Friday, March 16, 2012

Family Toons: The Hillbilly Bears (1965)

The Hillbilly Bears were one of the backup features for Atom Ant, but it's clear these shorts were a funny animal knockoff of The Beverly Hillbillies, as if the Clampetts had never left the Ozark mountains.

Most of the humor centered on mumblin', bumblin' Paw Rugg (Henry Corden), perhaps the most unintelligible patriarch in television history. In "Leaky Creek", Maw (Jean VanderPyl, The Flintstones) has to drag Paw to the creek to take a bath, but a beaver has apparently staked out the area for himself.

Edit, 1/9/22: The video has long been deleted. We've located a screenshot:


More than a decade later, VanderPyl & Corden would team again, as Corden succeeded Alan Reed as the voice of Fred Flintstone. Unfortunately, after a rerun cycle as part of the Banana Splits & Friends syndicated package, the Rugg family hasn't been considered for a revival, and you'd think the lunatics at Cartoon Network would've given them at least a look. Of course, when you consider the idiots running that network have zero interest in doing anything right.........

Rating: B.

2 comments:

magicdog said...

I remember the Hillbilly Bears, though I think they were packaged with The Banana Splits.

CN did have the nerve to revisit the clan some years ago with an unfunny interstitial showing the family on a Jerry Springer - like talk show. Apparently "Maw" wanted "Paw" to tell her he loved her and to better communicate with the family (of course he being so unintelligible, it was virtually impossible).

I could see this show getting an update if it were in a similar vein to modern "redneck comedies" like "King of the Hill".

hobbyfan said...

They were part of the Splits' show in season 2 along with Atom Ant & Precious Pupp when they dropped the Three Musketeers segments, but the series did predate the Splits by 3 years.

I've seen that interstital you mentioned. Flash animated, IIRC, and badly written. On purpose, given that it's CN's idiots we're talking about here.