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y February 1969 the word was beginning to leak out on our plans for fall, as the trade papers reported on what a huge boon Saturday morning was to advertising dollars (at $11–12K per minute) and ratings. They revealed that we would be adding another half-hour of Archie to the schedule, debuting it with Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. We weren’t the only ones doing spin-offs of popular shows, however, and other licensed series such as The Pink Panther were getting scheduled as well. Unfortunately, superheroes and action shows were on their way out—the networks were running scared of the so-called “moral watchdogs”—and so Aquaman was gone, Batman got moved to Sundays, and Superman got flown over to an afternoon spot. Gone too was Journey to the Center of the Earth, and no new Fantastic Voyages were ordered. Luckily, comedy and music were “in.” We did a presentation that year, I think, for a show called Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines, which was based on a 1965 comedy movie released by 20th Century Fox. The presentation was mostly basic drawings and very basic animation mixed in with footage from the film. It had a very unusual look, which was based on the movie poster and credits art by Ronald Searle, and might have been tough to animate had we sold it. But we couldn’t sell it. Coincidentally, that fall Hanna-Barbera did a show called Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines, which was extremely similar to this concept. We did another presentation for Paul Bunyan with Babe, his blue ox, but it didn’t sell either. Archie was getting a 47 rating regularly in the 2–11 age bracket, which was huge, and was soon sold to a whopping 71 foreign countries to air! So 20th Century Fox jumped on the bandwagon (so to speak) and asked us to do another music show, with a twist. They had planned to do The Hardy Boys, a series of popular teen mystery books created by Franklin W. Dixon, as a live series with NBC, but that didn’t work. So, instead, they pitched us as the animators for a new Hardy Boys series that incorporated music alongside the mystery-solving adventures of the title characters. ABC took the bait and signed us for the show in February, for a fall debut. The Hardy Boys’ music was to be produced by Chicago’s Dunwich Productions, published through Fox’s Fanfare subsidiary and released under the RCA Calendar label, as with The Archies. A promotional tour was set for ten cities, starting August 25th, with a live band performing songs. RCA’s $100,000 in promotion paid off; the first Hardy Boys single, “Love and Let Love,” was getting great airplay by mid-August. The early PR from the music then fed interest Opposite: in the show, which had yet to debut. Logo and images for The Hardy Boys For Hardy Boys we created the band’s characters, including among them Above and Below: Saturday morning television’s first-ever regular African-American character Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines art (predating Hanna-Barbera’s Valerie in Josie and the Pussycats by a full year)
CHAPTER 8: GOLD RECORDS AND WITCHES
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