| Harlem Globetrotters | |
|---|---|
Title card for Hanna-Barbera's animated Harlem Globetrotters series. |
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| Format | Animated |
| Country of origin | USA |
| No. of episodes | 22 |
| Production | |
| Producer(s) | William Hanna Joseph Barbera |
| Running time | 30 minutes |
| Distributor | CBS Television Distribution |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | CBS |
| Original run | September 12, 1970 – October 16, 1971 |
| Chronology | |
| Followed by | The Super Globetrotters |
Harlem Globetrotters (called Harlem Globe Trotters in the opening titles) is a Saturday morning cartoon produced by Hanna-Barbera and CBS Productions, featuring animated versions of players from the basketball team, Harlem Globetrotters.
Broadcast from September 12, 1970 to September 2, 1972 on CBS, and later re-run on NBC as The Go-Go Globetrotters, the show featured cartoon versions of George "Meadowlark" Lemon, Freddie "Curly" Neal, Hubert "Geese" Ausbie, J.C. "Gip" Gipson, Bobby Joe Mason, and Pablo Robertson, alongside their fictional bus driver and manager Granny, and Dribbles, their dog mascot.
The series worked to a formula where the team travels somewhere and typically got involved in a local conflict that leads to one of the characters proposing a basketball game to settle the issue. To ensure the Globetrotters' defeat, the villains rig the contest to ensure that their opponents lose; however, before the second half of the contest, the team always finds a way to even the odds, become all but invincible, and win the game.
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Twenty-two episodes of Harlem Globetrotters were eventually produced: sixteen for the 1970-71 season, and six more for the 1971-72 season. Harlem Globetrotters has a place in history as being the first Saturday morning cartoon to feature a predominately African-American cast; Filmation's The Hardy Boys had been the first to feature an African-American character the previous year. Another Hanna-Barbera series, Josie and the Pussycats, premiered 30 minutes earlier than Harlem Globetrotters on the same day and network, and was the first Saturday morning cartoon to feature an African-American female character. Like many other Saturday morning cartoons of the era, the first season episodes of the series featured a laugh track.
After the show was canceled, the animated Globetrotters made three appearances on Hanna-Barbera's The New Scooby-Doo Movies in 1972 and 1973. Oddly enough, Dribbles, who didn't appear on the show was in the theme song sequence and several references were made to Granny, who also didn't appear. Hanna-Barbera produced a second animated series starring the Globetrotters in 1979 called The Super Globetrotters, this time featuring the players as superheroes. In spring 1999 TV Land aired repeats of Harlem Globetrotters on Saturday mornings as part of its TV Land Super Retrovision Saturdaze lineup. The series has not been rerun since.
The series was a co-production of Hanna-Barbera and the CBS Television Network (only one of few animated TV series that CBS directly produced). Syndication rights were originally held by Viacom Enterprises, formerly owned by CBS as its syndication arm. They are now held by CBS Television Distribution. CBS Home Entertainment currently does not plan on releasing the series on DVD (in any event, they would need approval from the Globetrotters themselves).
In April 1972, Gold Key Comics launched a comic adaptation of the Harlem Globetrotters animated series; their first comic book appearance was in issue #8 of Gold Key's Hanna-Barbera Fun-In published in July 1971. Several stories in early issues were based on episodes of the TV show. The comic series lasted for 4 years and 12 issues through January 1975.
A soundtrack album, The Globetrotters, was produced by Jeff Barry and released in 1970 by Kirshner Records (Kirshner #KES-106, distributed by then-CBS division Columbia Records), which featured tunes heard in episodes of the series (during the basketball game sequences). Don Kirshner served as music supervisor for both the series and the record. 2 singles were generated from this onetime release, one of which (a cover of the J.R. Bailey and The Cadillacs tune "Rainy Day Bells") managed to crack the Top 100, followed by 3 non-album singles. Jimmy Radcliffe produced, with Wally Gold, and provided the vocals on "Duke Of Earl", "Everybody's Got Hot Pants" from the first non-album single and co-wrote and produced "Everybody Needs Love" from the second as well providing a number of songs and recordings for the series.
Globetrotter frontman Meadowlark Lemon was the only member of the team to be actually involved with the project, adding occasional background vocals to some tracks.
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