Colonel Bleep, Clutch Cargo and Space Angel
Video review for the Stranger, 9/25/92
From 1958 to 1967 (peaking around 1962), tiny independent studios churned out nearly three thousand low-budget cartoon shorts for insertion into local TV kiddie shows. Some of these cartoons didn’t air in every city; most have never been rerun. But now Streamline Pictures, originally formed to import Japanese animation, has released multi-tape packages of three of these series.
Colonel Bleep is a masterpiece of color and composition, which aired when most TV sets were black and white. The title character is a plucky little space creature who mostly communicates by flailing his arms and legs around (in oft-reused stock footage). His sidekicks, an Earth caveman and a living puppet, can talk in some episodes and not in others, leaving all the storytelling to a narrator. Unlike the cookie-cutter mediocrity of Hanna-Barbera’s product of the time, this show’s passionate cheesiness is innocently beguiling.
Same with Clutch Cargo and Space Angel, “adult” adventure series that used still drawings of realistic human characters. Almost the only movement was provided by the characters’ mouths — real human mouths, superimposed on the drawings through something called “Synchro Vox.” The Catalog of Cool calls it “a line-drawing dadafest of epic proportions.”
Issaquah’s Whole Toon Catalog has all these tapes for sale, plus such other contemporary curiosities as Bozo, Popeye, Beetle Bailey, Felix, Hercules, Roger Ramjet, Dick Tracy, Spunky and Tadpole, Pick a Letter, and Sinbad Jr.
LATTER-DAY ADDENDUM: I continue to receive more e-mail about this short-short review than about everything else on my site put together. I’m not a hardcore Clutch fan, and don’t know the answers to any of your production/credits questions about the series. I don’t know who now owns the master rights to the series. There’s some info about the series at the Toon Tracker site. Facets Video, which bought the Whole Toon Catalog’s mail-order operation, might have a little more info.
