I actually can't believe I don't have a review for Laff-A-Lympics here yet.
It isn't a good cartoon. It wasn't then and it still isn't. As others have noted, it consisted of three teams.
In truth, the Yogi Yahooeys seemed like the 1960s Hanna Barbera team, the Scooby Doobies was the 1970s HB team and the Really Rottens consisted of the bad guys.
The promise was also 15 members on each team. The Yogis had 16 members (and by all account, the extra one was Grape Ape. Why was he on their team?), and the Scooby Doobies and Rottens each had 13 members.
I wanted to like this cartoon back then, I wanted to regard it as fun, but in truth, it wasn't. It was incredibly stale, and the animation isn't impressive either.
The comic books, published by Marvel comics, actually were better. Written by Mark Evanier (the man who would go on to create Scrappy Doo), they consisted more of adventures and the characters interacting with one another.
And there was a larger treasury edition, truly outstanding book, with the Yogis and the Rottens hurled thru time to Fred Flintstones era, where they had a stone age Laff-A-Lympics.
I think the biggest problem my brother and I had with the cartoon was it was Scooby's show, and there were countless times when the Yogis, who I always rooted for, would be disqualified for the silliest things, then the Scoobys would get a bonus 50 points simply for being the Scoobys.
One of the daffiest I recall was the sandcastle building competition. I think it was either Yogi or Doggy Daddy who built the wonderful sand castle, won the competition, then a wave came in and washed it away.
"Aw," said guest judge Fred Flinstone, "too bad. You lose." I thought, you gonna take the prize back from them like that? Another pitfall was Snaggle Puss and Mildew Wolf hosting. Based on the virtually non-existent exposure the rest of the characters got, today we do at least have the wonderful Snaggle Puss voice in this way, but we always felt that Snag belonged on Yogi's (already crowded) team and Mildew of course should have been on the Rottens.
Undeniably, the worst aspect was the Ranger Smith narrator. You have nearly 50 cartoon characters in a show, let them do the talking, not some unseen fellow who didn't have his own cartoon! Laff-A-Lympics would air their first fifteen minutes after a Scooby or Dynomutt adventure, then we would get the Captain Caveman cartoon, then a Dynomutt conclusion or something, then the Laff-A-Lympics finale. It was near impossible to sit there for that long to see who won.
I was stunned when years later, the cartoon would air devoid of Scooby, Dynomutt and Caveman adventures and learned it was only a 30 minute long commercial! Rarely did the show get off its routine track, but there was one where all three teams tied, when they raced to the moon.
30 years on, that is about the only distinction of the show, seeing what 'locales' the characters are competing in.
Cartoon Network's Robot Chicken show from Seth Green just aired a spoof of Spielberg's "Munich" with the Laff-A-Lympics characters, called "Laff-A-Munich".
I'm not sure which was the way to be; glad to see this cartoon not forgotten, or distressed to see Wally Gator and Doggy Daddy pleading for their lives, Quickdraw McGraw making a last-ditch heroic effort to no avail, and all of those forlorn expressions from Hong Kong Phooey.
Many a time, I would try to play Laff-A-Lympics with my toys, animals as one time, heroes as another, suddenly-designated villains as the third.
I wasn't very creative either. Still, it was fun trying.
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