The Hanna-Barbera New Cartoon Series

The Hanna-Barbera New Cartoon Series, a.k.a. The New Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Series or The Wally Gator Show, was a syndicated television package of animated cartoon series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions, starting in 1962. The series included three unrelated short cartoon segments featuring funny animal characters:


 * Wally Gator
 * Touché Turtle and Dum Dum
 * Lippy the Lion & Hardy Har Har

Fifty-two episodes were produced for each of the three segments. The series was distributed to television stations as separate individual cartoon segments, each with its own opening theme and closing title. The title The New Hanna-Barbera Cartoon series was an off-screen promotional title to distinguish this series from other packages of Hanna-Barbera cartoons (such as Ruff and Reddy, Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear) available at the time. For example, WGN-Channel 9 in Chicago ran the three segments in a half-hour timeslot under the name Wally Gator. In New York, WPIX-TV originally used the segments for a local series, Cartoon Zoo, featuring Milt Moss as host and "Zookeeper", with life-sized cutouts of the characters in "cages" as a backdrop.

The series was originally syndicated by Screen Gems, the TV division of Columbia Pictures. The Hanna-Barbera studio was later purchased by Taft Broadcasting Company, which distributed the studio's product first through Taft-HB Program Sales, and later through Worldvision Enterprises. Over time, the studio regained control of many of its earlier productions and distributed them through Worldvision. The elements of The New Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Series were split up, with Wally Gator airing as a segment on Magilla Gorilla and Friends on USA Network's Cartoon Express from 1987 through 1991. Meanwhile, Touche Turtle and Lippy the Lion were part of another package of cartoons aired on the Family Channel. Following the purchase of the Hanna-Barbera library by Turner Entertainment, these shorts eventually appeared on Cartoon Network and later Boomerang.

The cartoons were put on DVD with Saturday Morning Cartoons: Vol. 2. Strangely, the Lippy the Lion cartoon was of noticeably better quality than the other two on the DVD.