Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales


Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales is an animated series TV series that originally aired on CBS from 1963 to 1966. It was produced by Total Television, the same company that produced the earlier King Leonardo and the later Underdog, and primarily sponsored by General Mills. The title is a play on the “tuxedo” dinner jacket worn as formal wear.
New short episodes were created for YouTube in 2014 by Chuck Gammage Animation in Toronto, and Cartoon Lagoon Studios in New York. Sponsored by Trix cereal, they resided on sillychannel.com. They feature the voice talent of Chris Phillips, Robb Pruitt and Ashley Albert.

Plot

The series centers on Tennessee Tuxedo, a penguin, and his friend Chumley, a walrus. They live in the Megapolis Zoo along with friends Yakkety Yak and Baldy the Eagle. Four episodes featured Howler, a dog that Tennessee got from his Uncle Admiration.
Tennessee and Chumley deal with several recurring antagonists. Most often seen is the ill-tempered zoo director, Stanley Livingston. Others are Rocky Maninoff, a gangster who often orders them to do his will at the point of a machine gun, and Tennessee's rival, Jerboa Jump, a kangaroo rat. All three have sidekicks: Livingston his assistant, Flunky; Maninoff a guy called Pretzel, and Jerboa a henchman named Tiger Tornado, a boxing tiger.
Tennessee and Chumley regularly escape from the zoo, only to find trouble outside. Whenever Tennessee proposes a hare-brained scheme, Chumley is skeptical. Typically, Tennessee assures the dim-witted Chumley that his superior intelligence will carry the day, often with his catch phrase, "Tennessee Tuxedo will not fail!" Chumley then responds with his own phrase, "Duh, okay Tennessee!"
When faced with more trouble than they can bear, the pair turns to their friend Phineas J. Whoopee, the “Man with All the Answers". The latter knows about everything, and he often lectures the pair on diverse topics, from the physics behind the hot air balloon to how musicians become popular. His lectures are illustrated and animated on his Three-Dimensional Blackboard, which he pulls from an avalanche of junk that falls out of his overstuffed hallway closet when he opens the door. At the end of a Mr. Whoopee lecture, Tennessee praises his mentor with the line, “Phineas J. Whoopee, you’re the greatest!” Tennessee and Chumley occasionally must consult Mr. Whoopee again when they fail their first attempt to solve any problem. Mr. Whoopee snorts: "But I've tried to warn you...".
In the series, Tennessee and Chumley have to overcome a personal problem that children can relate to, such as Chumley's requiring treatment for a toothache but fearing the dentist.
The pair attempt to use their newly gained knowledge to get out of the mischief they created, but they frequently end up in more trouble with zoo director Livingston, who punishes them in different ways, from police arrest to scrubbing pots and pans in the cafeteria for six months. Episodes sometimes end with Stanley chasing Tennessee and Chumley around the zoo. Although there are some cases where the duos never caused trouble at all, such as when they had stop tiger tornado from bullying the zoo animals and succeed, another case would be when they trained for zoo Olympic games without any damage or trouble at all and won.

Production

On a Boing podcast, Underdog creator Joe Harris explained that F.C.C. commissioner Newton Minow declared television a "vast wasteland" in terms of educational material. Efforts were subsequently made to include education in programming. He added that in this show, Tennessee and Chumley were portrayed as the ones who were being educated so that children would not feel that they were being lectured to, even though they actually were.
Occasional back segments included "The World of Commander McBragg", "Klondike Kat", "Tooter Turtle", "The Hunter", and "The King and Odie".
Don Adams used his well-known “clippy” voice characterization for the voice of the “small penguin, who tries but can’t succeed-o,” which he said was an exaggeration of actor William Powell’s voice. Bradley Bolke's characterization of Chumley seemed to be taken from Charlie Cantor's voice and personality of Clifton Finnegan on the Duffy's Tavern radio show of the 1940s; there Finnegan played a somewhat similar dimwitted sidekick to the scheming but good-natured bartender Archie. Larry Storch based Professor Whoopee's voice on Frank Morgan of The Wizard of Oz
Chumley would ask Tennessee a riddle before and in between the segments, in which Mr. Whoopee came up with the humorous answer on his Three-Dimensional Blackboard, usually ending with laughter. Sometimes Tennessee would ask Whoopee a riddle and Whoopee would come up with the humorous answer.

Episodes

Series overview

Season 1 (1963–64)

Season 2 (1964–65)

Season 3 (1965–66)

Season 4 (2014)

Syndication

Later reruns of Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales are quite different from the original network series, like most cartoon series produced by Total Television. The first 34 Tennessee Tuxedo cartoons were incorporated into syndicated prints of The Underdog Show. That syndicated package actually was a revised version of another earlier syndicated series called Cartoon Cut-Ups which initially featured first season segments of Underdog, Tennessee Tuxedo, and Commander McBragg. In fact, the syndicated Underdog Show includes some artifacts such as the Cartoon Cut-Ups closing, combining portions of the original Tennessee Tuxedo and Underdog closings, effectively eliminating the punch line of the visual "Post No Bills" joke in the original Underdog closing. It also includes the final teaser at the end of the show in which announcer George S. Irving says, "Looks like this is the end...but don't miss our next Cartoon Cut-Ups show!"
In syndication, Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales features different supporting cartoon segments compared to the show's original network run, including some cartoons from the Jay Ward studio. The first 39 syndicated episodes include "Tooter Turtle," "Bullwinkle's Corner", and "Aesop And Son." For syndicated episodes #940–945 and again from #956 through the end of the episode cycle, the supporting segments are all Jay Ward cartoons: "Peabody's Improbable History," "Mr. Know-It-All," and "Fractured Fairy Tales." Syndicated shows #946 through #955 repeat the "Tooter Turtle," "Bullwinkle's Corner", and "Aesop And Son" cartoons already shown in episodes #901–910. Each of the seventy Tennessee Tuxedo cartoons themselves appears twice over the 140 syndicated shows, in addition to the repeats of the first 34 segments as part of the syndicated Underdog Show.
In its first season during its original network run, Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales featured segments of "The Hunter" and "The King And Odie". Both segments originated in the 1960 series King Leonardo And His Short Subjects, but Tennessee Tuxedo included 26 newly produced segments of both, which were not seen on the original King Leonardo program. The following season, "The Hunter" began appearing as a segment on The Underdog Show, and the "Hunter" spot in Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales was filled by repeated segments of "Tooter Turtle". The "Tooter" cartoons shown on Tennessee Tuxedo were all repeated segments; no new segments were produced. Between 1968 and 1970, "Tooter Turtle" and "The Hunter" were seen as part of ABC-TV's The Dudley Do-Right Show. The 26 "Hunter" and "King & Odie" segments originally produced for Tennessee Tuxedo are seen in syndicated reruns as part of the Dudley Do-Right And Friends package.

Home video releases

UAV Corporation released a VHS containing three episodes of the show called Tennessee Tuxedo - It's Fun to be Healthy in 1990, and later released another VHS containing the Halloween special and episodes from a few other Jay Ward cartoons.
A DVD titled The Best of Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales was released by Sony Wonder and Classic Media in 2006. It contains 15 "sort of educational" episodes from the series. The series introduction and end credits do not seem to appear on the DVD if an episode is selected, but if "Play All" is selected, the series introduction will appear at the start of the episodes and the end credits will appear after the last episode.
One of the two "extras" on the DVD is a set of about ten audio-only outtakes from the recording of the redone version of the theme song. During the session, the engineer is heard speaking to the musicians and singers. The voice of the engineer was revealed on June 28, 2007, on The Howard Stern Show as the voice of Howard's father Ben Stern.
The other "extra" is a short collection of corny riddles posed to Mr. Whoopee and his 3DBB by Chumley and Tennessee. Example: What has four legs and only one foot? A bed.
On March 6, 2012, Shout! Factory released Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales: The Complete Collection on DVD in Region 1.

Cultural references

Austin Russell, a prominent employee and cast member of the History Channel's Pawn Stars, is nicknamed Chumlee after the Tennessee Tuxedo character.
The zookeeper's name, Stanley Livingston, is a reference to the explorers Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone.
In British English, some words have pronunciations that are significantly abbreviated from how the word is spelled. Thus, Worcestershire is pronounced "Wooster". This phenomenon also occurs in some other languages, such as Russian. Chumley is how the name Cholmondeley is pronounced in Britain.