Admit it. Over the weekend, you either changed your Facebook profile picture to a favorite cartoon from your past, or you know some of your friends who did so. You know, it was a project to raise awareness of child abuse by replacing human faces with cartoon faces. Or something like that. It got to the point where there were so many reasons and questions about what was going on, someone had to create a snopes.com page to get to the full truth of the event.
In my Facebook circle, plenty of my 150 FB friends participated in the project. I saw nearly every single cartoon character from Olive Oyl to Eugene the Jeep; from the Care Bares to the Wuzzles to JEM and the Holograms; from Voltron to Optimus Prime to Tranzor-Z. My daughter Cassaundra even briefly changed her profile picture for the cartoon Pirates of Dark Water, which she and I watched together every Saturday morning. Great show.
And yes, I got into the Facebook weekend fad as well; for three days my profile picture was not my usual smiling face (yes, there’s a picture somewhere in my Facebook gallery that has me both smiling and not hiding behind a camera), but instead was the cartoon Davey and Goliath. Of which I caught some flack from some of my friends. “You liked Davey and Goliath? Ewwww!!!”
Well… yeah. I liked Davey and Goliath. I liked watching the classic adventures of Davey Hansen and his talking dog, adventures captured in the wondrous world of stop-motion animation. In the mid-1970’s, when I was exposed to the wonderful world of Capital Cablevision, I could watch Davey and Goliath on several television stations on the same Sunday morning – the shows would appear on WPIX New York, and then would also appear on WOR New York. I think for a while they were also on WSBK Boston, but that might be my faulty memory at work.
Want to watch an episode of Davey and Goliath? Sure you do!
Flash forward to 1996. At that time, I’m freelancing for an animation magazine called Animato!, a glossy publication based out of Springfield, Mass. Animato! was a well-written magazine with plenty of details about legendary animation stories and classic movies – heck, I think they devoted three issues just on the history of the great lost work The Thief and the Cobbler. I sold several articles to Animato!, but my favorite was a piece I worked on called “The Gospel According to Davey and Goliath.” In the article, I had the pleasure of interviewing the creators of the series, Art Clokey and Ruth Clokey Goddell – it was their Premavision studios that created the surreal cartoon Gumby; Davey and Goliath was a more sedate, insightful product from their animation studio – which partnered with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to produce the series.
The article was published in the summer of 1996, and was later reposted – with my permission, of course – on the official Davey and Goliath homepage. A few years after I wrote this article, and nearly three decades after the last produced episode of the series, the Davey and Goliath characters were licensed for a new series of commercials and toys, and a Christmas special, “Davey and Goliath’s Snowbound Christmas,” premiered.
Here’s the Mountain Dew commercial. Funny stuff.
So when it came to selecting a cartoon character for the Facebook profile project this weekend, I chose Davey and Goliath. I also noted that it was the 50th anniversary of the first Davey and Goliath-produced cartoon, “Lost in a Cave,” and that several episodes of the series – including several long-lost episodes – are now available in a nice DVD collection.
Assuming that you participated in the “post your favorite cartoon character” project this weekend, which character did you choose to represent you on Facebook, and why did you select that specific character?
Chuck The Writer 