Josie and the Pussycats (1970-1971) – Review

With the popularity of their animated series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! Hanna-Barbera Productions decided that if one group of teenagers running around thwarting criminals worked then creating a second team of youngsters was an obvious follow-up, and to ensure this came to fruition Joe Ruby and Ken Spears went to the Archie Comics spin-off series Josie and the Pussycats to find this new group, a comic about an all-girl band and their zany adventures.  This subject matter was deemed to be perfect comedic fodder for a Saturday morning cartoon and was considered a perfect counterpoint to the Archie cartoon which had been created by rival animation studio Filmation.

The premise of Josie and the Pussycats revolved around a teenage all-girl pop music band that toured the world with their “entourage” while encountering a variety of nefarious villains, the leader of the group was Josephine “Josie” McCoy (Janet Waldo) the ginger-haired lead singer as well as songwriter and guitarist for the band, next we had Valerie Brown (Barbara Pariot) the band’s African-American bassist who was often seen playing the tambourine but even though she was a backup singer to Josie she was really the brains of the group and it was often her intelligence and ingenuity that got the group out of trouble, last but not least there was Melody Valentine (Jackie Joseph) as the band’s drummer and even though at a glance she appeared to be your typical bubbled-headed dumb blonde she was also the heart of the band and where Valerie was the brains it was her perpetual sweetness and optimism, not to mention her infectious giggle, that made her one of the more memorable characters on the show. Also, that her ears wiggled when the group was in danger gave the Pussycats an edge when it came to facing off against would-be world conquerors.

Trivia Note: Jackie Joseph was the speaking voice for Melody but her singing was provided by future Charlie’s Angels star Cheryl Ladd, who went by the name Cherie Moor at the time, and was hired by music producer Danny Janssen, along with singers Kathleen Dougherty and Patrice Holloway, to become a member of a live-action version of the trio.

To round out the cast of characters we have Alan M. Mayberry (Jerry Dexter) the band’s roadie and Josie’s love interest, not that we see much of that on screen, and then there is Alexander Cabot III (Casey Kasem) as the group’s manager and self-proclaimed coward of the group and, finally, we have Alexandra Cabot (Sherry Alberoni) who is Alexander’s twin sister but with no actual job with the band, other than to be a pain in the ass, and she mostly hangs around with them in the hopes of stealing both Josie’s thunder, but more importantly, stealing away Alan M. Aside from the villain of the week, and it is Alexandra who will cause much of the show’s conflict with her constantly trying to upstage the band, believing that she should be “The real star of the band” while trying to trick Alan away from Josie. Her plots to steal the spotlight usually fail in a humiliating fashion but they also often kick start the adventure with her causing the group to go off course from their planned gig and landing them in the lair of some supervillain or other.

I think she’s just overcompensating for being born with skunk hair.

The basic formula for this show was established in the very first episode with “The Nemo’s a No No Affair” where the ship that the gang were travelling on gets sunk by the great-grandson of Captain Nemo (John Stephenson), who sounds a lot like Boris Karloff, and the Pussycats end up thwarting his plan to become ruler of the Seven Seas in a timely fashion. It’s this element that really separates this show from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! as Josie and her friends are musicians not mystery solvers and most of the villains Josie and friends encounter are of the “world-conquering” variety and are more comparable to what was found in the animated adventure series Jonny Quest than that of the swindlers and conmen the Scooby gang tends to meet, with the exception of the episode “The Jumpin’ Jupiter Affair” where a group of aliens are unmasked to be diamond thieves exploiting the local natives, in fact, the adventures of Josie and the Pussycats have quite higher stakes when compared to many shows and not just with whatever evil the villain-of-the-week has planned but for the fact that most of them literally try and kill Josie and her friends.

Death Note: In that first episode Captain Nemo locks each of the gang members inside glass tubes, which he then sends to the bottom of the sea attached to anchors, and one must admit that is some pretty dark shit for a Saturday morning cartoon.

Similarities to the Scooby-Doo series:

• Not only is the character of Alexander Cabot III voiced by Casey Kasem, who provided the voice for Shaggy, but like his Scooby gang counterpart, he was an abject coward.
• The group’s roadie Alan M. is a tall blonde piece of beefcake and wears an ascot just like Fred Jones does. Question: Were ascots ever really a thing among teenagers in the 1960s?
• The group would often put on goofy disguises to fool the villains but unlike in the Scooby-Doo series, the whole gang would often participate in these charades.
• In the Scooby-Doo series Fred would come up with a trap to catch the “monster of the week” while in Josie and the Pussycat that job fell to Valerie.
• At one point in each episode, the gang would be chased by the villains in a montage overlaid by a fun pop song, which was a staple of Scooby-Doo.
• The show would end with the villains being handed over to the authorities and we’d even occasionally get a “Meddling kids” grumble from the villain of the week.
• Josie and the Pussycats may not have a talking Great Dane but Alexandra’s cat Sebastian was more than capable of aiding our heroes in and out of trouble.

Note: Don Messick voiced the cat Sebastian as well as the Muttley from Wacky Races and they both characters have wonderful snickers and mischievous personalities.

It’s true that like many cartoons of the time, Josie and the Pussycats was rather formulaic throughout its run, with the gang either stumbling across a diabolical mad scientist, whose plan is to turn everyone into plant food, or somehow they’d come into possession of top-secret plans or some high-tech device, but with the band being musical globetrotters the series was able to send our heroes to a variety of fun locations, from Paris the City of Lights to the danger fraught jungles of the Amazon Basin, and production designer Iwao Takamoto brought such locals to life with a great visual flourish, especially when considering this is just another Saturday morning cartoon show, and though every episode would end with Alexandra once again failing to interfere with a Pussycats’ performance, with her getting egg often literally on her face, the show was just loaded with charm and consisted of a collection of fun and memorable characters. This is not to say the show was perfect, as memorable as the likes of Melody, Alexandra and Sebastian were Josie herself was kind of boring and was forced to be the “Straight Man” of the show, but things could have been a lot worse if William Hanna and Joseph Barbera had got their way.

Valerie was almost turned into a Caucasian member of the band by the studio execs.

In the early days of production, Hanna-Barbera wanted to change Valerie to a Caucasian even though she was already established as African-American in the Archie Comics, and they wanted to fire Patrice Holloway who had been cast as Valerie’s singing voice but Danny Janssen, who was producing the real-life group’s Capitol album, refused to fire Holloway and Hanna-Barbera relented. So we will call that a win against segregation in cartoons and thus Valerie became the first African American woman to be a regular on an animated series.

Question: Why were these crooks dressed up as The Phantom?

Overall, Josie and the Pussycats was a fun-filled adventure show with crazy villains and wacky antics, as well as having one of the greatest theme songs to appear on a cartoon – I challenge anyone to not sing along with the lyrics “Josie and the Pussycats. Long tails and ears for hats” – and if you ever feel like a light and a frothy nostalgic trip there’s no better company than that of Josie and the Pussycats.

Trivia Note: That one episode where Josey and the Pussycats encountered fake aliens could be considered a herald of things to come as the second run of the series they would be launched into space to meet the real thing in Josey and the Pussycats in Outer Space.