Tooter Turtle

Tooter Turtle (sometimes spelled Tudor or Tutor) was a cartoon about a rather dopey-looking turtle who first appeared on TV in 1960, as a segment, along with The Hunter (a Senator Claghornish detective dog), as part of the King Leonardo and His Short Subjects program.

Tooter debuted on NBC, on Saturday, October 15, 1960, and ran for 39 original episodes through July 22, 1961. These episodes were later rerun as backups on other cartoon shows, but no more original episodes were made.

Plot

This segment was always a simple morality play. A simple-minded, straw boater-hat wearing, anthropomorphic turtle named Tooter (voiced by Allen Swift to sound similar to Mortimer Snerd) calls on his friend Mr. Wizard the Lizard (voiced by Sandy Becker with a Mittel-European accent), an anthropomorphic lizard wearing wizard cone hat, robe, and pince-nez eyeglasses. Mr. Wizard lived in a tiny cardboard box at the base of a tall tree. The introductory segment had Tooter knocking on the cardboard box, having "another favor to ask." From inside the box, Mr. Wizard (although disturbed from sleep, he was apparently always delighted to see Tooter) would shrink Tooter small enough to enter through the box's front door, and eagerly invite him in. Mr. Wizard has the magic to change Tooter's life to some other destiny, usually sending him back in time and to various locales. He usually accompanied his request with the phrase "Please, Mr. Wizard; it's what I want to be!" Since none of Tooter's alternate lives ever worked out, the moral of each segment was always the same: "Be just vhat you is, not vhat you is not."

As Tooter is doing his destiny, Mr. Wizard narrates about it. When Tooter's trip finally became a catastrophe, he always called out the same thing, the famous, "Help me, Mr. Wizard!" Mr. Wizard would rescue him with the incantation, "Twizzle, twazzle, twozzle, twome; time for this one to come home." Then, Mr. Wizard would always give Tooter the same advice: "Be just vhat you is, not vhat you is not. Folks vhat do zis are ze happiest lot." Tooter never learned, though.

References in popular culture

One major pop culture reference to Tooter Turtle comes from The Matrix. In a scene where Neo is attempting to find a way to return to the real world, he contacts his operator and says to him, "Mr. Wizard, get me the hell out of here!" This is a reference to Mr. Wizard's rescuing abilities (as well as a possible inside joke referencing Keanu Reeves's vocal similarity to Tooter Turtle).^{[citation needed]} Another reference comes in "Hold My Life," a song from The Replacements album "Tim," in which Mr. Wizard's incantation is part of the lyric. There is also a more oblique but definite reference to Tooter Turtle in the novel Bright Lights, Big City, in which the second-person narrator recalls these cartoons from his childhood, and wishes that he (like Tooter) could be rescued from his current predicament by a friendly wizard. And yet another reference comes from ABC's Lost in Episode 2 of its fifth season (titled "The Lie") when James "Sawyer" Ford calls Daniel Faraday "Dr. Wizard" and Miles Straume correcting with "isn't it Mr. Wizard." This is an obvious allusion to the surrealism of time shifting and living in many different lives, except this is not of their choosing.

The lines "Drizzle, drazzle, druzzle, drome" and "Help me, Mr. Wizard", were also frequently quoted by Tom Servo on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, such as in the episodes "Rocketship X-M", "The Wild, Wild world of Batwoman", and others.

Episode List

(Every Saturday from Oct 15, 1960 to July 22, 1961)

• Two Gun Turtle
• Tailspin Tooter (Plane Failure)
• Sea Haunt
• Highway Petrolman (Road Block-Head)
• Knight of the Square Table
• Mish-Mash-Mush (Panting for Gold)
• The Unteachables (The Lawless Years)
• Kink of Swat (Babe Rube)
• One Trillion B.C. (Dinosaur Dope)
• Olimping Champion (Weak-Greek)
• Stuper Man (Muscle-Bounder)
• Buffaloed Bill (Custard's Last Stand)
• Moon Goon (Space Head)
• Robin Hoodwink (Thimple Thief)
• Steamboat Stupe (Captains Outrageous)
• Souse Painter (Brush-Boob)
• Railroad Engineer (Stupefied Jones)
• Quarterback Hack (Pigskinned)
• Drafthead (Overwhere?)
• Lumberjack (Topped)
• Jerky Jockey (Kenducky Derby)
• Fired Fireman (Hook And Batter)
• Sky Diver (Jump, Jerk, Jump!)
• Tuesday Turtle (Private Pie)
• Snafu Safari (Trackdown Tooter)
• Anti-Arctic (North Pole Nuisance)
• The Master Builder (Rivet Riot)
• Taxi Turtle (My Flag Is Down)
• Canned Camera (Peek-a-Boob)
• Slowshoe Mountie (One, Two, Buckle My Snowshoe)
• Duck Haunter
• Bull Fright (Olay Down)
• News Nuisance (Sub Scribe)
• The Sheep of Araby (Beau Geste Goes West)
• Waggin' Train (California Bust)
• Anchors Awry (Nautical Nut)
• Vaudevillain (Song and Dunce Man)
• Rod and Reeling (Field and Scream)
• The Man in The Blue Denim Suit (Hay! Hay!)

External links

• Toonopedia: Tooter Turtle