Not being a boomer, I discovered Dastardly and Muttley way after the fact. The show, not the characters. But, I’m already going on a tangent. I discovered the show existed because of the Saturday Morning’s Greatest Hits CD in the mid 90s that had grunge bands doing covers of classic cartoons. Stop that pigeon. Stop that pigeon. Stop that pigeon.
If you’re of a certain age, those words just arrived in your head with a full brass arrangement behind them, and they are not leaving for the rest of the day. I’m sorry. I’m not really sorry. That theme song is one of the great earworms in the history of Saturday morning television, and Warner Archive has just put all 17 episodes of Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines on Blu-ray, scanned in 4K from the original camera negatives, and I have been humming it for three days straight.
This is the show where Dick Dastardly and his wheezing, snickering dog spend an entire series trying to catch one pigeon, and never once succeed. That’s it. That’s the premise. And I’m here to argue that it’s one of the purest, most perfectly engineered comedy machines Hanna-Barbera ever built.
If you’re new to this, welcome. Let me introduce you to the Vulture Squadron.
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Meet the worst air force in history
It’s World War I, more or less, in the sense that a Hanna-Barbera cartoon in 1969 was ever going to commit to a specific historical framework. Dick Dastardly leads the Vulture Squadron, a flying unit whose sole military objective is to intercept Yankee Doodle Pigeon, a carrier pigeon delivering secret messages to the other side.
That’s the whole war. One bird.
Dastardly is the mustache-twirling schemer, all sneering confidence and elaborate plans, and he is a magnificent failure. Muttley is his dog, and Muttley is the reason this show is immortal. He snickers. He wheezes. He mutters under his breath about his boss in a stream of half-audible grumbling that is somehow funnier than any actual dialogue could be. He can fly by spinning his tail like a helicopter rotor, which he will happily do to rescue Dastardly from a plummeting wreck, but only, and I mean only, if a medal is on offer. Muttley is a mercenary. Muttley has standards. Muttley is the greatest supporting character Hanna-Barbera ever produced, and I will not be taking questions.
Then there’s the rest of the squadron. Klunk is the inventor, a genius who speaks entirely in an unintelligible language of clicks, howls, whistles and growls, accompanied by facial contortions that have to be seen to be understood. And Zilly is the panicky one, whose two jobs are translating Klunk’s gibberish and trying to desert at every possible opportunity, usually by retracting his head into his flight jacket like a terrified turtle.
Four characters. One pigeon. Seventeen episodes of glorious, escalating failure.
The formula, and why it absolutely works
Here’s the thing people get wrong about this show. Yes, it’s repetitive. Enormously repetitive. Every single episode follows more or less the same beats: Zilly tries to run, Muttley drags him back, Klunk unveils some baroque contraption, the plan goes catastrophically wrong, the planes crash or collide or explode (frequently all three), Dastardly plummets earthward screaming for help, Muttley negotiates his fee in medals, and the General calls to bellow incomprehensibly down the phone before reaching through the receiver to grab Dastardly by the mustache.
And that is not a bug. That is the entire point.
This is Sisyphean comedy, the same engine that powers Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. The pleasure isn’t in wondering whether they’ll catch the pigeon. You know they won’t. They never will. The pleasure is entirely in the how, in the specific, inventive, gorgeously stupid new way that failure will arrive this week. A feather-seeking missile. A missile that homes in on sneezes. The whole squadron dressed as birds. A fortune teller. You are watching craftsmen find seventeen different routes to the same punchline, and when it lands, it’s sublime.
Kids get this instinctively. Adults sometimes need reminding. Repetition, done well, is a comedy structure, not a comedy failure.
Two men did all of this
Here’s my favorite fact about the show, and it’s genuinely remarkable.
Every character you hear in this series is voiced by exactly two people.
Paul Winchell plays Dick Dastardly, and also the General, and also assorted guest characters. Don Messick plays Muttley, and Klunk, and Zilly, and the narrator, and basically everyone else who opens their mouth. That’s it. That’s the entire cast. Even by Hanna-Barbera’s famously thrifty standards, this is extraordinary.
And these are not just any two voice actors. Winchell was a ventriloquist and performer whose most famous creation you already know: he was the voice of Tigger. Messick was one of the pillars of the entire Hanna-Barbera empire, the man behind Scooby-Doo, Boo-Boo Bear, Astro, Papa Smurf, and Bamm-Bamm Rubble. Between them, these two shaped the sound of American childhood for about forty years.
Listen to Messick’s work here with that in mind. He’s playing a snickering dog, a gibbering inventor, and a sniveling coward, and each one is a completely distinct comic creation. Muttley’s laugh alone is a piece of voice acting so perfect that it has outlived the show, the network, and the studio that made it. You can hear people imitate that wheeze who have never watched a single episode.
Where it came from, and where it went
This show didn’t appear from nowhere. It’s a direct spin-off of Wacky Races, the 1968 Hanna-Barbera hit where Dastardly and Muttley drove the Mean Machine and cheated their way through a cross-country race, losing constantly. That series was itself riffing on the 1965 comedy The Great Race, and it was popular enough to throw off two spin-offs for the 1969 season: this one and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. If you want the full picture of where these two characters came from, Warner Archive’s Wacky Races: The Complete Series disc is the essential companion piece to this one, and the two make a terrific double feature.
The title, by the way, is a straight parody of Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, the 1965 aviation comedy. The show’s original working title was simply Stop That Pigeon, which survives in the theme song and which is, frankly, the better title.
And the characters refused to die. Dick Dastardly and Muttley have proven weirdly immortal, turning up across decades of Hanna-Barbera revivals and eventually getting a big-screen appearance in the modern Scooby-Doo movie Scoob! The theme song got covered by a psychobilly band on a cartoon tribute album in the nineties. There’s even a Madvillain track that name-checks them. Not bad for two characters whose entire purpose was to lose.
You can browse the full series credits on IMDb, and the names behind the scenes are a Hanna-Barbera murderer’s row, including Iwao Takamoto, the designer who would go on to give the world Scooby-Doo himself.
What’s actually on these discs
One thing worth explaining for newcomers, because a “complete series” set of a 1969 cartoon isn’t quite what you’d assume.
Each 22-minute episode isn’t one story. It’s a little variety package: two full Dastardly and Muttley adventures, plus a segment called Magnificent Muttley, plus a handful of quick blackout gags called Wing Dings. The Magnificent Muttley shorts are the sleeper delight of the whole set. They’re Walter Mitty daydreams where Muttley imagines himself as the hero (a knight, a spy, a movie star, whatever) with Dastardly recast as the villain who finally gets what’s coming to him. They’re three minutes each, they’re wonderful, and they give the dog an inner life that the main stories never have time for.
So across 470 minutes you’re getting a lot more variety than the premise suggests. That’s the structure doing its job.
The disc: how it looks
This is the headline, and it’s a big one.
Warner Archive has sourced these from new 1080p HD masters taken from 4K scans of the original camera negatives, spread across two BD-50 discs at the original 1.33:1 television aspect ratio.
I want to pause on why that matters, because if you’re new to physical media it might sound like marketing noise. The original camera negative is the first-generation film element, the actual thing that ran through the camera when this cel animation was photographed. For hand-drawn animation specifically, scanning that negative at 4K is transformative, because it captures the ink lines, the brushwork on the painted cels, and the texture of the painted backgrounds with a fidelity that no syndication print, no VHS tape, and no standard-def DVD could ever approach. Those bold Hanna-Barbera color palettes were designed to pop, and a proper negative scan is what finally lets them.
But Warner Archive’s recent Hanna-Barbera work off original negatives has been consistently excellent, and what you should be seeing here is crisp, stable linework, rich saturated color, natural film grain left in place rather than scrubbed away, and none of the smeary, faded, generation-loss mush that anyone who grew up watching this in reruns will remember. If you have only ever seen this show as a washed-out afternoon broadcast, prepare to be startled.
Post complete series watch of Dastardly and Muttley, I did notice something. Why did every background look like it was painted by kids? I know Hanna-Barbara cut corners at time, but it really stands out after 17 episodes back-to-back.
The disc: how it sounds
Audio is the original mono, presented as a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track, which is the correct and honest way to handle a 1969 television production.
What you want from a lossless mono track on a show like this is clarity in the specific places that matter, and this show has very specific places that matter. Muttley’s snicker. Klunk’s gibberish. The General’s furious, unintelligible bellowing. Hoyt Curtin’s theme, which needs its brass to actually punch. And the whole Hanna-Barbera sound effects library, that instantly recognizable arsenal of boings and whistles and crashes that is honestly half the comedy. Good elements and lossless encoding should deliver all of it with a snap the old presentations never had. English SDH subtitles are included, as is standard for the label.
What’s in the case
| Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines: The Complete Series | |
|---|---|
| Master | New 1080p HD masters, 4K scans of the original camera negatives |
| Episodes | All 17 |
| Aspect Ratio | 1.33:1 |
| Audio | DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono |
| Subtitles | English SDH |
| Discs | 2 x BD-50 |
| Runtime | 470 minutes |
| MSRP | $24.98 |
The supplements are respectable. You get The Vulture Squadron’s Greatest Misses, a set of highlight reels rounding up the squadron’s most spectacular failures. You get Dastardly and Muttley’s Spinoffs: What Wacky Races Wrought, a retrospective featuring animation veterans discussing how the success of Wacky Races landed these two in their own show. And you get audio commentaries on two episodes from animation veterans.
Here’s my honest caveat, and it’s the same one I raised about the Wacky Races disc: these are legacy features, carried over from the earlier DVD release rather than newly produced for this Blu-ray. I don’t hold that against Warner Archive. Porting them over is the right call, and losing them would have been a genuine shame, since the commentary participants include people who actually made this show and who can’t record new material anymore. But if you were hoping for fresh scholarship on the Hanna-Barbera spin-off boom, this isn’t that. It’s preservation of what already existed, which is valuable in its own right, and at this price point I’m not going to complain.
Should you buy it?
Yes, and the case is easy to make on both sides of the aisle.
If you’re a collector or an animation historian, this is a clear buy. All 17 episodes, from 4K negative scans, at twenty-five dollars, with the legacy supplements intact. That’s outstanding value, and it’s the definitive presentation of a show that has spent its entire post-broadcast life looking terrible. Pair it with the Wacky Races set and you’ve got the full Dastardly saga.
If you’re a parent, and this is the angle I want to push hardest, this set is a gift. Seven and a half hours of genuinely funny, completely age-appropriate slapstick, with no ads, no algorithm, no autoplay, and nothing waiting to serve your kid something you didn’t choose. The humor is physical and immediate and it plays to a six-year-old exactly as well as it did in 1969. Modern kids’ animation is often smarter than this show. It is almost never simpler, and simple, done with this much craft, is its own kind of pleasure. My honest guess is you’ll end up watching the whole thing with them.
And if you’re just here for nostalgia, well. You already know whether you want this. That theme song has been playing in your head since the first line of this review.
Find Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines at MovieZyng
Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines: The Complete Series is available now on Blu-ray from the Warner Archive Collection, and you can pick it up at MovieZyng, the label’s dedicated storefront, which, as I’ve covered in my Warner Archive sale guides, is run by the same folks who actually manufacture the discs.
Fifty-seven years on, they still haven’t caught that pigeon. They never will. Go watch them fail beautifully, seventeen times, in the best quality this show has ever had.
