Who could forget that awesome show. It was probably my favorite cartoon as a kid, at least for a while. That and Scooby of course. But would it have hurt them to have Dick Dastardly finally win a race once in a while? My biggest beef with the show, though (and this is how it relates to Wacky Packages), is those early days of Ebay when every search for "Wacky" would come up with 50% Wacky Races animation cells, 40% Wacky Wobblers, and 10% or less Wacky Packages, so you had to weed through everything to find the good stuff!
Yes,
Wacky Races is one of my favorite Hanna-Barbera series, too, as well as its two spin-offs,
Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines and
The Perils of Penelope Pitstop.
The only thing I didn't like about the DVD releases of at least two of these three series is that the
Wacky Races: The Complete Series DVD set stupidly omitted all of the Announcer's dialogue in every one of the closing credits (except for two episodes (I don't remember which ones they were, though)) and
The Perils of Penelope Pitstop: The Complete Series DVD set equally stupidly omitted
all of the openings to the following week's episodes at the end of every episode (e.g, "Game of Peril", the next-to-last episode, whose opening segment
contained an important part of the entire plot). The
Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines DVD set, however, was unedited (as far as I
know, that is).
This isn't the
first time that whoever owns Hanna-Barbera by now has done this, though. The
Space Ghost and Dino Boy: The Complete Series DVD set's order of the
Space Ghost segments was completely different from the original broadcast order (I don't know about the order of the
Dino Boy in the Lost Valley segments, though; see the Wikipedia article
Space Ghost (TV series) for the segment release orders of both versions) and
The Herculoids: The Complete Series DVD-R set
again stupidly omitted the prologues to the first of the two segments in every episode which came before the opening sequence (the prologues to the second of the two segments, however, were left in
every time). A
perfect example of these omissins is the story "The Time Creatures", which opens on the Herculoids' homeworld of Amzot, but
this time, it is thousands of years in the future, long after the Herculoids are gone. An alien being named Oton says to a group of others of his kind "To truly rule the future, we must enter into the past and conquer all those who would dare stand in our way!" (or worlds to that effect in the second half of the sentence; I only remember the line up to "into the past") He and his men then use a time machine to go back in time to Amzot, thousands of years in the past, when the Herculoids lived. This is followed by the title card, which is, in turn, followed by the rest of the story. The omission of this important part of the plot (it
actually establishes Oton's motive for his actions later on in the story) is
terrible! Just
terrible!
And these four TV series are just the ones that I
know about and have actually
watched! I mean, people, if you're going to release complete-series DVD sets, please, at
least get them right the first time!
Don't give us Saturday morning cartoon fans sub-par products! Who
does the final product checks on these things
anyway, monkeys?
It's a good thing that this
didn't happen (again, as far as I
know, that is) to the DVD-R sets of two more of my favorite Hanna-Barbera series,
The Atom Ant Show and
The Secret Squirrel Show!
