Tooter Turtle
A turtle's time-travel adventures with Mr. Wizard the Lizard.
Tooter Turtle is an American animated television series that first appeared on NBC on October 15, 1960, as a segment of the King Leonardo and His Short Subjects program. The show ran for 39 original episodes through July 22, 1961, and later aired as reruns on other cartoon shows. It is notable for its recurring moral, 'Be just what you is, not what you is not!'
Quick Facts
- Runtime
- 5 minutes
- Executive producers
- Peter M. Piech
- Voices
- Allen Swift; Sandy Becker
- Country
- United States
- Language
- English
- Network
- NBC
- First aired
- 15 October 1960
- Last aired
- 22 July 1961
Facts from the source article.
Plot
Each episode follows a consistent format. Tooter Turtle calls on his friend Mr. Wizard the Lizard, an anthropomorphic lizard who wears a wizard cone hat, a robe, and pince-nez eyeglasses and lives in a tiny cardboard box at the base of a tall tree. Tooter knocks on the box, saying he has 'another favor to ask,' and Mr. Wizard shrinks him to enter through the front door. Mr. Wizard uses magic to send Tooter time traveling into the past or teleport him to various locales, narrating the story as Tooter fulfills a new destiny. When the adventure becomes a catastrophe, Tooter cries, 'Help me, Mr. Wizard, I don't want to be X any more!' Mr. Wizard rescues him with the incantation, 'Drizzle, Drazzle, Druzzle, Drome, time for this one to come home.' At the end of some episodes, Mr. Wizard advises, 'Be just what you is, not what you is not. Folks what do this has the happiest lot.'
Critical reception and impact
The Replacements borrowed and tweaked Mr. Wizard's incantation—"Drizzle, Drazzle, Drozzle, Drome; Time for this one to come home"—into the lyric "Twizzle, Twazzle, Twozzle, Tome, Time for This One to Come on Home" for their song "Hold My Life" on the album Tim. One historian described the World War I fighter-pilot episode "Tailspin Tooter" as containing some of the most gruesome pro-war imagery in cartoons from that period; it aired during the Vietnam War but before the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. In the 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City, the narrator recalls the cartoon series while in a similar predicament. In The Matrix (1999), Neo tells his operator Tank, "Mr. Wizard, get me the hell out of here!" to exit the Matrix.
More in Television Shows About Wizards
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