Hocus Pocus Powwow (1968) Online

When at their best, the Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies cartoons were some of the best and funniest cartoons ever made, being wonderfully animated and scored, hilarious with iconic characters and peerless voice work.

That is not the case with the poorly done Merlin the Magic Mouse cartoons, which were classic examples of Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies' decline and were even worse than the worst of more iconic characters like Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Sylvester and Wile E. Coyote.

'Hocus Pocus Powwow' is a small improvement over the previous effort, but the same flaws are present. It has its moments, with the amusing character of Lo and two entertaining gags in the rabbit in the hat and treadmill gags. Larry Storch does a serviceable job with the voices.

On the other hand (re-iterating what was said about 'Merlin the Magic Mouse', the animation clearly suffers from smaller budgets and tighter deadlines. Everything looks so flat, scrappy and rushed, none of the colour, liveliness and fluidity seen with Looney Tunes at its best. Have also rarely been a fan of the stock/canned music that Bill Lava adopted, and here it is cheap-sounding, annoying and ill-fitting.

The writing is incredibly lazy, apart from two gags very little else sticks out as remotely amusing let alone hilarious and there's nothing endearing or anything memorable about them. The cliff is incredibly repetitive and done to death gag and doesn't work at all here, feeling misplaced. The story is tired and disjointed, Looney Tunes at their best are some of the zaniest, wildest, wittiest and liveliest cartoons ever. All the Merlin the Magic Mouse cartoons are an extremely pale shadow of all that, and actually don't feel like Looney Tunes, actually feeling a rejected and very low-budget Hanna-Barbera effort.

While one doesn't expect the iconic Looney Tunes to stick around forever, surely they could have come up with more memorable, interesting, likable and funnier characters than the characters here. Was especially irritated by the sidekick character Second Banana. Merlin lacks the charisma or comic timing to be a good lead character. Only Lo makes an impression.

Overall, very poorly done cartoon. 3/10 Bethany Cox

This is one of those late '60s Warner Bros. theatrical cartoons that uses new characters instead of the classic Bugs, Daffy, Porky, etc. The star here is Merlin the Magic Mouse whose W. C. Fields-inspired voice is done by Larry Storch of TV's "F Troop" fame. He does all the other voices here like that of Second Bannana and the Indian Lo. Perhaps because of the obvious low-budget look, this cartoon was mostly "eh" to me. Whatever funny gags provided here come courtesy of Lo, the Poor Indian. Like when he gets Merlin's hat and pulls the rabbit out of it with that hare biting him on the nose. Or when Lo gets off a cliff, stands for a few seconds, then falls with the scene changing to the ground from up high with the impact signaled by a small smoke (reminiscent of the Road Runner cartoons with While E.'s impact). Then we see Lo running on a treadmill which he calls, "Portable warpath". LOL! Otherwise, this was mostly blah for me.

This cartoon is a fairly good and most enjoyable example of the cartoons produced by Warner Brothers after 1966. While they don't come up to the level of the work done in the 1930s-1950s, they have a certain charm to them and a few are fairly good. Merlin isn't my favorite character from these later shorts (I like Cool Cat more), but he does have his moments. Worth watching. Recommended.