No, I'm Sticky, I'm the real Sticky
I found another lost piece of my childhood last night at Video Regency in the form of a 1980 cartoon called "No Man's Valley". It's the story of a California Condor (who for some reason is drawn to look like a light brown old world vulture wearing pants and sandals) who has to save his mountain from the evil bulldozer men and inexplicably, the only way to do this is to fly to the mythical No Man's Valley, the secret hideout of (erroneously drawn)endangered and extinct animals who build houses and streets and are always having trials in court until dinner time during which they all sit together at long picnic benches. The condor is of course put on trial as soon as he arrives, and after he wins his trial and eats dinner with everyone, a passenger pigeon sings a plaintive ballad called "Welcome To No Man's Valley" and tries to convince him to stay. He instead decides to go back to California to save the other condors, and the only way to get back is to climb to the top of a huge frozen mountain with the help of the passenger pigeon and a purple turtle. They all magically end up back in California and I think the animators ran out of ideas or money or something because all of a sudden the bulldozer guy has a change of heart and announces, "Yep, those are California Condors, let's all go home". Everyone cheers, and it's over.
I clearly remember seeing this on TV back in the day. Not even just seeing it, I remember being excited about it for weeks ahead of time. As is usually the case with childhood obsessions, it makes no sense at all when I watch it now and to call it scientifically and ornithologically inaccurate is an understatement. I do give it full credit for saving the California Condor though.
Having not had enough cartoon condor madness, we also picked up "Mr. And Mrs. Condor", a truly baffling Japanese made cartoon from around 1978 which consists of horrific animation and what sounds like one guy doing all the voices, and not very well at that. In fact, a single character sometimes changes voices 6 or 7 times. I am not joking. Mr. Condor starts off sounding like an Amos & Andy-esque black caricature, becomes British, then turns into a mellow hippie and then becomes black again. Another time, a frog and rabbit are talking to each other and then later in the show the frog has the rabbit's voice and the rabbit has the frog's voice. I guess they thought kids wouldn't notice.
And then there was this character that everyone called Uncle Billy, who could either have been a mouse or an opossum. He was about the size of the rabbit, but he looked exactly like a mouse. They wasted about 10 minutes having Uncle Billy very slowly and deliberately explain to all of his forest friends that he was the only one that they all liked because the mockingbird had not used his voice to say bad things about them. Whatever. His voice changed a bunch of times too.
The mockingbird was so mean that he made the frog cry and fall into the river several times. At least 6 times that I know of. And it looked exactly the same every time, but that couldn't have been because they were trying to stretch 5 minutes of plot into a 30 minute cartoon. Ironically the mockingbird was trying to cause trouble by imitating everyone's voices, even though none of them could even decide what their own voice sounded like. In the end, the mockingbird apologized to an assembly of forest creatures and sang a frightening ear piercing car alarm type song and they all forgave him.
I clearly remember seeing this on TV back in the day. Not even just seeing it, I remember being excited about it for weeks ahead of time. As is usually the case with childhood obsessions, it makes no sense at all when I watch it now and to call it scientifically and ornithologically inaccurate is an understatement. I do give it full credit for saving the California Condor though.
Having not had enough cartoon condor madness, we also picked up "Mr. And Mrs. Condor", a truly baffling Japanese made cartoon from around 1978 which consists of horrific animation and what sounds like one guy doing all the voices, and not very well at that. In fact, a single character sometimes changes voices 6 or 7 times. I am not joking. Mr. Condor starts off sounding like an Amos & Andy-esque black caricature, becomes British, then turns into a mellow hippie and then becomes black again. Another time, a frog and rabbit are talking to each other and then later in the show the frog has the rabbit's voice and the rabbit has the frog's voice. I guess they thought kids wouldn't notice.
And then there was this character that everyone called Uncle Billy, who could either have been a mouse or an opossum. He was about the size of the rabbit, but he looked exactly like a mouse. They wasted about 10 minutes having Uncle Billy very slowly and deliberately explain to all of his forest friends that he was the only one that they all liked because the mockingbird had not used his voice to say bad things about them. Whatever. His voice changed a bunch of times too.
The mockingbird was so mean that he made the frog cry and fall into the river several times. At least 6 times that I know of. And it looked exactly the same every time, but that couldn't have been because they were trying to stretch 5 minutes of plot into a 30 minute cartoon. Ironically the mockingbird was trying to cause trouble by imitating everyone's voices, even though none of them could even decide what their own voice sounded like. In the end, the mockingbird apologized to an assembly of forest creatures and sang a frightening ear piercing car alarm type song and they all forgave him.