Way back when, everything was harder earned. Though I'm not exactly complaining that, today, I'm rarely more than a few clicks away from watching any cartoon I please, there was just something more intrinsically special, something more of an event about making the effort to go be with your telly at an allotted time to watch that thing you were excited to see, or else miss it, perhaps forever!

Back then, Saturday mornings were everything, and there was no more valuable real estate than that patch of carpet in front of your TV. Though there were times, of course, when other members of my family felt they were entitled to watch what they wanted to see on television, there was no arguing with my absolute right to be glued to the box for back-to-back Saturday morning cartoons. Because that's when they were on, and missing them wasn't an option.

There was less back then, so I guess it just meant more to us. Sorry, younger generations. I'm an inveterate nostalgist, so comfortable with my choices, and if it's wrong to warmly recollect the era of watching things at the same time, the shared experience we could all chatter about at school come Monday morning, then I don't want to be right.

Where would we have been as kids, then, without Hanna-Barbera? It doesn't bear thinking about. A world without The Flintstones? Without Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! or Wacky Races? Hell, no. 

Inspired by all-star, madcap comedy The Great Race (1965), which was itself inspired by the incomparably zany It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Wacky Races was a cartoon I loved even more than most. Primarily because Dick Dastardly and his unhelpful sidekick Muttley were like catnip to me, so fun and appealing, so naughty but equally, so full of joy for their hijinks.

Dastardly and Muttley generally dropped out of first place to lay elaborate traps that always failed. If only they'd simply stayed in first, they'd have won every time! Instead, not even once did they emerge victorious. But I guess some things are more important than crossing the finish line first, fair-and-square. To Dick and his dastardly co-pilot, honesty and sportsmanship were bland as beans. Only cheating added that special sauce that made victory appropriately delicious.

Besides my villainous role models, what most appealed to me about the show were the cars. The glorious racers! Eleven autos in all, each created with so much invention and unabashed silliness, how could we have failed to fall in love with them? Even today, just a flash of The Mean Machine, the Convert-A-Car or the Creepy Coupe takes me back to my childhood. To watching fresh Wacky Races adventures all through the Seventies. Gee, there must have been hundreds of them, as I don't ever remember watching the same episode twice. 

Author: Marshall Julius