Bloonywoonie Battle.

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

DePatie–Freleng Enterprises, which sort of rose from the ashes of the Warner Bros. theatrical animation short department, is best known for The Pink Panther. (Probably the best cartoon character to come out of the '60s.) But they did quite a bit more than that.

One project they did fifty years ago was HERE COMES THE GRUMP! A simple little bit of Saturday Morning goofiness that ran a year, then another in reruns, then was mostly forgotten. About par for the course in the TV cartoon game, really.

The antagonist in the series bears more than a passing resemblance to Warner Bros. Yosemite Sam. Even his not-so-trusty dragon steed is almost identical to one ridden by Sam in classic theatrical 'toon. But this is to be expected, since Sam himself was based on Friz Freleng... Y'know... Half of the DePatie–Freleng partnership!

While this show didn't make much of a mark in the US, but was apparently more popular south of the border. So much so that somebody thought it was a great idea to produce an animated feature film based on it called A WIZARD'S TALE, primarily for the Mexican market. Last year. Almost half a century after the original series. It bombed very badly.

But we're going back to the hippie-dippy era of 1969 to see the first episode!

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