Parts
About
Following the success of "The Archie Show" and its companion, "Sabrina the Teenage Witch," Filmation greenlit an original companion for Sabrina based on The Universal Monsters. "Laugh-In" writers Jack Mendelsohn and Jim Mulligan were hired to develop the show, patterning it after that gag-a-minute series, and musical numbers were added to ape the success of The Archies. The Goolies characters also appeared in more traditional stories on Sabrina's show. "Sabrina and the Groovie Goolies" premiered in the fall of 1970, to great acclaim from children... and to the disdain of parents' groups, who routinely singled the show out for its grotesque characters and comical violence. The next year, the two shows were split apart, never to be reassembled (until now!).
There were a variety of musical groups featured on the show (The Monster Trio, The Mummies and the Puppies, The Spirits of 76, etc.) , but the music all came from the same team, the guys who were also behind the songs on Filmation's "The Hardy Boys" (and there's some musical overlap on their second album, "Wheels," which was released the same year). One of the bands that showed up in preliminary artwork was The Running Stones, a colorful band of rocks with arms, legs, and instruments who were probably replaced by The Rolling Headstones because they looked like insects-- but weirdly, these unused characters were featured in both the American and Japanese coloring books.
As for the music, the masterminds behind it were Richard Delvy, Ed Fournier, and Dick Monda, who copyrighted the songs under the aliases Linda Martin (Delvy), Sherry Gayden/Gaden (Fournier), and Janis Gwinn (Monda). Monda and Fournier appeared as Drac and Frankie on the tie-in album cover (along with Jeffrey Thomas as Wolfie), as well in the live-action portion of The Haunted Heist/Daffy Duck & Porky Pig Meet the Groovie Goolies.
Not only were the Goolies popular in the USA, but they were wildly successful around the world. In most countries, the dialogue was dubbed but the songs remained in English -- however, that wasn't the case in Japan and Czechoslovakia, where the songs were revised and re-recorded in their native tongue. In France, the show spent a period as a featured component of the children's anthology "Recré A2." The songs remained in English, but a live-action Goolies band sometimes burst in singing a French variation of the theme song, which was issued on a tie-in album.
Only one full season was produced (plus a TV movie with the Looney Tunes and two additional appearances on a subsequent Archie/Sabrina show). Episodes were subsequently repackaged in the syndicated anthology show "The Groovie Goolies and Friends," along with various other short-lived shows produced by Filmation. This show is notable for the bumpers that led into commercial breaks, which featured the Goolies interacting with Gilligan, My Favorite Martian, and other animated characters.
Filmation made a few attempts to revive the show, but it never happened, and once the studio got sold, the characters were never utilized again. Although they didn't have the rights to the characters, the writers of the Archie TV show Riverdale made a sly reference to the Goolies by naming their resident antagonist biker gang The Ghoulies.
More info about the show is available in this insightful article, this pdf, and of course, on Wikipedia and imdb.
So here are all of the Groovie Goolies episodes, including their crossovers with Archie, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and the Looney Tunes characters (whose voices were corrected in the fan-edit). Also includes alternate international versions of various episodes (from Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Japan, and Spain). Plus there are CBRs and PDFs with scripts, storyboards, storybooks, art and merchandising, mp3s of the songs (in English, Czech and French) - and more!
The primary episodes came from the long out of print DVD set (plus the Sabrina and Archie sets), the video extras largely came from YouTube (some of them are long gone), many scans came from my own collection -- this stuff was amassed from a vast array of places. Thanks to everyone who unknowingly contributed.
Note: Audio commentary tracks are not playable in the archive's player, you've gotta download the files and switch to the secondary audio stream to hear them.
- Archive
- Internet Archive, in Classic TV
- Licence or status
- The Internet Archive states none for this item.
- Credit
- Filmation
- Language
- English
- Who can watch
- The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Teens profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed