It's hard to believe that I first saw this series more than 50 years ago, when it aired on Sunday nights just before The Wonderful World of Disney. What I remember was a show that was adventurous, featured Mark Twain's characters Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Huckleberry Finn, and used a mix of live action and animation to tell fun and exciting stories. I'm glad it's finally available on DVD, but "The Complete Series" set of three discs includes only the 20 episodes of the show, with no extras whatsoever, not even subtitles. A feature on the making of the show, or a remembrance piece with the cast and crew recalling their experiences, would have been nice.
Anyway, the show's setup is that Tom, Becky, and Huck get chased into a cave by the murderous Injun Joe, who escaped from jail and now wants revenge on the young protagonists for testifying against him in court. Joe menacingly yells "I'll find you, no matter where you go!" This is all explained in about a minute during the show's live-action intro, which is repeated at the beginning of every episode. Once in the cave, the kids get lost and emerge in an animated land, with the three actors being pretty much the only live-action elements and everything else they encounter, including all other characters, being fully animated. In each episode, they're in a different animated land with new challenges to face, and more often than not, the kids help someone and make new friends. Also in each episode, there's a main bad guy who has the animated face of Injun Joe. No explanation for this is offered. Tom, Becky and Huck's adventures take them through time and all over the world from South American mountains, to African jungles, to Middle Eastern deserts, to South Sea islands, to a valley of Neanderthal-like people, to ancient China, to Antarctica, the Pacific Northwest, and even an undersea Atlantis. In some episodes, they encounter characters and situations from literature, including Hercules, Lilliputians from Gulliver's Travels, and Don Quixote from Man of La Mancha. In others, they face thinly-veiled versions of Captain Nemo, Genghis Khan, and Captain Ahab. I like that there's a variety of stories, and probably my favorite episode is called "Hunting the Hunter" in which the kids encounter an island of talking animals where they are put on trial for being human. It has a pro-animal bent I wouldn't have expected in a kids' show from the 1960s. I also liked the episode "The Conquistador's Curse," which explores the characters' humanity, and it's one of two episodes where Tom and Huck face off against each other, at least temporarily.
The main cast, which includes Michael Shea as Huck, Kevin Schultz as Tom, and Lu Ann Haslem as Becky, are all good in their roles and seem to grow in confidence as the season progresses. Shea and Schultz both went on to a variety of television appearances throughout the 70s and into the 80s. Haslam, who is cute and spunky as Becky, doesn't seem to have continued acting after this series. The other cast member in every episode is Ted Cassidy, best known as Lurch from the Addams Family, and as Ruk in the Star Trek original series episode "What are Little Girls Made of." Things I find strange are that in the live-action portion, Cassidy never appears in the same frames as the kids, and you never see him mouth his dialogue on screen. The majority of his role is voicing the animated bad guys, and his deep voice makes him intimidating.
I should mention that the show's theme song, which you hear at the beginning and end of every episode, is a bouncy and fun barbershop quartet number accompanied by banjo and trombone, and is different from anything else I can recall on television.
And now finally on to what I really wanted to talk about. The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn aired in 1968, exactly a year before Hanna Barbara studios debuted its much more successful series, Scooby Doo Where Are You, in 1969. While Huckleberry Finn doesn't revolve around kids solving mysteries, involves a cast of three companions rather than four, and doesn't feature a recurring animated animal companion, the two shows frequently sound and look and like each other. On my most recent rewatching, I noticed that a number of pieces of incidental and mood-setting music, which I know well from repeated viewings of Where are You, show up in New Adventures, or rather were in this series before Scooby Doo. Ted Nichols was the musical director for all of Scooby Doo, and for part of Huckleberry Finn. And speaking of sound, voice actor Don Messick, who was the voice of Scooby Doo until 2012, as well as scores of other well-known characters from Papa Smurf, to Astro from the Jetsons, to Droopy, and many others, also voiced animated characters in three Huckleberry Finn episodes, including the first episode.
While Huckleberry Finn varies its style to depict the different animated lands the protagonists visit, the two shows frequently have a similar look. If fact, one episode, called "Strange Experiment," in which the kids encounter a mad scientist with an assistant who resembles Frankenstein's Monster, has backgrounds and character designs that could have easily fit into Scooby Doo. It's worth noting that production design for both series was by Iwao Takamoto, who started as an apprentice under the tutelage of Disney's "Nine Old Men," and left Disney in 1961 for Hanna-Barbera where he had a hand in developing many well-known and beloved cartoon characters and was responsible for naming Scooby-Doo after Frank Sinatra's final phrase in "Strangers in the Night."
And the links to The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn aren't limited to Scooby Doo and animated shows. Hollingsworth Morse, who directed half of New Adventure's episodes, also directed a slew of well-known live-action shows including Emergency!, Lassie, Love, American Style, Adam-12, Marcus Welby, M.D., The Dukes of Hazzard, and The Fall Guy.
