Wait Till Your Father Gets Home

One of the commentators mentioned that this was a Saturday morning cartoon. Wrong......it was aired during prime time, just like the original 1960 Flintstones series. The show was clearly aimed at an adult audience; not just because of the time slot; I remember that one of the show's sponsors was Haynes panty hose. I cannot agree that this show was a parody of All in the Family, as this same commentator mentioned; at least not in the sense that the father figure was a parody of Archie Bunker. The father in this show was not at all bigoted, as was Archie Bunker (and he was also a much more educated man).

I do remember seeing a very humorous old lady, in at least one episode, who was paranoid, thinking that there was "a communist under every bed". My mother commented to me, at the time, that she thought that this character was a take-off from the old lady in the 1971 movie "Cold Turkey" (about the town that gave up smoking for a whole month), and I believe that she was correct. "Cold Turkey" came out a year before "Wait Till Your Father Gets Home" debuted.

It's really a shame that this series did not make more than one season's worth of episodes (I believe it ran for two years, but the second year the shows were just repeats). I thought that it was a great show. When it debuted in '72, it had been 6 years since "The Flintstones" prime time show had ended. I missed seeing adult cartoons on TV. After "Wait Till Your Father Gets Home" ended, adult TV animation hit a dry spell for the next 15+ years, until The Simpsons began.

Brian

Much of what I have to say about it, I've already said on "Jump The Shark," but, this was a show that tried to be a cartoon answer to ones like All In The Family, without being a COPY of them, and it actually succeeded in a very big way. Without getting credit for it, or much of any publicity that I know of. (It was a syndicated show, and in my area at least, came on before prime time, so it probably "flew beneath the radar.") In some ways, it actually OUTDID the Norman Lear kinds of shows. Especially with the "Ralph" character, played by Jack Burns, who's always been so great at playing comical loudmouths, and sometimes bigoted ones (as in the famous Burns and Schreiber "Taxi" routine). The Ralph character was almost closer to "Joe" (in the Peter Boyle movie) than to Archie Bunker, because he was an actual vigilante (although one who never actually DID anything violent), who was on the lookout for minorities as much as Communists. And some of his lines were genuinely "strong," lines that AITF probably would've though twice about putting into Archie Bunker's mouth.(But again, who expected something like that from a Hanna-Barbera cartoon show? So no one seemed to know about it.) Then there was "Chet" the older son, who (even though it was a cartoon) was one of the least exaggerated comical hippies on TV! One of the best episodes was about Chet getting drafted, and planning to leave the country, which is STILL a touchy subject. Even though it had a sort of "tidy" ending - he gets a deferment - it was still a pretty bold thing to do with a REGULAR character on a show (as opposed to a ONE-TIME character, that no one's going to see again). And Alice (played by Kristina Holland, who played the "ditzy" secretary on "Courtship of Eddie's Father") was far from a stereotyped "fat girl" - instead of being worried about her having no social life, Harry always seemed to be worried about her fooling around with too many boys. And of course, Tom Bosley as Harry - some time before Happy Days, he was already playing the put-upon father very well.

I love this show. I was 10 when it came out but funny enough, don't remember watching it back in 1972. I guess I was too busy watching the Partridge Family and Brady Bunch. I'm glad it's on the Boomerang network, along with another childhood favorite, the Banana Splits. Thank God for DVR so I can tape them since it's on in the middle of the night. I hadn't seen mentioned here in detail that Jackie Earle Haley, later of the Bad News Bears and most recently, the movie "Little Children" (Oscar nominated) was the voice of youngest son Jamie. According to his IMDb bio WTYFGH was his first acting job, albeit vocally only.

This show is awesome and I'm sure was very topical for its time, for example, the episode when Chet wants to move in with his girlfriend. I'm surprised that the Jack Burns character was able to get away with talking about "Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Blacks" on a cartoon. He reminds me of a cartoon version of Archie Bunker, for sure.

Wow! When I first saw this when I was a kid, I had no idea this was Hanna Barbera. And I though to myself, finally, they made a show down to Earth, and something that reflected society, as the story of a dad, normal, white, tries to live a good life in the '70s despite his hippie son, and teenage liberal daughter, and each episode has a good lesson or a message filled with social commentary, much like The Simpsons, or King Of the Hill in the "Me Generation", or The Flintstones or Jetsons in the 70s. And Ralph is the most unforgettable and perhaps the funniest character in the whole series, as the conservative McCarthyist, as he said things about commies. Yes, it had the feel and sentiments of the Cold War days. Recommended to all those who love The Simpsons, King Of the Hill, and the Adult Swim shows. If they were to remake this, they should make Ralph the same, except they should make him say things about terrorists instead of the Reds. No swearing or violence.

This is one of my favorite show's from Hanna-Barbera. After years of placing families in the stone age, the space age and even in ancient Rome, Hanna-Barbera finally had a piece that took place in this century. The best thing about this show was the fact that the Boyles were played more or less like real people and it was a very humorous look at how conservative Harry dealt with not only his liberal kids, Alice and Chet, but with a changing world around him. However, the real star was Ralph, Harry's reactionary neighbor. He made Dale from "King of the Hill" look normal. Ralph was always looking for communists in every nook and cranny and he would always give Harry all sorts of crazy advice based on his wild theories. The only thing I found wrong with the show, however, was the poor job of animation (allegedly Hanna-Barbera "farmed out" the animation work to a Canadian company as a way to save money). All in all, though, despite the poor animating, this still is one of the funniest cartoons to come out of the 1970's.