Wait Till Your Father Gets Home

I love this show. I was 10 when it came out but funny enough, don't remember watching it back in 1972. I guess I was too busy watching the Partridge Family and Brady Bunch. I'm glad it's on the Boomerang network, along with another childhood favorite, the Banana Splits. Thank God for DVR so I can tape them since it's on in the middle of the night. I hadn't seen mentioned here in detail that Jackie Earle Haley, later of the Bad News Bears and most recently, the movie "Little Children" (Oscar nominated) was the voice of youngest son Jamie. According to his IMDb bio WTYFGH was his first acting job, albeit vocally only.

This show is awesome and I'm sure was very topical for its time, for example, the episode when Chet wants to move in with his girlfriend. I'm surprised that the Jack Burns character was able to get away with talking about "Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Blacks" on a cartoon. He reminds me of a cartoon version of Archie Bunker, for sure.

We used to watch this when I was very little...maybe four or five, and I have dim memories of the theme song and some of the voices. They are good memories. As I remember it, the show "King of the Hill" kind of puts me in mind of it, with the concise wit, varying personalities and their interactions and the references to modern culture. My dad used to laugh at the neighbor, whose constant "Huh? Huh? Huh?" briefly became something of a catchphrase in the early 70s. I'd buy this in a second if they released it on DVD...why haven't they? They have everything else out there...every obscure show that was ever produced. I even saw the boxed set of "The Powers of Matthew Starr", for God's sake. They put that out, and leave "Father" in the vault? Come on!

Much of what I have to say about it, I've already said on "Jump The Shark," but, this was a show that tried to be a cartoon answer to ones like All In The Family, without being a COPY of them, and it actually succeeded in a very big way. Without getting credit for it, or much of any publicity that I know of. (It was a syndicated show, and in my area at least, came on before prime time, so it probably "flew beneath the radar.") In some ways, it actually OUTDID the Norman Lear kinds of shows. Especially with the "Ralph" character, played by Jack Burns, who's always been so great at playing comical loudmouths, and sometimes bigoted ones (as in the famous Burns and Schreiber "Taxi" routine). The Ralph character was almost closer to "Joe" (in the Peter Boyle movie) than to Archie Bunker, because he was an actual vigilante (although one who never actually DID anything violent), who was on the lookout for minorities as much as Communists. And some of his lines were genuinely "strong," lines that AITF probably would've though twice about putting into Archie Bunker's mouth.(But again, who expected something like that from a Hanna-Barbera cartoon show? So no one seemed to know about it.) Then there was "Chet" the older son, who (even though it was a cartoon) was one of the least exaggerated comical hippies on TV! One of the best episodes was about Chet getting drafted, and planning to leave the country, which is STILL a touchy subject. Even though it had a sort of "tidy" ending - he gets a deferment - it was still a pretty bold thing to do with a REGULAR character on a show (as opposed to a ONE-TIME character, that no one's going to see again). And Alice (played by Kristina Holland, who played the "ditzy" secretary on "Courtship of Eddie's Father") was far from a stereotyped "fat girl" - instead of being worried about her having no social life, Harry always seemed to be worried about her fooling around with too many boys. And of course, Tom Bosley as Harry - some time before Happy Days, he was already playing the put-upon father very well.

This is one of my favorite show's from Hanna-Barbera. After years of placing families in the stone age, the space age and even in ancient Rome, Hanna-Barbera finally had a piece that took place in this century. The best thing about this show was the fact that the Boyles were played more or less like real people and it was a very humorous look at how conservative Harry dealt with not only his liberal kids, Alice and Chet, but with a changing world around him. However, the real star was Ralph, Harry's reactionary neighbor. He made Dale from "King of the Hill" look normal. Ralph was always looking for communists in every nook and cranny and he would always give Harry all sorts of crazy advice based on his wild theories. The only thing I found wrong with the show, however, was the poor job of animation (allegedly Hanna-Barbera "farmed out" the animation work to a Canadian company as a way to save money). All in all, though, despite the poor animating, this still is one of the funniest cartoons to come out of the 1970's.

Before Tom Bosley became a prime time superstar on Happy Days, he voiced the father in Wait Till Your Father Gets Home. I have fond memories of this series, which debuted almost half-a-century ago!! In some ways it was the more sedate prelude of The Simpsons.