"Wrench"
"Socket"
"Socket"
As the opening theme and the resulting assembly of the cartoon vehicle known as Speed Buggy continued in 1973-74 on a Saturday morning on CBS, there was a decent chance that I was in front of the TV watching.
I'm also sure that a better than average chance that my brother (a little over a year old) was somewhere around me, not really caring about Speed Buggy, but there wasn't much else for me to do, let alone for someone of his age to do, so he was likely around the television because that is where I was!
Speed Buggy was a cartoon that basically took the two Hanna-Barbera cartoon hits from the previous few seasons, Scooby Doo (1969) and Josie and the Pussycats (1970), changed things up a hair with the premise (replacing the traveling van or rock band with a racing car), kept what worked (a wacky non-human interacting with teenagers.) and spun it into a "new" cartoon.
After all, if you sat down and watched all three of those cartoons, it would not be difficult to find the common thread in writing and the shows themselves and if you weren't familiar with them going into this 90 minute binge (I'd be hard-pressed to find someone unfamiliar with Scooby-Doo.), I'd bet that they would either like or dislike all three.
Speed Buggy was a talking car with three traveling teenagers (I've never understood how no one ever questioned why so many of these 70s shows had teenagers traveling around the country/world without any type of supervision) on a racing circuit where they raced for championships and yet still had time to defeat various villains on their way to victory despite being deviated from their course on every episode ( I also have never understood why there was no one around from the circuit to disqualify them for not following the correct course.).
Famous voice actor Mel Blanc voiced Speed Buggy, and "Debbie" of the three teenagers was voiced by Arlene Golonka, who was a character actress that had achieved her biggest fame, a few years before as Ken Berry's love interest on "Mayberry RFD", which was a favorite show of Battlin' Bob's.
Speed Buggy can still be seen on Cartoon Network and Boomerang every so often and Speed Buggy made a few guest appearances on cartoons later in the 70s such as Scooby-Doo and Laff-a-lympics as part of the"Scooby Doobies" team.
So, I'm sure you may be wondering why a cartoon that lasted one season (although Speed Buggy episodes were shown for several years following ) and for a total of sixteen episodes (Speed Buggy was seen often on Saturday, they were the same sixteen episodes) has its own post?
Well, I was skimming through the internet and saw the above picture of the very first lunchbox that I owned as I entered first grade in 1974.
Lunchboxes were a very big deal in 1970s elementary school culture and the one thing that made preparing for school shopping tolerable was selecting your lunchbox for the year.
One thing that I could give my mother credit for in these situations was that each year, we (my brother later in the decade as well) would be allowed to pick a new lunchbox.
This was not a small perk, as many kids would use the same box for years, especially considering how many corners that were cut on clothes, shoes, etc.
My mom started to get the hint a little bit about how rough these things could be on kids by the time I hit the upper schools, but in elementary school, lunchbox equality was about all that I had going for me.
Little did I know and in hindsight, why did Hanna-Barbera make this decision and that as I was selecting Speed Buggy as my lunchbox of choice that another Speed Buggy cartoon (other than a guest appearance) would never see the light of day.
Why would you release lunchboxes etc. of a program that you had already decided to cancel?
Merchandise wise, I have a hard time believing that Speed Buggy was going to be a big seller without new episodes on Saturday mornings, so it still doesn't make sense all these years later.
Memorabilia based on Speed Buggy was small, other than the lunchbox, a basic board game, a short comic book run and I think a few years later, the four characters might have been part of a Hanna-Barbera Slurpee cup series at Seven-Eleven, but that's about it from the seventies.
There was a small Matchbook-style car made in 1998 that I think is in the attic with a lot of my stuff that I bought before we moved and I think it's still in the packaging.
It's funny how a picture of something brings long-dead memories back to you.
A school bus, the kid you sat beside because he had a Speed Buggy box too even though you had never met, the times you used it and the time that it was moved aside for other lunchboxes and later to the point of no lunchbox at all.
And sometimes even the person that you used to watch cartoons beside you in a far different place and time comes to mind as well.
I'm sure that Speed Buggy box is still at my parents' house, just about everything from childhood that I didn't bring here still is, I wonder how what kind of shape it's in after 45 years?
1974 and 45 years is a long time to a metal lunchbox after all!
Perhaps I'll drag it out one day and see if it still has any memories left to jump out when I open that lid!
Thanks for reading some memories of a short-lived cartoon and a little kid that watched it on Saturdays in front of the old school floor model television!
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