Cool, there’s a Top Cat cartoon on TV just now without the canned laughter. God Bless the BBC1! I wonder if they’ll get the same backlash when they revert that they did when they accidentally showed a chortle-augmented episode of M*A*S*H?
1 When I was a lad, they wouldn’t even call it “Top Cat” in the listings, because there was a cat food on the market at the time with the same name…
… which begs the question what did they call it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Cat
“Boss Cat”
Sounds vaguely familiar, I was always more of a Garfield person though.
And do you remember the BBC renamed “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”, as well?
Indeed, s/Ninja/Hero… I don’t think they did that with the more recent Turtle resurgence though.
(ISTR they even went so far as to re-record the title song for the Turtles, too… they never did that with Boss^H^H^H^HTop Cat.)
If I remember correctly, MASH always had awful dubbed laughter, because it’s BLAND AS HELL and you need hints as to when you’re supposed to laugh.
As bad as TV is now, I’m amazed people sat around and watched it when shows like MASH and Giligan’s Island were on.
I’m probably just spoiled growing up with Bittorrent and the variety of entertainment the Internet provides 🙂
Well, the problem wrt M*A*S*H is that it was never exactly supposed to be a comedy show… IIRC it was just that the only network funding available at the time came from its comedy budget, so it had to be made to look like a comedy. (But maybe that was some other show…)