As The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show rolled on through the morning, the focus of the program switched to the Road Runner for the second half or final third, introduced by its own memorable theme — “Road Runner, the Coyote’s after you/Road Runner, if he catches you, you’re through…” Unfortunately, the quality of the Road Runner’s portion of the show was somewhat compromised…
You see, Warner Brothers continued to release theatrical shorts longer than the other studios, but they farmed out the actual work to smaller companies. DePatie-Freleng Enterprises (co-owned by former WB director Friz Freleng) made the shorts from 1964 to 1967, resulting in a much-altered animation style (not quite “limited,” but close). The WB/DFE partnership did some Road Runner films, but focused mostly on a series of Daffy Duck vs. Speedy Gonzalez shorts (the less said about which the better). Format Films handled the final batch of Road Runner shorts, which were even worse than the Daffy/Speedy stuff. These late-period embarrassments turned up again and again on The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, but can’t hold a candle to the ones originally produced from ‘49 to ‘63, which also turned up on BB/RR. Even a six-year-old could tell the difference.
Sometimes during one of the Format Road Runner shorts (there were eleven of them, and at least two were shown every damn week), I would turn the dial back to ABC, and frequently encounter The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, another entry in the trend of turning a prime-time family show into a Saturday morning kids’ cartoon. Before my time, there had already been Saturday morning versions of Star Trek, The Addams Family, Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, Emergency!, Lassie, My Favorite Martian, and possibly I Dream of Jeannie (the adaptation was pretty loose.)
The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang bridged that era with the 80s, which brought us animated versions of The Dukes of Hazzard, Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, Punky Brewster, ALF, and more Gilligan.
The premise for a lot of these shows was the same: take a few of the original TV cast, dump them into a crazy new setting, and add a few new “cartoon-only” characters, preferably some kind of cute mascot or talking animal. To wit: Fonz, Richie Cunningham, and Ralph Malph are caught in a malfunctioning time machine and bounce through history accompanied by a comic-relief dog named Mr. Cool and a “future girl” named Cupcake. (Second example: Laverne and Shirley are in the army and their drill sergeant is a pig named Squealy.)
Almost without exception, these spin-off cartoons managed to get most of the original cast to do the voices. I imagine Donny Most probably wasn’t too difficult to convince, but Ron Howard had already directed two TV movies, one feature film and was planning his second (Night Shift), and had left the actual prime-time version of Happy Days. Still, the work couldn’t have been too demanding. Howard could probably knock back a Scotch and polish off his lines for all 24 episodes in an afternoon, with one eye on the clock so he could get to the bank before it closed.
(Those 24 episodes were padded out for almost two years — first in the usual re-runs, then re-packaged with other shows, in true Saturday Morning style, as the rather desperate-sounding Mork & Mindy/Laverne & Shirley/Fonz Hour.)
At some point during The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, it would be time for breakfast. With a laborious lugging about of the kitchen stool, I assembled the disparate parts that would come together to form my perfect meal — a bowl of cereal. I took my cereal very seriously. Every other Saturday or Sunday afternoon, Mom would do the grocery shopping, and I would accompany her to make sure the cereal acquisition was handled by me personally. Mom had grocery shopping down to a science: her trip through the aisles took exactly sixty minutes. I had that amount of time to pick out my cereals for the next two weeks. I had to get one “healthy” cereal
(Grape Nuts, Cheerios, Chex, etc.) to offset the effects of the two others I was allowed, which were always powerfully sugared. I liked the healthy ones just as well, because I would simply add my own sugar to taste, usually to the point it would leave a viscous sludge on the bottom of the bowl. Mom would often threaten that I would “get worms” if I continued to eat that much raw sugar, the horrific threat of which might be effective on less-savvy six-year-olds, but I waved it off like the old wives’ tale it was. (To this day, I am worm-free.)
So I stood in the cereal aisle in the dead center of Woodland’s Nugget Market (the original!) for an hour, making my decisions. When Mom passed down that aisle, I knew I was at half-time. Would I go home with a product from Post, Kellogg’s, or General Mills? Would it be Pops? Loops? Pebbles? Jacks? I avoided the Smacks — the puffed wheat cereal looked like a bowl of dead locusts, and I didn’t care how cool Dig ‘Em the Frog dressed, I didn’t want a slimy amphibian on my cereal box. Something from the Crunch family, perhaps? The good Cap’n’s original version would tear the roof of your mouth 
to hell, and leave a strange film, but Peanut Butter Crunch was smooth as silk. (I’ve often wondered if Cap’n Crunch’s eyebrows were floating above his eyes, or simply painted on his hat.) And speaking of unpleasant mouth feel, Grape Nuts was tantamount to eating a bowl of garden-path gravel, but it had a peculiar charm and its slightly-smaller box often graced our shelf. If I was feeling particularly jaunty, I would select Cookie Crisp, which many hand-wringing nutritionists felt was truly the end of civilization. I preferred the long-discontinued Vanilla Wafer Cookie Crisp (in the blue box).
Around this time, at least one of the choices was almost automatic — Waffelos,
my hands-down favorite cereal. They tasted exactly like waffles with maple syrup. They came in regular or blueberry, had a mustachioed cowboy mascot on the box, and best of all, my sister didn’t like them, so the whole box was mine! (If you go to the Mr. Breakfast website comment page — and who wouldn’t? — and read the comments for Waffelos, one of the first remarks you’ll see is “This stuff was like crack!”) The Waffelos cowboy rode off into the sunset before the 80s were half-over, and we’ll never see his like again. (Post introduced some bullshit called “Waffle Crisp” in 1996, but it is a pale imitation.)
Brimming bowl of cereal in (two) hand(s), I carefully baby-stepped my way back from the kitchen to the TV tray I had hopefully remembered to set up ahead of time… Continue reading
Holy Bee of Ephesus 