| DEPUTY DAWGOriginal Medium: Television cartoonsProduced by: Terrytoons First Appeared: 1960 Please contribute to its necessary financial support. Amazon.com or PayPal The CBS TV network bought the Terrytoons studio in 1955, and promptly started exploiting all the old Terrytoons characters, as well as creating new ones for broadcast. Curiously, the … |
| … first Terrytoons property that debuted in his own TV show (as opposed to Mighty Mouse, who had his own TV show but didn't debut there, or Tom Terrific, who debuted on TV but not in his own show) never appeared on CBS. Instead of being part of the regular network offering, Deputy Dawg was syndicated.
The Deputy Dawg Show began during October, 1960, on only a few dozen stations. But it quickly caught on, and was soon popular in practically every major TV market in America. So popular, in fact, that a couple of years later, a half-dozen or so of the cartoons were released to theatres. Directors of the Deputy Dawg cartoons include George Gordon (whose career at Terrytoons went back to the Farmer Alfalfa days), Bob Kuwahara (creator of Hashimoto-San), Dave Tendlar (best known for his work at Fleischer and Famous Studios) and Ralph Bakshi (later famous for American Pop, Fritz the Cat. Wizards and much more). As the name implies, Deputy Dawg was a deputy sheriff in a place where words like "dog" are drawled — specifically, the backwoods country of southern Mississippi, where bayous abound. The supporting cast included Ty Coon, Muskie the Muskrat and Vincent Van Gopher, who didn't always function as pals of Deputy's — they had to be chased out of other folks' chicken coops and melon patches every bit as often as the next guy. The sheriff himself was a white-moustached humanoid toon, who badgered Deputy from above just as the others badgered him from below. Most of the voices were done by Dayton Allen (who also did both Heckle and Jeckle), but Lionel Wilson (Sidney the Elephant) handled some of the incidental characters. Aside from no less than 102 cartoons shown on TV (at four per half-hour show), and those occasional forays into theatrical release, Deputy Dawg appeared in comic books. Dell Comics made him the title feature of Four Color Comics #s 1238 and 1299 (1961 and '62), as well as starring him in its New Terrytoons title. Gold Key Comics reprinted one of the Four Color issues in 1965 as Deputy Dawg #1, and ran him in the back pages of its own New Terrytoons series. He also appeared in a couple of Wonder Books (a knock-off of Little Golden Books), as well as the usual toys, lunchboxes, etc. In 1971, Deputy Dawg headed up a half-hour package that NBC ran on Saturday mornings. There, rerun segments of his old series were backed up by a segment rerunning theatrical Gandy Goose and Sourpuss cartoons, and a segment that ran non-series Terrytoon "classics". That was his last outing as a star. After that, along with Luno, The Mighty Heroes and other minor Terrytoons characters, he started turning up occasionally in cartoon packages that ran on local stations. But in recent years, none of the old Terrytoons guys have been seen on TV at all. — DDM BACK to Don Markstein's Toonopedia™ Home Page
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