The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle

The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle is a 1979–1980 television series featuring newly produced Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle cartoons. The series was produced by Filmation, and aired from 1979 to 1980 on CBS with 96 episodes (128 if counting the educational "Nature" and "Homonyms" segments, hosted by Mighty and Heckle and Jeckle respectively) produced.^[1] It was the second Mighty Mouse cartoon series, following the original Mighty Mouse Playhouse from 1955 to 1967, and followed by Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, which aired from 1987 to 1988.

CBS was looking to bring Mighty Mouse back to television for the first time since Mighty Mouse Playhouse went off the air in 1967. They had purchased the Terrytoons studio back in 1955 and eventually closed it in 1972. Without an animation studio of their own to produce new content, they licensed out their works to Filmation.^[2]

In the Mighty Mouse segments, Mighty Mouse protected the world and his love interest, Pearl Pureheart, from the evil machinations of Oil Can Harry and his new bumbling henchman, Swifty, a fat cat who could still run extremely fast. Their encounters could happen in any time period, with Pearl and the villains adopting roles specific for the era, though Mighty Mouse remained the same. Several changes were made to the Mighty Mouse formula for Filmation's series. The characters' operatic dialogue delivery from the theatrical shorts was mostly removed to reduce the necessity to hire additional actors that could sing for roles that producer Lou Scheimer would fill in the various episodes (although Mighty Mouse would still belt some lines out, like his catchphrase, "Here I come to save the day!"). According to producer Norm Prescott, the operatic dialogue was also removed because he did not think that "a singing superhero mouse" would fly with contemporary audiences. Filmation also abandoned the faux serialization tradition of starting off each entry as if it were a continuation of some non-existent previous part. Instead, events would unfold as Mighty Mouse usually watched for trouble through a giant telescope from his fortress on a cheese-like planet in space. One all-new story, the science fiction serial "The Great Space Chase", was serialized across the entire season in 16 parts. In keeping with broadcast standards of the time, the violence was toned down or non-existent. For the Heckle and Jeckle segments, the magpies' antics were toned down to reduce their malevolent and sadistic nature. However, they still remained somewhat madcap in their antics, particularly with fourth wall breaks taking advantage of them being cartoon characters. Jeckle was portrayed as the smarter of the pair. The series introduced a new segment, Quacula. Quacula was a pale blue vampire duck with a Daffy Duck-like bill and fangs, dressed in a blue jacket and a black cape with a red lining, who slept by day in a white egg-shaped coffin, in the basement of a house owned by an anthropomorphic bear named Theodore. Every night Quacula would rise from his coffin and try to terrify Theodore and others, but he would never really succeed; his antics tended to be more comical than frightening. Also, Theodore would come up with one plan after another to rid himself of Quacula, but always fail to do so. Each hour of The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle consisted of two Mighty Mouse cartoons, two Heckle and Jeckle cartoons, one Quacula cartoon, and one episode of "The Great Space Chase". Also included were "Mighty Mouse Environmental Bulletins" and Heckle and Jeckle's "Homonyms" (to add a little educational karma).^[1][3][4]

Due to one of their studio training programs, run by Don Christensen, Filmation brought a lot of new people in, including storyboard artists John Kricfalusi, Tom Minton and Eddie Fitzgerald, and screenwriter Paul Dini, and gave them their start in animation on the show and their other productions such as Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids' The Brown Hornet. Because the studio kept all of their work in America, they were hiring more than any other company and teaching working animation to the next generation. A lot of the animators, including Kricfalusi, Kent Butterworth and some old animators who had worked on classic 1930s-1940s cartoons like Tom Baron, Ed Friedman, Dick Hall, Don Schloat, Larry Silverman, Kay Wright, Lou Zukor, Ed DeMattia, Lee Halpern, Alex Ignatiev, Jack Ozark and Curt Perkins, wanted to rebel against Filmation's mandates of reusable animation and their strict "on-model" policies where model sheets had to be traced, and sneak in some fluid animation. They wanted to break the rules, not understanding the limitations put on by network strictures and economic realities.^[5][6] Fitzgerald, Minton and other storyboard artists drew some funny and lively storyboards as reference for the animators.^{[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]} As a result, the animation and art was a lot more energetic than the original Terrytoons.^[1] Fitzgerald storyboarded a scene in the episode "Movie Mouse" where Oil Can Harry does a wild take in response to Swifty telling him that he used handcuffs to tie up a snake. He got in trouble with Scheimer and Prescott, who claimed that it could not be animated. Butterworth insisted that it could, and he spent a week working on it to prove it. The scene wound up in the finished episode.^[15] Kricfalusi, Fitzgerald, Minton and Butterworth would later go on to work on Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures.^[16][17] Paul Dini wrote some of the Quacula and Heckle and Jeckle episodes. When he first got hired, he was lighting models for Filmation. Dini's father was a friend of Prescott's. He had just gotten out of school and sent Filmation a script, which they found funny, so Dini was given some work.^[5][18]

After the series premiered, cartoonist Scott Shaw filed suit against Filmation due to the fact that he had created a character named Duckula for the comic book Quack! #1 (July 1976), published by Star*Reach. While the notion of a vampire duck was not really new as Daffy Duck had appeared with a "Duckula" character in Daffy Duck #92 four years prior in 1975, what drew concern from Shaw! was the fact that he was alerted by friends at Filmation that they had copies of Quack! on hand during production, and that Quacula's character model sheet seemed to be a Bob Clampett Daffy with Duckula's features overlayed onto it (Shaw! would recruit Clampett as an expert witness). Additionally, Duckula had his own bear supporting character named Bearanboltz, a dim-witted pastiche of Frankenstein's monster, which again made the similarities too convenient. The matter was settled out of court by Filmation with Shaw! for $30,000, and after 16 episodes Quacula was dropped from the show. The show was shortened to a half-hour in 1980, and was moved to Sundays in its final season.^[19][20] In 1982, "The Great Space Chase" was re-edited into an 80-minute movie which had a limited release to theaters. It later appeared on home video.^[21][4]

• Alan Oppenheimer – Oil Can Harry, Swifty, Narrator, Additional Voices^[22]
• Diane Pershing – Pearl Pureheart, Additional Voices^[22]
• Frank Welker – Heckle, Jeckle, Quacula, Theodore H. Bear, Additional Voices^[22]
• Lou Scheimer (uncredited) – Mighty Mouse, Additional Voices^[22][23]
• Erika Scheimer (uncredited) - Additional Voices (episode 4)

• The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle at IMDb