Created and Produced by Total TeleVision Productions [Paperback]

Mark Arnold (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 11, 2009

Here at last is the real story of how TTV was formed! Inside you will find rare production artwork and storyboards, as well as reminiscences from TTV's founders. "Mark Arnold is the guy who the other authorities on comic books and animated cartoons turn to when they're stumped for an obscure tidbit of pop cultural information; he always delivers the goods." - Scott Shaw, cartoonist

Product Details

• Paperback: 380 pages
• Publisher: BearManor Media; 1st edition (June 11, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593933452
• ISBN-13: 978-1593933456
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #652,956 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mark Arnold (1966- ) was born in San Jose, California. He is a comic book and animation historian, and has had many articles published in various publications. He has a BA in Broadcast Communication Arts from San Francisco State and has performed many celebrity interviews. He has published "The Harveyville Fun Times!" since 1990 and published his first book "The Best of the Harveyville Fun Times!" in 2006. His second book "Created and Produced by Total TeleVision productions: The Story of Underdog, Tennessee Tuxedo and the Rest" was published in 2009 by BearManor Media. His third and fourth book for BearManor called "If You're Cracked, You're Happy: The Story of Cracked Mazagine, Book 1 and Book 2" and a fifth book called "Mark Arnold Picks on The Beatles" were issued in 2011. He plans to write a children's book and a Disney book among other things. He currently resides in Saratoga, CA.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable and informative tribute to the cartoons Jay Ward didn't create (but you always thought he did), July 16, 2009

By 

Bradley Davis "brad78" (Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Created and Produced by Total TeleVision Productions (Paperback)

A few years ago Keith Scott published his excellent and authoritative book on all things Jay Ward, The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a Flying Squirrel, and a Talking Moose, all about the history of Jay Ward's animation studio and the cartoons he produced for sponsor General Mills for television in the 60s, particularly Rocky and Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right, etc. Over the years various syndication packages of Jay Ward's creations have been mixed and mingled with another batch of cartoons that he did not create, though many have believed that he did. These include the ever popular Underdog and Tennessee Tuxedo cartoons, as well as the The King and Odie, Go Go Gophers, Commander McBragg and others. These cartoons were actually produced for General Mills at about the same time by another studio, Total Television Productions (or TTV). Style and (limited)animation-wise the early cartoons of Jay Ward and TTV are visually similar, having utilized the same Mexican animation studio (Val-Mar/Gamma Productions, a cost-saving venture of General Mills, their advertising agency and others). In Scott's book the TTV cartoons are briefly mentioned and panned mildly as being "pleasant diversions", but not up to Jay Ward's caliber and "screamingly unfunny". Yet many remember them fondly.

This new book by Mark Arnold serves as a complement to the Scott book to tell the real history and facts about Total Television Productions and their cartoons. It offers the inside story on the origins of the studio, the people and talent involved involved, and the characters they created. Any person who finds the topic of animation (or at least, the history and business of animation) interesting, or loves Underdog or Tennessee Tuxedo (my personal favorite), should find this book enjoyable. It is well written in a casual readable style, featuring extensive excerpts from interviews with the four principle founders/owners of TTV, as well as bios and interviews with voice actors and animators who worked on the cartoons.

The content of the book itself (not counting the episode guide) clocks in at about 250 pages, compared to over 300 in the Scott book. However this book reads much faster, devoting more pages to photos of production art, historic TTV merchandise, storyboards and even entire episode scripts with notes scrawled in the margins. While I enjoyed the Scott book a lot, some have found it exhaustive and verbose, ie, wordy. This book has enough substance but will not suffer the same criticism.

The opening chapter gives the basic back story of TTV, featuring extensive interview excerpts from the two original idea men and eventually all four founders. Having read both books, one gets the impression that while General Mills enjoyed great success with Jay Ward's product, he was viewed suspiciously as a bit of a loose cannon by his sponsor, their advertising agency, and even the network. TTV appears to have been their safer, more trouble-free alternative. Neither company had anything to do with the production of the other's cartoons, one being a West coast operation (Ward), while TTV was an East coast studio. Still they were both more-or-less forced to utilize General Mills' and DFS's pet project budget animation studio, Gamma Productions in Mexico City. The purpose of both was basically to create animated cartoons as a vehicle for General Mills to advertise breakfast cereals to kids. The philosophies of the two studios differed however. While Ward reveled in his use of somewhat sophisticated humor that was often lost on children, TTV attempted to create cartoons that were fully approachable by young children but still wouldn't bore older kids and adults.

This book includes a chapter about the outsourced Mexican animation house Gamma Productions. It is not as extensive a history as in Scott's book, but is valuable in its own right as it features substantial interview excerpts from one or two animators who actually worked there on cartoons for both Ward and TTV in the 60s, as well as additional details about the studio's history and demise.

Other chapters throughout the book focus on the various TTV characters in chronological order (King Leonardo, Tooter Turtle, Tennessee Tuxedo, Underdog, etc), and go into the bios and histories and talents of many of the voice actors who brought the characters to life.

Similar to the Scott book, this book provides an Episode Guide that gives a synopsis and airdate of each cartoon for each series that TTV created (as nearly complete as the author could make it given the prolonged unavailability of many of these episodes). There are also a couple of brief appendices featuring info on comic books and actors and animators. This is likely to be the most complete and authoritative book on the TTV story that will ever be written, and it serves pretty well in that regard.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fine "biography" of an overlooked 60s TV cartoon factory, August 9, 2009

By 

Christopher Barat (Owings Mills, MD, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Created and Produced by Total TeleVision Productions (Paperback)

Over the past two decades, Mark Arnold has done yeomanlike service in preserving memories of various pieces of fondly recalled pop culture that have, for one reason or another, fallen by the wayside (though fond memories of them may linger on). Most of his efforts have gone towards commemorating the legacy of Harvey Comics in his fine fanzine, THE HARVEYVILLE FUN TIMES!. For more than 15 years, I've written the RICHVILLE RUMINATIONS column for that magazine and therefore can testify directly to Mark's love for the subject matter. Now, Mark has favored us with a book on the unjustly overlooked output of Total TeleVision productions, a cartoon producer in the paradoxical position of having created several of the best-loved animated TV series of the 1960s, yet currently languishing in such obscurity that (gasp!) no one has even bothered to create a Wikipedia page wholly devoted to the company. Though Mark's book isn't as tightly organized as I might have liked, he presents by far the most detailed and enlightening history of TTV that has appeared to date.

Past reference works that have touched upon TTV's output have tended to be condescending at best and disdainful at worst, often making disparaging remarks that compare the company's work unfavorably to that of the Jay Ward Studios. This is an understandable parallel to draw, given that (1) both the Ward shows and the TTV efforts were sponsored by General Mills; (2) both groups of shows were animated by the same limited-animation factory in Mexico; (3) a number of network and syndicated "compilation series," such as "The Dudley Do-Right Show" and "Go-Go Gophers", indiscriminately mixed Ward and TTV product together, virtually forcing viewers to do comparisons; (4) to be perfectly frank, Ward's shows (especially those starring Rocky and Bullwinkle) were legitimately funnier that TTV's. Arnold, however, provides some helpful information as to WHY such TTV series as "Underdog", "Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales", and "King Leonardo and His Short Subjects" took a different tack.

When Buck Biggers, Chet Stover, Treadwell Covington, and artist Joe Harris formed TTV in the late 50s, the goal was to follow Ward's lead and produce shows to be sponsored by General Mills (for whose advertising agency Biggers, Stover, and Harris all worked at the time). The focus of TTV's output, however, was intended to be different from the outset. Wary of Ward's prickly reputation and penchant for firing jokes that sailed over the heads of (most of) his audience, GM wanted shows that, while still watchable by sophisticated audiences, were a bit more "kid-friendly." TTV shows, as a result, emphasized characterization and narrative over "boffo yuks." This approach sometimes puts these shows in the awkward position of "falling between two stools" -- not being funny enough for the wiseacre crowd that loved Ward's material, yet being too funny to be taken entirely seriously. (This was especially true of "Underdog", which spent its active life in perpetual tension between authentic, cliffhanger-ridden superheroics and outright parody.) It did, however, have the advantage that when such a "halfway-house" methodology was appropriate to get a specific point across, TTV's work could be very effective indeed. This is why, after considerable reflection, I've come to regard "Tennessee Tuxedo", rather than "Underdog", as being the best TTV series. "Tuxedo" was one of several "educational" cartoons that popped up in the early 60s in response to complaints (most famously by FCC Chairman Newton Minow) that animated TV fare didn't teach kids anything useful. Similar beefs have been registered in the intervening decades, resulting in occasional classics ("Schoolhouse Rock") and a whole lot of schlock ("Histeria!", "Cro", most "green-themed" cartoons). "Tuxedo" was the best of that first generation of "edu-toons," which also included "The Funny Company" and "The Big World of Little Adam". Unlike those series, which leaned heavily on live-action documentary footage, "Tuxedo" wrapped its soft-pedaled nuggets of info in the appealing package of wise-guy penguin Tennessee Tuxedo (voiced by Don Adams, who was still a few years away from playing Maxwell Smart) and dimwitted walrus Chumley getting required data from Phineas J. Whoopee, the genial "man with all the answers." The fact that "Tuxedo" was 100% animated (with assistance from Whoopee's "three-dimensional blackboard") permitted the educational material to slide smoothly down the throats of the youngsters for which it was intended. As Arnold points out, while some of the technology described in "Tuxedo" has dated, the method of delivery displayed in the cartoon remains highly effective.

"Tuxedo" and "Underdog", like most of the other TTV features, relied upon repetition of catchphrases and the like as a means of ramming their points home. This has the advantage of rendering the shows difficult (if not impossible) to forget, yet, when taken to extremes, it can become irritating. Arnold notes the major repetitive features of these shows and additional TTV products such as "The World of Commander McBragg", "The Hunter", "Klondike Kat", "Go-Go Gophers", and "Tooter Turtle", yet does not "string the thread through the popcorn" and discuss TTV's output as a complete entity. Instead, we get series-by-series recaps, some of which are better than others. Another structural flaw in the book is the heavy emphasis upon lengthy quotations from Biggers, Stover, Covington, Harris, Bradley Bolke (the voice of Chumley), and others. Aside from not being adequately edited for clarity, these quotes should have been set off in paragraphs by themselves, allowing Arnold to fill in the gaps with more writing of his own. As it is, I had to read the book several times before the narrative really started to "flow" and make coherent sense.

Despite the aforementioned problems, Arnold's book, along with Biggers' and Stover's own book of reminiscences (also available from Bear Manor Media), will be the standard reference work on TTV into the foreseeable future. Arnold is especially good when describing TTV's demise in the late 1960s and the story behind the company's last, unproduced series, "The Colossal Show". This series, which was intended to star a Sergeant Bilko-style character in ancient Rome, "lives on" to this day in the peculiar form of a one-shot comic book commissioned from Gold Key after TTV had reached a "handshake deal" with NBC to produce the show (General Mills had dropped out of the picture several years before, and TTV's actual last series, "The Beagles", was sponsored by a toy company). NBC eventually backed out of its commitment, but the comic book remains, preserving what "The Colossal Show" might have looked like, in the manner of prehistoric tree sap preserving an ancient insect. The failure to produce this series -- which would undoubtedly have been far, far better than Hanna-Barbera's later "The Roman Holidays" -- is probably the one "pseudo-tragedy" in TTV's relatively short, but genuinely distinguished, history. Thanks, Mark, for finally doing TTV some justice.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Total Treasure!, October 1, 2009

By 

Marc Jay Levenson "Pale Blue Dot" (Bensalem, Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Created and Produced by Total TeleVision Productions (Paperback)

Mark has captured a cherished memory that I'd almost forogtten was there. When I opened his book and thumbed through the pages, rushes of wonderful laughter surged back. Underdog, Tennessee Tuxedo, Commander McBragg, the Go Go Gophers--these were characters and stories that were created by true TV geniuses. Sadly, their style and creativity have disappeared. But Mark has brought back their innovative magic, along with the inside stories of the creators, animators, and the voices which brought such ridiculous fun to life. I grew up with Sandy Becker (a New York TV genius in his own right), and his voice is part of the stories which Mark resurrects (remember Tooter Turtle??). I didn't realize that Tennessee Tuxedo's mentor, Mr. Woopee, was courtesy the voice of Larry Storch. I can't get his voice out of my mind now! This was a wonderful book for anyone who wants to know the true stories behind some of TV's most unforgettable cartoon characters. Gotta go now. Stanley Livingston is back at the zoo! Chumley!!!!