Baggy Pants & the Nitwits

For at least half this show, "Baggy Pants and the Nitwits" was as funny as anything on TV. But then there's that other half....

Y'see, it's like this: in the first half, the focus is on the character Baggy Pants, who looks for all the world like Charlie Chaplin reincarnated as a cat. In his part, he basically goes through kiddie versions of his original's antics. For some reason, seeing a cat-like Charlie was pretty redundant (at that time, I was already familiar with Chaplin's work) and just simply not as funny in this watered-down version. In fact, it was just biding time until the second half....

The Nitwits took over the last half, where retired superhero Tyrone (voiced by Johnson) and his long-suffering wife Gladys (voiced by Buzzi) go into action to fight unspeakable foes (like a woman in a chicken suit, a moving blob of water, etc.) and all the while act and look like their dopplegangers back on the original "Laugh-In" series.

The dialogue, sounding mostly improvised by Johnson, was a riot and, to be sure, he got the best lines that way. SAMPLE - complimenting his walking cane Elmo (don't ask): "You are a good cane - remind me to take you jogging with me tomorrow!"

Well, at least it was a half-good show to watch on Saturday mornings. Back in 1977. If they ever release it on video, I hope they just go with the GOOD half.

Five stars for "Baggy Pants and the Nitwits". Yay, Tyrone; sorry, Charlie.

A very odd show, I didn't understand at all what I was seeing as a kid - not in a "wow, whatever's going to happen next?" kind of way, more of a "I don't understand what this is supposed to be."

With hindsight I see now that someone had the idea of converting three icons of comedy into a Saturday morning kids' cartoon - Chaplin was presented as a comedy cat, two characters from the old Rowan and Martin show as whatever they were, and Groucho Marx as a wise-cracking cat. And these characters presented Saturday-morning grade comic antics about on the same level as the Pink Panther cartoon, ie not really all that funny. From my perspective the trouble was that, while I was familiar with Chaplin and could see that that's what the baggy-pants cat was presenting, I had no knowledge of Groucho beyond the iconography and, being British, had never heard of the Laugh-in. So these characters were just baffling. I don't know how the producers could have thought it would be meaningful to the target audience - I guess even American kids of the right age-group would be too young for the referneces. Not funny enough to justify their eccentricities, I watched this show simply because it's what was on.