just enjoying something without engaging any and all critical faculties.
Watched purely for the absurdist 1960s fun they were, Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har are a fun, silly joy, a reminder that while my childhood had its bleak, much-bullied moments, it also had these two denizens of on-screen cartoons and comic books and I was all the better for their amusing antics and the escapist diversion they gave me when I needed it the most.
