Tom Terrific!

August 7, 2008 in Cinema by Jerry Thomas | 2 comments

Gather ’round, children, while I tell you a story.

Long ago, in the dim ages before the Internet, we had this thing called “television.” It was a lot like YouTube, but you had to watch whatever happened to be on, and shut up and like it. There were only four channels, one of which was “good for you,” and everything was in black and white. If you wanted a cartoon, you had to wait until Saturday morning. And you never had a thought that things could ever be any different.

But then there was Tom Terrific, which ran occasionally on the daily Captain Kangaroo show, perhaps the best children’s show of the era. Tom was what he was: a boy with no apparent adult supervision who wore a funnel for a hat. Where he came from, or how he got the hat, was never explained. The funnel imbued him with the magic power to change into any object he could imagine, which stood him well in difficult situations. Thus equipped, Tom sought adventure with his “faithful companion,” Manfred, a talking dog who mostly wanted to stay home and sleep.

Tom had a winning enthusiasm, delusions of grandeur, and was drawn as simply as possible, probably due to a constrained budget. I, too, am drawn with a constrained budget, and that accounts for my featureless countenance and underdeveloped personality. One does not get the impression that there was much money backing the Tom Terrific production, but the show had a palpable charm nonetheless.

There does not seem to be much available of the Terrific oeuvre online, but YouTube does provide a sampling. Watch it now and get an idea of what I was watching then. There are some unfortunate characterizations of Native Americans herein, but such was the time.

Click to play, dummy!