Baggy Pants & the Nitwits

A very odd show, I didn't understand at all what I was seeing as a kid - not in a "wow, whatever's going to happen next?" kind of way, more of a "I don't understand what this is supposed to be."

With hindsight I see now that someone had the idea of converting three icons of comedy into a Saturday morning kids' cartoon - Chaplin was presented as a comedy cat, two characters from the old Rowan and Martin show as whatever they were, and Groucho Marx as a wise-cracking cat. And these characters presented Saturday-morning grade comic antics about on the same level as the Pink Panther cartoon, ie not really all that funny. From my perspective the trouble was that, while I was familiar with Chaplin and could see that that's what the baggy-pants cat was presenting, I had no knowledge of Groucho beyond the iconography and, being British, had never heard of the Laugh-in. So these characters were just baffling. I don't know how the producers could have thought it would be meaningful to the target audience - I guess even American kids of the right age-group would be too young for the referneces. Not funny enough to justify their eccentricities, I watched this show simply because it's what was on.