Wait Till Your Father Gets Home

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.

I am an avid fan of the series. I am looking for others to share my interest in the DVD set. Let me know what you think. I believe I can help with any questions you may have as I have ran some fan clubs in the past for this great television comedy. I can remember seeing the show when I was a smaller one and really didn't get it, yet as I grew older I started to think about the material and what was said and was blown away. Some of the racial comments were treated lightly due to the cartoon style and I thought this was a crazy concept and I think that is why it has stayed with us in one way or another.

Thanks, Larry

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.

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!

One of the commentators mentioned that this was a Saturday morning cartoon. Wrong......it was aired during prime time, just like the original 1960 Flintstones series. The show was clearly aimed at an adult audience; not just because of the time slot; I remember that one of the show's sponsors was Haynes panty hose. I cannot agree that this show was a parody of All in the Family, as this same commentator mentioned; at least not in the sense that the father figure was a parody of Archie Bunker. The father in this show was not at all bigoted, as was Archie Bunker (and he was also a much more educated man).

I do remember seeing a very humorous old lady, in at least one episode, who was paranoid, thinking that there was "a communist under every bed". My mother commented to me, at the time, that she thought that this character was a take-off from the old lady in the 1971 movie "Cold Turkey" (about the town that gave up smoking for a whole month), and I believe that she was correct. "Cold Turkey" came out a year before "Wait Till Your Father Gets Home" debuted.

It's really a shame that this series did not make more than one season's worth of episodes (I believe it ran for two years, but the second year the shows were just repeats). I thought that it was a great show. When it debuted in '72, it had been 6 years since "The Flintstones" prime time show had ended. I missed seeing adult cartoons on TV. After "Wait Till Your Father Gets Home" ended, adult TV animation hit a dry spell for the next 15+ years, until The Simpsons began.

Brian