BOOTLEG FILES 912: “Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt” (1965-55 syndicated animated series).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube and other online video sites.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It fell through the proverbial cracks.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely at the moment.
The other day, I was scrolling through an animation history forum on Facebook and I saw a post where someone asked a question about a series called “Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt.” While I would like to imagine that I have some degree of expertise regarding animated television series, I found myself stumped – this was the first time that I ever saw any mention of “Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt.”
I started to do research and quickly found a treasure chest worth of episodes on various online video sites. The visual quality of these episodes was not pristine – they appeared to have been lifted from some well-worn 16mm prints, and some were in black-and-white. But despite the lack of high-definition clarity, the episodes were a delightful surprise – they were fast-moving, charming and often very funny. With each episode I viewed, I couldn’t help but wonder why “Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt” fell out of sight.
“Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt” was the creation of Sam Singer, a producer who is best remembered today for the series “Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse.” In 1960, he created a pilot episode featuring Sinbad Jr. as a teenage seafarer with his own single-mast sailboat and a talking anthropomorphic parrot named Salty who wore a white t-shirt and sailor hat. The youth was supposed to be the son of the legendary Sinbad the Sailor, but the pilot episode had a contemporary setting and the WASPy-looking Sinbad Jr. did not inspire thoughts of the legendary 9th century Arab mariner. Sinbad Jr. wore a belt that when pulled tight would swell his upper torso to Mr. Universe-level musculature, giving him superhuman power to combat whatever foes came his way.
The pilot, called “Sailor’s Story,” aired in an episode of “Bucky and Pepito,” a syndicated cartoon series that Singer produced. Singer felt the Sinbad Jr. and Salty characters had potential for their own series, albeit with a slight visual change to teen – the boy’s blonde hair in the pilot became brownish-red while his sailor hat was replaced with a captain’s headgear and his belt buckle was changed from a standard metal square to a flashier diamond-shaped design. Dal McKennon, a voice actor for Singer’s animated series, recorded the dialogue for the characters.
Singer got to work on producing episodes of “Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt” for syndication through Trans Arts, the company that released his other series. However, American International Pictures got wind of this endeavor and tried to stop it – that studio claimed it had the rights to the Sinbad character based on its 1961 theatrical release “The Magic Voyage of Sinbad.” Never mind that AIP’s film was an English-dubbed version of a 1953 Russian film called “Sadko” that had nothing to do with the legendary Sinbad character. Fortunately, Singer and the studio reached an agreement to release the episodes through AIP’s television division. The studio contracted Hanna-Barbera to produce additional episodes, which retained the visual designs of the characters but replaced McKennon’s voice performances with Mel Blanc as Salty and a teenage Tim Matheson as Sinbad Jr.
The Singer-produced episodes emphasized action and adventure. “People Pluto Trap” is dizzying with its wild plot – Sinbad Jr. turns his sailboat into a spaceship and blasts off with Salty to the planet Pluto, where they encounter carnivorous plants, a butterfly that turns into a pterodactyl and a clone created by the resident extra-terrestrials. “The Web of Evil” finds the heroes battling a giant spider who created a humongous web that catches airplanes in flight. These works are inventive in their concept and execution.
The Hanna-Barbera episodes infused healthy doses of wacky humor into the stories, with Sinbad Jr. as the boyishly heroic central figure while Salty plus the various adversaries generated the laughs through slapstick and jokey dialogue. These episodes offered recurring villains in Blubbo, an oversized but under-intelligent bully, and the German-accented scientist Rotcoddam (that’s mad doctor spelled backwards) who is, of course, interested in world conquest. The plots are frequently outlandish, especially “The Adventure of Mad Mad Movies” with a befuddled Sinbad Jr. getting cast in a pirate movie and “Elephant on Ice” with the seagoing duo encountering a wooly mammoth in the Arctic. Also to their credit, Hanna-Barbera jazzed up the series’ opening theme song – and after watching a few episodes, it becomes quite the earworm.
A total of 102 five-minute episodes were created and packaged for the “Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt” series that was programmed in syndication from September 1965 through May 1966. The series was accompanied with merchandising that included a magic belt for kids (instant muscles were not included), trading cards and comic books; the cartoons were also sold to foreign markets and sold to the home movie market that preceded the rise of the VCRs.
After its initial syndicated run, the individual cartoons later turned up in local TV kiddie shows where they were mixed with other cartoons. By the mid-1970s, however, “Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt” was mostly gone from the small screen as AIP’s television division ceased operating. It was never made available in any home video format, and a potential resurrection of the material at this late date would require substantial digital restoration.
Mercifully, there are plenty of unauthorized postings from this series online – I am sharing a few episodes here and I would invite you to check out YouTube, DailyMotion.com and the Internet Archive to find more. Trust me, you’ll have a lot of fun with this jolly gem of a cartoon series.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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