#didn't like how most blacks kids in 90s cartoons have the same hair so changed it

[maslosstuff]

Late night redesign

[ghostchasersmagazine]

Of all the leader-type characters of the Hanna Barbera mystery solver shows, I think Biff from Jabberjaw is one of the most underrated. I like how his ideas weren't always bright, as it makes him different enough from the other leaders. Also, his designs in both the original series and the Cartoon Network Groovy are really fun. Speaking of the Cartoon Network Groovy, I'm surprised only Jabberjaw and Josie And The Pussycats got them, as I think that Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kids, The Funky Phantom, Goober And The Ghost Chasers, and The Amazing Chan And The Chan Clan could have all benefitted from having them.

I agree! A lot of the other leader characters tend to act as the Straight Man of their respective groups, so Biff's character is a fun play on that by having him be more of a plan guy, someone who's in charge mainly because it was all his idea in the first place.

What I particularly like about his characterization is that he's still good-natured about it. A fast-talking character like him could have easily be written as a scammer or a schemer, so it's nice to see that they avoided that route and had him still be a good guy.

His character also still has at least one of the major benefits of the traditional leader characters have, in that he's arguably the most "grounded" of the four Neptunes. He serves as a good middle point between his friends; he's not as serious as Shelley, as he does come up with plans that could fail in comedic ways, but he's still more serious than Bubbles and Clamhead, as he's still the one coming up with the plans to keep the group going in the first place.

As for Biff's (visual) depiction in the Cartoon Network Groovie, I'll be honest - I'm not a fan of his design there. Conceptually it works; I think the designers did a good job of making the Neptunes look like a 90s band, and I am a fan of time capsule designs like that.

The problem is that it just doesn't read as Biff to me. By making his hair noticeably shorter, straighter, and changing it from brown to black, it takes away what made Biff visually stand out among the other leader types. They didn't even give him the same shade of blue to wear. They could have said that it was a (then) modernization of any other guy character and it likely would have been just as convincing to me.

It's a very similar problem to what I don't like about Bubbles's design in the Groovie. There's an argument that her design is even worse in this regard because by straightening her hair it does take away the main factor that did separate her from the other blonde girls, her curls, but I do like her design slightly more, since by keeping her hair the same color and length I could at least tell it's supposed to be a version of her.

That's both the inherent brilliance and biggest flaw of Hanna-Barbera's human character design in the 1970s - because most of the characters are drawn physically the same, the hair and clothing are essential in making the characters memorable. By changing/getting rid of those two aspects, it makes the characters near unrecognizable, which is what I think happened to Biff in this case.

But moving on to discussing the Groovies more generally, I apparently don't remember these as well as I thought. I looked up a list of them to refresh my memory and I only remembered like, three of them, the Atom Ant one (if only because it unnerved me as a kid), the El Kabong one, and the Magilla Gorilla one. I don't think I heard songs like "Jabberjaw Running Underwater" or "Signal in the Sky" until I found them on YouTube later on. There were also a couple of shorts I thought were Groovies but apparently were part of the Cartoon Network Shorties line instead, like the Huckleberry Hound short.

That is to say, while it would have been cool to see Groovies for other shows as well, I guess it wouldn't have helped me personally get interested in the shows as a kid.

I do think it's interesting that Josie and the Pussycats and Jabberjaw were the shows chosen for the Groovies to represent the 1970s, though. I do get why they did it, as they were both musical shows and Hanna-Barbera produced multiple adaptations and mystery solver shows during that time. But since a lot of the other Groovies were based on heavy hitters like The Flintstones and Yogi Bear, you think they would have opted to make Groovies out of the seemingly more obvious Scooby Doo or even Speed Buggy given its popularity at the time.

Of the shows you listed in particular for potential Groovies, I think an Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan Groovie would have been cool. The fact that the Chan Clan is a musical group tends to get overlooked when discussing Hanna-Barbera's musical shows, so acknowledging that would have been neat. Plus it could have been a way to have a Groovie about the actual mystery solving aspect of these mystery solver shows, since that surprisingly tends not to be discussed as much when bringing up the shows.

In a similar vein a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids Groovie would have been fun too, just swapping the detective imagery from the Chan Clan idea with spy imagery. (Though, this hypothetical does make me wonder if a Groovie was made based off the show would [then] modernize the characters' designs too, modeling Butch after a 90s heartthrob instead of David Cassidy.)

No real ideas for what a Funky Phantom or Goober and the Ghost Chasers Groovie would be like, though.