What Have I Done??”

So back when I first start­ed this site, I had in mind cre­at­ing a tra­di­tion of doing Franken­stein-relat­ed art for Hal­loween, when I had time. It’s been awhile since I did one. So here you go!

Mil­ton the Mon­ster is one of those car­toons from my child­hood that I’ve always looked back on fond­ly. Cer­tain car­toon prop­er­ties are well-remem­bered and seem to come back for revivals every so often. Mil­ton is one of those car­toons that seems to have slid into obscu­ri­ty, unfor­tu­nate­ly. Most car­toon fans either don’t remem­ber it, or have nev­er heard of it.

For those who don’t know about the show, the con­cep­t’s right there in the show’s theme song! Take a look. I had­n’t watched the show in a long time, so doing this cov­er was an excuse to watch some episodes and refresh my mem­o­ry. Yes, it’s def­i­nite­ly lim­it­ed TV ani­ma­tion, and the jokes can get a lit­tle corn­ball, but I still get a kick out of it. If some­one were to actu­al­ly do a revival of this show, it would be a blast to be involved!

Search­ing for actu­al char­ac­ter mod­els to draw from, I could­n’t find any. I have a sense that TV ani­ma­tion in the ’60s some­times had a much broad­er inter­pre­ta­tion of “on-mod­el” than what it does now, or even when I start­ed work­ing in ani­ma­tion in the ear­ly ’90s. It’s sur­pris­ing to see how much the look of the char­ac­ters on this show can fluc­tu­ate from episode to episode, depend­ing on the animator.

And of course, this had to be a Gold Key cov­er. They actu­al­ly did pub­lish one issue of a Mil­ton the Mon­ster com­ic back in the mid-’60s. If you were a kid in the ’60s and want­ed to buy a com­ic book fea­tur­ing your favorite ani­mat­ed character(s), Gold Key had the rights pret­ty much sewn up to all of them!

Any­way, I hope you enjoy this. And Hap­py Halloween!

2 thoughts on “What Have I Done??”

  1. Brad

    One thing, if I remem­ber the (real) Gold Key book accu­rate­ly — it did­n’t have Hee­bie and Jee­bie. (A mark against it right there.) Also, you should men­tion that Mil­ton’s voice was a knock-off of Gomer Pyle’s.

    There were also the mid­dle seg­ments of the car­toon show, fea­tur­ing such mem­o­rable char­ac­ters as Pat­ty Pen­guin and Flukey Luke (whose faith­ful Indi­an com­pan­ion had an Oirish accent). But the longest run­ning was Fear­less Fly, who is unlike­ly to be revived because his arch-foe was a Fu Manchu manque named Dr. Goo Fee. (Side note — Mighty Mouse was orig­i­nal­ly planned to be a fly, but some­one decid­ed mice were cuddlier.)

    Boomer? Who, moi?

    Reply
    1. Mark Post author

      I don’t actu­al­ly have my copy handy of the one issue Gold Key did, but you’d think they would’ve used Hee­bie and Jee­bie in there. They fig­ure pret­ty promi­nent­ly as sup­port­ing char­ac­ters in the show.

      Doing some read­ing, when the stu­dio orig­i­nal­ly pitched the show, they were focused on Fear­less Fly as the anchor­ing con­cept. But the net­work was more inter­est­ed in Mil­ton, so he became the focus. And I think almost all the voic­es were done by one guy. Talk about try­ing to keep a tight budget!

      Reply

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