The Adventures of Spunky and Tadpole
A boy and a bear hunt bad guys in short daily episodes.
The Adventures of Spunky and Tadpole is an animated television series produced by Beverly Hills Productions that began syndication on September 6, 1958. The show featured a boy and a bear who hunted down bad guys, with each story told across ten three-and-a-half-minute episodes. It aired 150 episodes until September 9, 1961, typically shown one episode per day as part of local afternoon children's programming.
Quick Facts
- Genre
- Comedy
- Writer
- Art Moore
- Voices
- Joan Gardner
- Don Messick
- Ed Janis
- Opening theme
- "The Toy Shop Window"; by Roger Roger
- Country
- United States
- Language
- English
- Episodes
- 150
- Producer
- Ed Janis
Facts from the source article.
Did You Know?
- Actress Corinne Calvet and her husband were originally vice-presidents of Beverly Hills Productions.
- The company's president and producer Ed Janis engaged in shady fund-raising practices that attracted the attention of the Better Business Bureau and were reported on by Variety.
- Corinne Calvet and her husband withdrew from the company after the fund-raising issues came to light.
Marketing
The cartoon was cheaply made and poorly thought out, but its first distributor, Guild Films, gave it a major promotional push in 1958. Guild, a big player in TV distribution at the time thanks to shows like Liberace and the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoons, managed to place Spunky and Tadpole in several big-city markets by claiming it would entertain both kids and adults. It couldn't keep up with stronger syndicated competitors such as Huckleberry Hound and the Three Stooges shorts, and after Guild was absorbed in a merger at the end of the 1950s, the episodes were shuffled to smaller distributors. Sold cheaply to less wealthy stations in smaller areas, the series quietly aired into the mid-1960s.
More in 1950s American Animated Television Series
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