| Colonel Bleep | |
|---|---|
VHS cover art for Colonel Bleep |
|
| Genre | Sci-Fi |
| Format | Cartoon series |
| Created by | Robert D. Buchanan Joseph Barbera |
| Written by | Robert D. Buchanan |
| Directed by | Jack Schleh |
| Presented by | Narrator |
| Starring | Colonel Bleep Squeek Scratch |
| Narrated by | Noah Tyler |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Language(s) | English |
| No. of episodes | 104 (less than half are known to survive) |
| Production | |
| Running time | 5 minutes |
| Production company(s) | Soundac |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | Syndication |
| Picture format | Color |
| Audio format | Monaural |
| Original run | 1957 – 1960 |
Colonel Bleep was the first color cartoon ever made for television. It was created by Robert D. Buchanan, and was filmed by Soundac of Miami. The show was originally syndicated in 1957 as a segment on Uncle Bill's TV Club. 104 five-minute episodes were produced. Of these episodes, slightly fewer than half are known to survive today.
The show took place on the fictitious Zero Zero Island, where the Equator meets the Greenwich Meridian. There, Colonel Bleep, an extraterrestrial lifeform from the planet Futura, protected Earth with the help of his deputies, Squeek (a mute cowboy puppet boy) and Scratch (a caveman of great physical strength who was awakened from a sleep of several thousand years by an atomic explosion). Colonel Bleep, like all of his fellow Futurans, could manipulate butonic energy in a variety of ways; for instance, to propel himself through space (inexplicably, on a unicycle), or as an offensive weapon. The amount of butomic energy Colonel Bleep could absorb at any given time was finite, and in several episodes he runs out of energy and becomes vulnerable.
Their usual nemesis was a dark and mysterious hooded figure called Dr. Destructo, who could typically be found in his flying saucer and seemed to have no lower half. Other than that oddity, he was kind of a very-limited-animation, early version of Darth Vader. Other regular villains included The Black Knight and Black Patch (a space pirate).
The animation in the show was extraordinarily limited, as was typical of TV animation during that era. Noah Tyler was the narrator for the show. Jack Schleh directed all of the episodes. The design of the series was greatly influenced by the futuristic googie designs of the '50s and early '60s: Cars had huge tailfins, boomerangs were frequently incorporated into signs and architecture, and atom symbols were used as frequently as possible.
In 1965 Schleh and Buchanan also produced a series of syndicated physical fitness cartoons for children through Soundac called The Mighty Mr. Titan. Although Colonel Bleep is generally well-regarded today, The Mighty Mr. Titan is not.
Unlike its contemporary series, Clutch Cargo, practically no original material from the production of Colonel Bleep is known to exist today. In the early '70s, while Jack Schleh was closing Soundac and moving the company's materials to a van, car thieves stole the van. Its contents have never turned up.
Colonel Bleep has probably not been shown on TV in the United States since the early 1970s. Two videocassettes from the series were released in 1993, containing most of the episodes still known to exist at the time (reportedly discovered in the film storage vault of a southwestern U.S. TV station which had formerly aired the show). A third videocassette containing the remainder of the existing episodes, plus some existing footage of the Uncle Bill's TV Club series had been planned, but was never released.
Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi has acknowledged the influence of Colonel Bleep on his own work.
On August 23, 2005, Alpha Video released a DVD entitled Colonel Bleep, Volume 1. The DVD contains 23 episodes, about 20 of which do not appear on the earlier videocassette releases, nearly doubling the number of episodes of the series still known to exist.
One episode can be seen as part of "The Speed Racer Show", an anthology film created by Streamline Pictures released on VHS and DVD by Family Home Entertainment as "Speed Racer: the Movie." The episode occurs between the two Speed Racer episodes ("The Car Hater" and "Race Against the Mammoth Car, Part 1").
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