Over the past few years, we’ve seen a great convergence of my life’s two great loves; pro wrestling, and old Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
The first WWE and now Warner Bros. creative merger was 2014’s Scooby-Doo! WrestleMania Mystery, in which the Scooby Gang went to a live event in WWE City and also a talking, mystery-solving great dane dream-wrestled a giant sandwich that was definitely supposed to represent Brock Lesnar. That was followed by The Flintstones & WWE: Stone Age Smackdown!, about CM Punk boxing a dinosaur and Barney Rubble facing the Undertaker inside Hell in a Cell. Not a joke. After that was a second Scooby flick that combined WWE, Scooby-Doo and Wacky Races for some reason.
The latest film is The Jetsons & WWE: Robo-WrestleMania! It’s a movie about how even 100 years from now, Roman Reigns’ character will be exactly the same, and he’ll still be getting a push. It’s got time travel, people running in fear from robots and everything else you’d want from a dystopian sci-fi thriller. I legitimately love these cartoons, and if you disconnect from the logic of why, say, the Jetsons would need to travel time to get some of an unfrozen future Big Show’s 2016 contemporaries to defeat him instead of like, killing him with robots, you’ll love them too.
That said, I love them so much that I feel compelled to put it out all there and request that they let me, IMDB’s Brandon Stroud, write the next WWE/Warner Bros. joint. To show that nobody is more prepared for this than myself, I’ve compiled a list of the 8 pro graps/Hanna-Barbera projects I’d like to helm.
1. The Huckleberry Hounds of Justice
That’s Huckleberry Hound as Shield Seth Rollins, Droopy as Shield Dean Ambrose, Dinky Dog as Roman Reigns. I think most Seth Rollins promos are longer than Huckleberry Hound cartoons, but everything else is on point. You’ve got Huck battling Corporate Kane as Dinky Dalton, you’ve got Droopy beating people up with his unpredictable offense — watch any Droopy cartoon and tell me that’s not pitch-perfect — and you’ve got the BIG DOG protecting his yard. Here’s some test footage:
Plan B would be a Huckleberry Hound spinoff, where he suddenly can’t win any fights without help from Powerful Pierre, aka Jean-Paul Levesque.
2. Magglepuss
WE EXIT STAGE LEFT ON TUESDAY NIGHTS MAGGLE
Snagglepuss is already a gay Southern playwright mountain lion (or whatever), so it wouldn’t take much to transform him into a conservative millionaire cowboy who dances too much, offends large groups of people and occasionally gets paid to beat people up.
JBL even has a catchphrase, “BAWGAME!” which isn’t too far from, “heavens to Murgatroyd.”
3. Wyatt Til Your Father Gets Home
This one’s a little more obscure. Remember the 1972-1974 animated sitcom Wait Til Your Father Gets Home, about Hanna and Barbera deciding they could draw over episodes of All In The Family and call it a new show?
Now imagine Tom Bosley’s Harry replaced by a cultist swampbilly who tells his lazy son to “run” and instructs his feminist daughter to follow the buzzards? Bonus points if Chet ever catches a Sister Abigail.
4. Yogi Bearer
Follow the morbid, Gothic National Park adventures of mortician slash slightly above average bear YOGI BEARER and his pal Boo Boo — a 7-foot tall bear who was burned in a fire and has to wear a mask to conceal his physical and emotional scars — as they try to steal a pic-a-nic urn from the Ranger. Did we mention the Ranger is also 7-feet tall and is an undead wizard?
This should be our most surefire hit, combining the famous sneaky laughs of Yogi Bear with the corpse fucking, living man embalming and ritualistic kidnapping slash black wedding-having we love from WWE’s most popular character.
5. The Million Dollar Kid
“What if Richie Rich was a heel,” is something I’ve spent too much time thinking about. He’d just be Barron Trump, right?
But in a more fun world, the “poor little rich boy” (alongside his manservant Cadbury and his dog Dollar, who does his taxes) gets what he wants not with cash, but by PROMISING cash to make strangers do embarrassing or emasculating things. Imagine Richie telling Mayda Munny he’ll date her if she can bounce a basketball ten times without messing up, only to kick it out from under her at 9. Or him making Professor Keenbean kiss his feet for a hundred dollars. That’s the perfect cartoon for this generation.
This is the one that’ll probably get made, because there’s a villain named The Onion who has bad breath powers, and you know Vince McMahon thinks that’s the funniest shit of all time.
6. I Am Weasel
This one’s for our Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro readers.
I.M. “The Brain” Weasel goes about his daily life as an evil pro wrestling manager and color commentator, only to be annoyed weekly by a themed phonecall from “Stag” R. Babboon. And it’s all brought to you by 1-800-COLLECT, so that’s an easy way to get the film sponsored.
In the second half of the feature, we can have a segment featuring Cow and Chicken, played by Desperado Joe Gomez and the Renegade. If that’s not enough, we can include an episode of Das Wunderkind’s Laboratory, about a boy-genius with a high IQ and a suspiciously large bulge.
7. Help! It’s A New Day
Three entertaining, intelligent bears — Kofi Kingston as Hair Bear, Big E as Square Bear, and Xavier Woods as Bubi Bear — spend all day trying to figure out how to escape WWE, where they’re just told to smile and have fun all day. They go on to be the longest reigning trio of anthropomorphic talking bears in zoo history. They also ride around on a bicycle that sells ice cream, for some reason.
Seriously though, if you don’t know about the Hair Bear Bunch, watch the intro and tell me they aren’t already the New Day.
Those zookeepers are straight-up Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson, look at them.
8. Owens and the Pussycats
Finally, the project I’d most like to work on.
What do we know about Kevin Owens? We know that he:
1. easily befriends rock stars
2. easily befriends well-meaning redheads
3. eventually turns heel on anyone he befriends
So without trying to force Archie Andrews to get into ska, who is Hanna-Barbera’s most well-meaning rock star redhead? Josie McCoy, lead singer of the band Josie and the Pussycats. One powerbomb off the stage later and the Pussycats would have a new lead singer: a pissed-off Canadian dad who just wants to be in a band to support his wife and children. And also he can’t stop attacking everyone.
Please contact me immediately, Warner Brothers. I didn’t even get time to pitch my Tom & Jerry Kids feature with Sheamus and Cesaro as Tom and Jerry and Enzo and Big Cass as Spike and Tyke.
Or Ernest ‘The Top Cat’ Miller.
