Joining Of The Knights
The BANANA SPLITS show was originally an hour of combined live-action and animated elements. Hard to say which was more cartoonish though. Hanna-Barbera hired the brothers Krofft to do the costumed and puppet segments, launching their Saturday Morning career that would produce many iconic series of their own.
One of the original animated segments was the ARABIAN KNIGHTS. A lighthearted adventure series in which a group of misfits with various powers join forces under a prince (voiced by DENNIS THE MENACE) and an unrelated princess (voiced by LAMBCHOP’s momma) to oppose an evil, usurper Sultan and his minions.
The series was unusual among HB’s action-adventure ‘toons in that it had a first episode origin story. This was generally avoided, since they knew the episodes would be rerun many times, and didn’t want obvious first (or last) episodes to make it so apparent.
The Arabian Knights’ eighteen episodes were featured in both network seasons of the Splits, even as other segments were swapped-out for bits recycled from earlier HB programs. Hard to keep track of how far they continued into the host show’s long syndicated run, as the nature of the show made it pretty easy to rotate all sorts of cartoons through.
Here’s another in our series of original Saturday Morning Cartoons. More from the OldHorseman.
