Clutch Cargo

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 Clutch Cargo every morning before school. It seemed very strange, but for some reason I couldn't stop watching those real human lips. It was on one of the cartoon channels recently, and my son thought it was the lamest thing he's ever seen and feels sympathy for how I grew up. I recently heard an explanation for the odd animation, other than it was low budget. The creator's child was deaf and could not understand regular cartoons, since she could not lip read the mouth movements of animated characters. So he came up with the idea of using real mouths so deaf children could enjoy cartoons. The story has a ring of truth to it, but it could very well be apocryphal. If anyone can verify this, it would go a long way to explaining such an odd idea for kids' entertainment.

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.

Created by Charles Haas (for Cambria Productions) - "Clutch Cargo" (1959-1960) was a limited animation cartoon adventure story that I found to be entertaining mainly from a nostalgic perspective on things.

Using the novelty of Syncro-Vox (superimposing real human mouths onto the faces of the cartoon characters) - Clutch Cargo was an international globetrotter (on dangerous missions) who brought along with him his ward, Spinner and his pet dachshund, Paddlefoot.

All-in-all - I thought that this vintage cartoon was at least worth a view.

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!