Touché Turtle and Dum Dum
The Complete Series
275 min. / Color / 1.33:1 / DTS HD-MA 2.0 MONO / SDH
Warner Archive Blu-ray $24.99
Available from Movie Zyng
Hanna-Barbera was on a giant cartoon roll in the early 1960s, with success in syndication, networks, daytime TV and prime-time television, and couldn’t have been much busier. The Huckleberry Hound Show offered Huck, Pixie & Dixie and Mr. Jinx, and Hokey Wolf; Quick Draw McGraw gave us Super Snooper & Blabber Mouse and Augie Doggie & Doggie Daddy, and Yogi Bear presented Snagglepuss and Yakky Doodle & Chopper, all of which were presented as self-contained half-hour shows, with commercials and bumpers between the cartoons.
For the 1962-1963 season, H-B kept things rolling with an untitled umbrella title they promoted to stations as The Hanna-Barbera New Cartoon Series, offered for syndication, and a change of pace from the other shows: 5 minute cartoons only, three series of 52 five-minute cartoons each, that could be lumped together or offered as part of one of the many cartoon offerings with live hosts that were so popular in those days; in NE Ohio, we grew up with Professor Jack in Akron and Barnaby, Franz the Toymaker, Cap’n Penny, and Woodrow the Woodsman in Cleveland. Lippy the Lion and (a depressed hyena named) Hardy-Har-Har were one segment; Wally Gator, who lived in a swamp in the opening title card but in a zoo during the cartoons, and the subject of this set, Touché Turtle, a musketeer-like do-gooder, and his rather dense companion, a sheepdog named (what else?) Dum Dum.
The Hanna-Barbera New Cartoon Series was manufactured on the quick and with a lower budget than the half-hour block series, including filming the cartoons on 16mm instead of 35mm, which is why the quality of the image varies wildly throughout this set of 52 Touché Turtle cartoons. When you watch the first cartoon in the set, Whale of a Tale, you’ll be surprised at how much softer the image is compared to other recent H-B Blu-ray sets from Warner Archives, including the beautiful recent Huckleberry Hound release, but that’s first Turtle cartoon is probably the worst-looking of the 52, and it’s passable. In general, the series has bright colors and the sound is never a problem, even for those cartoons that don’t match the perfect quality we’d hoped for: these are surely the best available materials after all these years, and we know the Warner Archive folks gave it their all. The best part is the cartoons themselves: we watched about 20% of them, and they were undeniably clever, funny, and likeable. Daws Butler is the voice of Touché; Alan Reed is Dum Dum, and I will admit, until the Warner Archive started releasing these beautiful vintage H-B sets, I had no idea how many voices were contributed to these shows by Mr. Reed, whom I knew only as Fred Flintstone.
Throughout the series, Touché travels the world and various eras of time, battling pirates in this cartoon, assisting General “Custard” in another, forced into crime by an evil hypnotist in a modern city in another. He’s good natured and stoic and a running gag is him answering the telephone in his shell before he’s off on another adventure. The good-natured Dum Dum is pretty much just there to follow his hero around and occasionally hurt himself trying to emulate the “Touché Away!” call to action.
It’s a fun set, and we’re only sorry Cap’n Penny from WEWS-TV in Cleveland isn’t here to present the cartoons along with the Little Rascals and Pooch Parade. Fingers are crossed that Blu-ray compilations of Lippy and Wally are on their way in 2026.
