Clutch Cargo

About forty years ago when I was a child in a Los Angeles suburb I recall seeing this odd cartoon, so different from the others where things moved. The creators seem to have had this process where they could put images of actors lips moving in the faces of the characters. Kinda' neat and kinda' not. After being exposed to the work of Disney, Lantz and others, this dialogue heavy, action off-stage with sound effects cartoon didn't seem so hot. Novel, though. Compare to others of the period. Almost anything on the idiot box could hold the attention of a little child. Some that came later were worse. Margaret Kerry was the voice of Paddlefoot? Well, whattaya know!

If you like Jonny Quest, Exotica music, old "Still Animation" like those 1966 Marvel cartoons and weird animation techniques, you really gonna enjoy this rather obscure curiosity.

I remember watching this show as a kid on WGN's Garfield Goose and Friends with Frazier Thomas. It was very different from anything else that was done at the time. I know compared with the animation of today it seems cheap and tawdry but now I watch these shows with the same fondness of watching old Andy Griffith Show reruns. The live action lips set against animated cells and other ways they had of reducing the need of actual animation were sometimes fascinating in their simplicity. If you saw these as a kid you will like them now. If not they may not be right for you. I totally enjoy watching these shows now as much as I did then.

Time heals wounds. Maybe that is why I gave this cartoon such a high rating. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Clutch Cargo look like Leslie Nielson, Officer Dribble of NAKED GUN? CLUTCH CARGO aired early in the morning in Buffalo, NY on WGR (channel 2) back in the early 1960s. Being less than 5-minutes, an episode could fit almost anywhere there was a moment of dead air, not that it was that much of an improvement. But seriously now, these episodes were fun to watch. Each episode was very short and the animators were very clever in masking the lack of animation by using bushes or any other obstacle to hide the lack of movement in their legs as they walked. It was a unique blend of incredibly good artwork combined with incredibly bad animation. What really set this cartoon apart from the rest was the real live acting moving lips which were super-imposed on the cartoon characters' faces. This was a really neat novelty at the time.

A very strange cartoon. It was an action cartoon with still pictures. Moving human lips were superimposed on the still pictures for the dialogue. It was rather creepy, but we all tried to copy the way Clutch talked.