TVSquad

It looks like the guys at Giant magazine's web site are at it again, trolling YouTube for videos that you may not have thought of. This time, they've dug up ten intros to Hanna-Barbera shows, in tribute to Joe Barbera, who passed away a couple of days ago. Among the selections are the wonderfully un-PC intro to Hong Kong Phooey (I guess it was OK for Scatman Crothers to sing "ching chong" back in the seventies... Rosie O'Donnell was born in the wrong time, I guess), and intros to The Herculoids, the "so hip it's square" Flinstones Comedy Hour from '72 ("We'll have a groovy time!"), The Jetsons, and one of H-B's Scooby-Doo clones from the mid-'70s, Speed Buggy. There's also an intro from the live-action show Korg: 70,000 B.C.

Speaking of Scooby, the intro they post is from a late-'70s revival of the show, which included the then-new character of Scooby-Dum. But they kind of miss the boat on this one; that's maybe the third-best intro, behind the originial Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? and my personal favorite, the oh-so-cheesy Scooby-Doo Movies from 1972. Remember the episodes with the Harlem Globetrotters, Sandy Duncan, Batman and Robin, and Tim Conway? That was from this series. In order to refresh your memory, I've embedded the intro to that after the jump.

Feel like wasting your entire day? Watch this batch of commercials Giant magazine put together. They claim these are the "50 Greatest Commercials of the '80s," but I think that's a bit of a stretch. First of all, a few of the ads they show are from the '70s, like a Colt 45 commercial starring Redd Foxx (everyone knows that the Colt 45 ads from the '80s starred Billy Dee "Works Every Time" Williams). Another '70s ad is the Tootsie Pop ad where a kid asks "How many licks does it take to get to the center?", which seemed to be on TV for about twenty years.

Another flaw of this list? Well, it's right there in the introductory paragraph: they were going to list the best five, but they just kept finding more and more good ones. Problem is, by the end of the list, I was straining to remember some of the ads they were talking about, and I watched a hell of a lot of TV in the '80s. One of the ads, where Batman and Robin use a shitty little econobox car to chase down the Penguin, was only shown in England, for crissakes.