The Plastic Blaster.

Hey kids (of all ages), it's Saturday Morning Cartoon time again!

Paul Terry started out in theatrical animation in 1915, in the same primordial, silent ecosystem that would later give rise to Walt Disney and other legends in the field. But, where the Fleischers would challenge Disney for dominance in technical innovation while Ising and Harman tried to one-up him in production quality at MGM, Terry was perfectly content for his studio to be the 'economy brand' cartoons.

As such, TerryToons was big on cost-cutting animation shortcuts that would become the basis for Saturday Morning Cartoons on television. But Terry wasn't an early enthusiast for the medium, and passed on his nephew Alex Anderson's idea to do 'toons specifically for TV in the late 1940s. Oddly enough, Terry would sell his studio to CBS in 1955, where his characters MIGHTY MOUSE and HECKLE & JECKLE would become far more popular in broadcast reruns than they ever had been in the theaters.

The MIGHTY MOUSE PLAYHOUSE was an early entry on the Saturday Morning scene, starting soon after the CBS purchase. (They got ten years of mileage looping the same eighty theatrical shorts!) Then they changed it up a bit with new comedic superhero characters created by greenhorn animator Ralph Bakshi providing the opening and closing segments with an old Mighty Mouse short filling-out the show's middle for the eleventh and final season.

Bakshi has gone-on to create an impressive body of mostly non-kiddie animated works including FRITZ THE CAT, LORD OF THE RINGS, WIZARDS, and COONSKIN. He even returned to his roots with a new Mighty Mouse TV series in 1987 before that ended in controversy over nothing.

I featured Mighty Mouse's first cartoon at the start of this Saturday upload tradition. ( https://www.bitchute.com/video/2CEHYacOWzqU/ ) So today I'll focus on just the "new" guys...

Here's the first episode of THE MIGHTY HEROES from October, 1966!

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