Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines
Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines was a cartoon produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions for CBS. Originally the series was broadcast as a Saturday morning cartoon, airing from September 13, 1969 to January 3, 1970.
The show focuses on the efforts of Dick Dastardly and his canine sidekick Muttley to catch Yankee Doodle Pigeon, a carrier pigeon who carries secret messages (hence the name of the show’s theme song “Stop the Pigeon”).
The show is widely known as Stop that Pigeon based on the show’s original working title and the show’s theme song, written by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (and based on the jazz standard “Tiger Rag”) which repeats that phrase so often that it is frequently mistaken as the show’s actual title. In the UK, the series remains best known by the shorter name Dastardly and Muttley.
The show had only two voice actors: Paul Winchell as Dick Dastardly and the indistinctly heard General, and Don Messick as everybody else. Each 22-minute show was broadcast over half an hour on the network, including network breaks, and contained: two Dastardly & Muttley stories, one Magnificent Muttley story (Muttley’s Walter Mitty-style daydreams), and two or three short Wing Dings (brief gags to break up the longer stories).
The Vulture Squadron use many planes with various attachments built by Klunk, including an anvil, a racket, a jack-in-a-box, robots, missiles etc…
I miss this cartoon! I woke up around 5am every Saturday just to watch this show.