ASK me: Funday Funnies

I shoulda known someone would ask this. And it was Neil Robertson who did…

It isn't just me, is it? The closing theme song from Matty's Funday Funnies had a musical riff that sounded an awful lot like one that was used in the Beany & Cecil show. Was that plagiarism or was there some kind of connection between two otherwise very dissimilar cartoon shows?

These was a connection. The original Matty's Funday Funnies debuted in October of 1959 and it featured old Paramount cartoons of, among others, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Herman & Katnip, Buzzy the Crow, Baby Huey and Little Audrey. These had been acquired from Harvey Comics, that publisher having purchased much of the Paramount cartoon library in 1958 for a reported $1,700,000. Harvey edited the original openings of the films to make them all "Harveytoons" and they also made a deal with ABC and Mattel to run them.

Funday Funnies was the show on which ABC ran them — with a newly-animated opening and closing along with interstitials of Matty Mattel and Sister Belle, who were mascots/hosts of Mattel Toys. Here's a promo for the show and it was narrated by the greatest game show announcer of all time, Johnny Olson…

The promo says the show was on Sunday afternoons at 5. Actually, it was on at all sorts of different times on different ABC affiliates at different times. I would guess it sold a lot of Mattel Toys. But after two years, I guess it ran outta gas.

In light of the recent success of the Hanna-Barbera operation, Bob Clampett was shopping around a cartoon version of the Time for Beany puppet show. He made a deal with Mattel for a whole line of Beany and Cecil toys and for cartoons of those characters to replace the Paramount/Harveytoons…and Matty's Funday Funnies became Matty's Funnies with Beany and Cecil. Matty and his sister (redesigned a bit) and all those commercials for Mattel toys stayed but the cartoons changed.

So the reason the theme song sounds the same to you is that the theme song was the same. Bob Clampett and another gent wrote new lyrics to the tune — which, by the way, was composed by Hoyt Curtin, who was responsible for so many memorable theme songs on Hanna-Barbera shows. Here's a whole half-hour episode…

This version of Matty's Funnies also ran in different time slot. It debuted in 1962, reran in '63 and '64 and then some awkward edits were done to the 26 episodes. Matty, his sister and all references to Mattel Toys were chopped out and the series was syndicated as The Beany & Cecil Show for a long, long time. They were pretty clever cartoons.