The Harlem Globetrotters are great to watch in action. As a kid, I’d never seen them in person but I knew all their names from the animated TV show. I remember Meadowlark, Curly, Geese, Gip, and Bobby Joe. They worked a similar formula to Josie and the Pussycats, Jabberjaw, and Scooby Doo except of course they always solved their problems with a basket ball game. They would lose the first half of the important game because the bad guys cheated but would come out fighting in the second half and win in the end due to their superior skill.
Their show lasted for two seasons and ran from 1970 to 1972 and continued in reruns after that. It has the distinction of being the first Saturday Morning cartoon to feature African-American male characters. You can probably still see episodes of the show on Boomerang. I remember when they teamed up with Scooby Doo and the gang in The New Scooby-Doo Movies and I even vaguely remember when they teamed up with Snow White.
I guess you could say they were cartoon heroes but they weren’t super heroes, at least not yet. Like any Basketball team the line up changed and later (in 1979) they were given super powers and fought crime as the Super GlobeTrotters. Their abilities weren’t that original. Three of the five got powers similar to that of The Impossibles. They had a Multiple Man, Fluid Man and Spaghetti Man (instead of the Impossible’s Coil Man). One of them, code named Gizmo Man, got an oversized Afro and was able to pull any tool they needed out of it like Captain Caveman‘s fur coat. Last and possibly least was Curly Neal who’d been around since the first cartoon series. Using his bald head as the theme and dubbed Sphere Man, he became a huge human basketball. For some reason, they could all fly too. Like the previous series, they would settle their differences with the bad guys with a basketball game. This particular series was even more light hearted than the original and only lasted one season. I watched every episode as a kid and enjoyed them but I like the original series better. Do you remember them?
I remember them. I was that big a fan. It seemed more like buffoonery than anything.