7.4 /10 1 Votes
7.7/10 TV First episode date 13 September 1969 Number of seasons 1 | 7.2/10 IMDb Final episode date 3 January 1970 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Directed by William HannaJoseph Barbera Starring Paul WinchellDon Messick Cast Don Messick, Paul Winchell, Chikao Ohtsuka, Wally Boag Similar Wacky Races, The Perils of Penelope, Help! It's the Hair Bear Bun, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines (or simply Dastardly and Muttley in the UK) is a cartoon produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions for CBS. Originally the series was broadcast as a Saturday morning cartoon, airing from September 13, 1969 to January 3, 1970. The show focuses on the efforts of Dick Dastardly and his canine sidekick Muttley to catch Yankee Doodle Pigeon, a carrier pigeon who carries secret messages (hence the name of the show’s theme song "Stop the Pigeon"). The cartoon was a combination of Red Baron-era Snoopy, Wacky Races (which featured Dastardly and Muttley in a series of car races), and the film Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.
Contents
- Plot
- Magnificent Muttley
- Credits
- Original run
- Voice cast
- Japanese version
- Syndication and home video
- References
The show is widely known as Catch The Pigeon or Stop the Pigeon based on the show's original working title and the show's theme song, written by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (and based on the jazz standard "Tiger Rag") which repeats that phrase so often that it is frequently mistaken as the show's actual title.
The show had only two voice actors: Paul Winchell as Dick Dastardly and the indistinctly heard General, and Don Messick as everybody else. Each 22-minute show was broadcast over half an hour on the network, including network breaks, and contained: two Dastardly & Muttley stories, one Magnificent Muttley story (Muttley's Walter Mitty-style daydreams), and two or three short Wing Dings (brief gags to break up the longer stories).
Plot
Dick Dastardly and Muttley, the villains from Wacky Races, are now flying aces and members of the Vulture Squadron, a crew of aviators on a mission to stop a homing pigeon named Yankee Doodle Pigeon from delivering messages to the other side.
Each story features variations on the same plot elements: the Vulture Squadron tries to trap Yankee Doodle Pigeon using one or more planes equipped with Klunk's latest contraptions, but one or more of the Squadron messes up and the plane(s) either crash, collide or explode (or all of the above). While they are falling out of the wreckage, Dick Dastardly calls for help, which Muttley either offers or refuses depending on whether Dastardly agrees to give him a medal. Even when Muttley does agree to fly Dastardly out of trouble, Dastardly seldom has a soft landing. At some point the General calls Dastardly on the phone to demand results, and while Dastardly assures him that they will soon capture the pigeon, the General usually disbelieves him and bellows to Dastardly through the phone and extends his hand from it to either whack Dastardly on the head or grab his mustache. By the end of every story, Yankee Doodle Pigeon escapes while the Vulture Squadron are often left in backfiring predicaments. In a contemporary comic books/comic digest series of Dastardly and Muttley in their Flying Machines Dastardly and Muttley failed to stop "Yankee Doodle Pigeon" except once-when accidentally knocking out and capturing Yankee Doodle Pigeon with falling ice cubes-Dastardly and Muttley find to their surprise that the messenger pigeon message bag contains nothing but moths.
Magnificent Muttley
There was one Magnificent Muttley episode in each of the 17 broadcast shows. Muttley is the main character, and imagines himself in a lot of situations, with Dastardly in the role of the villain. Each episode was about 3 minutes.
Credits
Original run
Voice cast
Japanese version
Syndication and home video
After its original CBS run, Dastardly and Muttley was shown in syndicated reruns on local stations throughout the 1970s and '80s. Some episodes were subsequently distributed on VHS tape by Worldvision Enterprises.
On May 10, 2005 Warner Home Video released the complete series on Region 1 DVD. On July 31, 2006, the series was released on DVD R2 in the United Kingdom but only in HMV stores and its online site as an HMV Exclusive.