The Extras
The Extras
Revisiting Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles and Daffy Duck's Quackbusters
Animation historian Jerry Beck and Warner Archive's George Feltenstein continue our animation discussion. Together, they take listeners on a nostalgic journey back to the 1960s with the TV series "Frankenstein Jr. and the Impossibles." Jerry Beck reveals how this series captured the zeitgeist of its time and paved the way for iconic animated shows like "Josie and the Pussycats" and "The Archies." And George Feltenstein shares the painstaking efforts behind restoring these cartoons for Blu-ray.
Next, we explore the revival of Warner Bros. animation history with George Feltenstein and Jerry Beck with the 1988 film "Daffy Duck's Quackbusters." With insight into Greg Ford's pivotal role in bringing the Looney Tunes characters to a new generation, the conversation highlights Ford's shift from historian to creator. Learn about the making of memorable works like "Night of the Living Duck" and "The Duxorcist," and the impact of animation compilations like "Bugs Bunny Superstar." Celebrate the enduring legacy of these cartoons and the excitement of their Blu-ray release, featuring fan-favorites such as "Blooper Bunny" and "Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers."
Purchase links:
FRANKENSTEIN JR. AND THE IMPOSSIBLES Blu-ray
DAFFY DUCK’S QUACKBUSTERS Blu-ray
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Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog Group
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Hi, tim Lard, here, host of the Extras podcast, and this is a continuation of my discussion with animation historian Jerry Beck and George Feltenstein of the Warner Archive on some of the animation titles that were released in January and February of 2025. Today we're going to be talking about the TV series Frankenstein Jr and the Impossibles from 1966. And we'll also be talking about Daffy Duck Quackbusters, the compilation film from 1988. Well, next I thought we'd go back to 1966 and a TV series called Frankenstein Jr and the Impossibles, and you released the complete animated series here just recently, and I know this series has a lot of fans because there was a lot of talk on social media, I think, when this was announced, so people are starting to get it. I watched it. It looks fantastic, it's so much fun and a lot of people who grew up with it, I know, are going to really enjoy collecting it. But I think there's also younger fans these days too who really enjoy it. What can you tell us about the origins of this one, jerry?
Jerry Beck:Well, this was the beginning of the superhero craze of that period, you know, and it was also the era of the monkeys, pop music, beatles and this, uh, the impossibles section of it is obviously a parody of of the superheroes and the rock groups putting it together. This was before they did josie and the pussycats, before filmation did the archies and all that. This was a early, probably the first of that sort of thing. Again. Hannah barbara trying to be on trend, one of the earliest of their saturday morning cartoons wasn't the first of that sort of thing Again, hanna-barbera trying to be on trend, one of the earliest of their Saturday morning cartoons. Wasn't the first or second even, but it's definitely an early one there in 1966. The Frankenstein Jr. I think that was supposed to be. In fact I think the show is Frankenstein Jr and the Impossibles is supposed to be the lead, but if you watch the show, the Impossibles have the open and closed cartoon and Frankenstein Jr and the Impossibles is supposed to be the lead. But if you watch the show, it's the Impossibles have the open and closed cartoon and Frankenstein's in the middle and Frankenstein Jr is just the usual. You know, a take on the superheroes combined with the always popular.
Jerry Beck:Monster horror, you know craze, which you know started in the earlier 60s, late 50s with chiller theater and things like that. That was a big, famous monsters of film. Land Monsters were big. The idea of turning it into a robot actually is either equivalent or right on the same time as what was going on in Japan, things that weren't even happening in the United States yet we weren't aware of it. But shows like Gigantor, these giant robots, these shows that were coming up, being made, that were early anime, this is sort of in that same vein, but I don't think they knew about that when they did it. I think they're a lot of fun.
Jerry Beck:I love looking at these shows visually. I think the design is that primo Hanna-Barbera mid-60s ink line, just beautiful-looking fun. They're done in that kind of Batman show way where if you're a little older they're funny, if you're younger you can take them seriously. You know they work both ways. Frankenstein I can go on and on, by the way, unless you stop me, but I mean Frankenstein Jr is oh, what's his name? Ted Cassidy from Lurch, from the Addams Family is his voice. Dick Beals, also known as Speedy Alka-Seltzer on the old commercials, he's Buzz the boy, the little boy, and davy on davy and goliath.
Jerry Beck:Oh, that's right that that's right and on and on the uh. What I love about the uh the show amongst all the things, it is the one of the coolest opening segments with paul freeze doing like a narration about right and just the graphics, the design of stuff, even on the end titles. It's all very modern, hip, not like any of the other Hanna-Barbera shows of that era. It's very smart and you know of the period. Paul Freese is a fluid man, one of the impossibles. Don Messick is multi-man. The character turns into many, many and Coil man, this little tubby little fellow with a coil body who bounces around. That's Hal Smith, who also is from Mayberry and Davy and Goliath, that's right.
Jerry Beck:Otis the Drunk on Andy Griffith, but it's a wonderful cast. It's fun. Otis the Drunk on Andy Griffith, but it's a wonderful cast. It's fun. It was aimed at the Saturday morning crowd, but boy to me it's very sophisticated in the way they did it and I love these shows. These are absolute favorites of mine and for those who care.
George Feltenstein:There are little bridges and bumpers in between the cartoons as it was broadcast on network television when it was a Saturday morning new program, and those pieces have not been seen, really since we released this as a Warner Archive DVD set, I think in 2011, and they were from old Shelfmaster tapes. They did not look very good, but people were just glad to be able to see the show in a legitimate release. But here we've scanned the camera negatives that are all 35 millimeter at 4K and they've been given the class A treatment, so they look and sound terrific and they're built for Blu-ray.
Tim Millard:Yeah, you know, I just I enjoyed the whole rock stars who are superheroes conceit or in other shows they're spies or whatever.
George Feltenstein:But that whole conceit of the 60s and 70s I just think is so funny and yeah, there's a bit of a james bond vibe in there, along with superheroes, and yeah, the music, it's all it's just. It's a very unique cartoon series yeah, it's, it's, it's.
Jerry Beck:It's that comic book aesthetic of that period. There's no backstory, we don't get the origin. They're playing their music. They get a call from the chief, they jump into action. No more needs to be known. It's just what the premise of the show. Next thing you know they're battling a prehistoric creature or something, and the villains are very clever. They came up with different ideas for the villains in each episode. It's fun. Fun is the word. Yeah.
Tim Millard:And I mean Coil man, I think, is the one that amuses me the most, but it's very funny how they figure out how to use him in the past. I mean Fluid man, you kind of get okay, he can turn into water and all, but it's just fun and because, like you said, it was meant for Saturday morning. It's got that youthfulness to it. You go with it and you just you just enjoy the laughs and everything.
Tim Millard:I like the fact that when you, when you get these series on Blu-ray, george, you feel like you're, you're getting a bit of like well, you are obviously you're getting a bit of animation and comic book history that has exploded in the last 20 years. But this is like, hey, those who are watching this or those who want to know a little bit about the early days, these are the shows you want to get and you've never seen them look this good number one or sound this good as well, and you can really now enjoy them for the way they were made, for the audience and as a just a fan of animation. So these are great. Before we just go on on that, there are a couple of extras on here. George, do you have Monsters Rock?
George Feltenstein:Yeah, it's one piece that was a little retrospective piece and is carried over from the DVD era. But it's a nice little encapsulation because you know people need to know the background of these things if they're not familiar with them and they can enjoy them on their own. But having that extra slice of context is very, very helpful.
Tim Millard:Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, all right. Well, that's a fantastic release. I'm looking forward to talking about this next one as well. And we're going to jump ahead a couple of decades 1988. And this is the only film that we're talking about today feature-length film, I should say and that's Daffy Duck's Quackbusters from 1988. How did this film come about, george?
George Feltenstein:Yeah, Well and Jerry, you can pipe in here, but Jerry and I are friendly with a gentleman who is not only an animation historian but an animator himself. His name is Greg Ford and Jerry and I being ex-New Yorkers knew.
George Feltenstein:Greg and I can always speak for myself. I knew Greg and I can only speak for myself. Greg was very helpful to me in my early days in theatrical repertory of putting Looney Tunes programs together for revival theaters and being able to charge percentage could make money in a movie theater. Because for decades people thought oh well, you know, you get $5 rental for a cartoon. You can't make money from cartoons and that's kind of why the theatrical distributors stopped offering cartoons after they became television fodder. And it was in the early 80s that Greg was a pioneer in programming. Jerry, I assume you were there at the Thalia for Porky Pig's 50th anniversary. It was a cake, I remember. But there was this really cool old repertory theater up on Broadway called the Thalia Theater and there was a night of Looney Tunes featuring Porky Pig shown in 35 millimeter to a very rabid, packed audience.
George Feltenstein:When you watch the classic cartoons in a theater with a packed audience it's a whole other experience and it's a wonderful one. Yeah, and Greg was also integral in curating classic animation programming at the Museum of Modern Art. So he was a historian, but he also had a talent for animation himself and I don't exactly remember what the circumstances were. But Greg was a diehard New Yorker and somehow he ended up coming out here and working at Warner Brothers in Burbank to create new Looney Tunes and the work that he did really stood out because it brought that historical sensibility and the knowledge that the original great Looney Tunes were not children's entertainment, they were meant for adults, that children could also enjoy in a theater. So bringing his historical contextual background to creating new animation and his inimitable and very specific personal sense of humor resulted in some very, very wonderful work. The problem was, as I understand it, that the distribution executives here didn't quite know what to do with Greg's cartoons and the feature Daffy Duck's Quackbusters followed in the footsteps of, I think, four compilation features that were done here at Warner Brothers. After the success not at Warner Brothers of Bugs Bunny Superstar and Chuck Jones, did the Bugs Bunny Roadrunner movie. Chris Frilling did the Looney Looney Bugs Bunny movie, the 1001 Rabbit Tales and then Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island. Those compilations featured new animation that bridged classic clips. Well, it fell upon Greg to do something similar, but he also used some of the cartoons that he had made here, and our disc presents those cartoons separately Night of the Living Duck and the Duxorcist as well as providing what we call a matinee version where you get to see a full cartoon before the feature. So some of the footage is repeated.
George Feltenstein:I loved Greg's sense of humor and what he brought to doing these things, and a lot of people are excited that Daffy Duck's Quackbusters is on Blu-ray because they remember watching it on HBO or seeing it on Cartoon Network. But there's a bigger backstory in that you have this incredible historian and I would say there's a legion of animation fans who owe a great deal to Greg. People like Greg and Leonard Maltin showed the way for another generation of animation fans, and Greg didn't just find it to be acceptable to be a historian and a curator. He actually became a creator, and I think that's what's exciting. So this disc not only has the Quackbusters feature, which is really enjoyable, but it also has some of the other individual cartoons made by Greg, such as Blooper Bunny, which is my personal favorite, invasion of the Bunny Snatchers and some other more. I would say post-Golden Age short subjects that were made here at the studio that haven't been around on Blu-ray before. It's a very welcome disc for the fans of Warner Brothers cartoons. What sayest thou O'Jerry?
Jerry Beck:Well, that was all very good and all very true. I'm thinking back to those days and I don't have the full origin myself of how Greg ended up with the, except this, some of it's speculation, some of it is stuff he told me. But remember the 70s? I mean it was, you're right, bugs Bunny Superstar had come out. It was the low point of American animation. People were beginning to rediscover the classic shorts on Saturday morning you know what's opera doc? By being repeated on Saturday morning. That's where it began to attain its status. That's where it began to attain its status and I think because of the success of Bugs Bunny Superstar, warner Brothers figured we got to figure out a way to restore or do some new things with the characters.
Jerry Beck:I know that in the mid-70s they started doing some TV specials. Some of them were just pastiches of the old cartoons. Some of them were just pastiches of the old cartoons. I mean, literally there's a famous one called Looney Tunes in Space which they've just put together very, very quickly in 1977 to cash in on Star Wars, and it's nothing but the. You know, one space cartoon after another, that kind of thing, and really no bridging material. They hired Chuck to do some bridging material, as you might recall, and I guess they got the idea that we should do a feature like this Bugs Bunny Superstar. That turned out to be a big hit. I'm sorry if I'm giving you too much information here, but that was remember George, that was shown at the Lincoln Center New York Film Festival and it was opening night or closing night. It was a big freaking deal and I still save the LA Times, the New York Times Sunday full page ad for it that it was being shown at the Lincoln Center and then immediately, like the next week, it was shown in regular movie theaters. They really did a good job of exploiting that movie. It was, I guess, a hit to whatever they needed it to be and that led to I guess it led to some more Chuck Jones cartoons for TV specials.
Jerry Beck:But then they ended up getting Frizz Freeling to leave his own company, the Patty Freeling, and come back and work for Warners again unbelievably, and they offered him a deal to do TV specials and have a feature with his name in the title, because Chuck got a lot of attention for the Bugs Bunny Roadrunner movies. That's why I think the second movie is called something like Frizz Freeling's Loony, loony Bugs Bunny movie which the title being a takeoff of Mad Mad, mad Mad World, if you think about it and that came in they all did relatively well, as kind of, when they you know the diminishing returns, you know became Saturday morning things, so much so that they continued to do it. And when Freeling retired, after three features and numerous you know shorts I think they brought Greg in because of the Museum of Modern Art exhibit I think he wrote about it he did that film comment issue, remember that and he was becoming known as the guy who takes this stuff seriously in the mid-'70s. This was before the Book of Mice and Magic, with Leonard Maltin and others. This was like a primo period. I think what happens is Warner's called him in and kind of basically said what would you do? And their attitude was let's have this guy do it, because really back then it was like, I say, a low point and there was really no one interested in doing anything. But Greg, of course, was enthused about doing stuff. So he started off doing these shorts like the Duxorcist, and then they said let's do another feature. Now I don't know who it was at that time Ed Blyer or whoever on high who decided to do these features. But that was one of the greatest decisions ever made by the company, because although they only made five, they've never not been on television. They've never been.
Jerry Beck:There was a whole period after that, in the 80s and 90s, as you said. They were on HBO, they were on Nickelodeon, they were on the Disney Channel, they were on every venue and outlet you could find, not to mention VHS and all that in the beginning. So they were very widely seen. The feature format was a good thing for Looney Tunes and has made a lot of money money for the company. And Greg had his shot to do that, to make a film that featured old footage and new footage. Had his shot to do that, to make a film that featured old footage and new footage, and to keep doing cartoons, commercials and interstitials. He did all sorts of things while he was involved with the unit there.
Jerry Beck:The only thing that ended it was that animation came back. Animation came back because of Roger Rabbit and Disney, little Mermaid and things like that. So by 1990, that's when Warner's decided to team up with Steven Spielberg and do Tiny Toons, and that was kind of the beginning of the modern day studio that still exists today that's been doing mainly television animation. But I think that's what happened, I think Greg and the unit he was part of with producer Kathleen Helpy and that little unit basically kind of dissipated whereas the TV thing grew and grew. But that said, this film has never looked better than it looks here on Blu-ray. It's crystal clear. It's a lot of again, I use that term it's a lot of fun. That's exactly the criteria that all of these things should be and this certainly fits that and it's a great. It's a great compilation and I hope someday we'll get around to those other features putting those out.
George Feltenstein:Well, I thought this was the most important one because of what Greg achieved and I don't think it was a personal bias, that we know him, but I think he really achieved something remarkable because Bloober Bunny, which didn't really get released it was suppressed by certain prior executives here it finally showed up. I know I got it out on DVD, but someone got it on Cartoon Network as well. There was a big emphasis to get this really funny and it was like PG humor. There was a little bit of adult humor, and I say adult with a small A. It was just smart and beyond kiddie fodder, because the problem is most people when they hear animation or cartoons they think it's kiddie, babysitter stuff, it's deke animation.
George Feltenstein:That is not what classic animation is about. That's not what Warner Brothers cartoons were about, animations about. That's not what Warner Brothers cartoons were about. And Greg went back to New York and finished these things from New York because he just was not meant for Burbank and the studio system. It didn't agree with him. But we're very, very blessed to give his work a proper showcase on blu-ray with this disc, which is a tribute not only to the great warner brothers animators but to greg and terry lennon, his co-director, who put a lot of these things together.
Tim Millard:They're terrific it's always great to hear from jerry and george their take on these animation titles. Such a big fan of these releases, I think you're going to enjoy them and they're a terrific addition to your blu-ray collection. And if you haven't yet ordered the blu-rays for frankenstein jr and the impossibles or daffy duck's crackb, there are links in the podcast show notes, as always. If you haven't yet subscribed to our podcast and you enjoyed it, please subscribe at your favorite podcast provider, appreciate that. Thanks for listening and stay slightly obsessed about animation.