The Banana Splits was a fairly innocuous kids show. The humor was too wacky and vaudevillian to be too terribly threatening. However, their sworn enemies The Sour Grapes Bunch were just plain eeevil.

The Sour Grapes Bunch were a group or pubescent girls in skimpy mini-dresses and knee-high boots that would show up and do a rather dated go-go dance into the Splits lair, usually to deliver a letter. These large, mutant team mascots (what was Snork? A mastadon?) were terrified of the Sour Grapes. Why? BECAUSE THEY WERE WITCHES!!! Just watch how they are able to psychically attack the Splits, USING ONLY THE POWERS OF THEIR MINDS!!! Run Fleegal! Your soul is in mortal peril! Don’t read that note! It’s probably an incantation to bind you in eternal servitude to their dark lord!

Besides, they always looked like those bitchy girls on the playground who could do penny-drops off the monkey bars and had Dr. Pepper lip gloss in the pockets of their designer bell bottom jeans.

What does it say when you are in a room full of bird-headed mutants doing the hustle and YOU are the creepiest thing in the room?

It says volumes.

Uncle Deadly! Oh how I loved him as a kid. This creepy little Muppet is the blue guy with the quasi-Cthulhuesque chin tentacles (chin-tacles?) who would pop up every once in a while to make you soil your Pampers. So glad I found this!

This isn’t so much a scar, as something you have probably never heard of that profoundly changed your world.

Photo by Great Beyond
If you grew up in Seattle in the 70s (and I did) then you remembered local kids show host JP Patches. If you didn’t grow up in Seattle in the 70s, then The JP Patches Show defies description. The show was on the air from 1958 to 1981, and at one point was on twice a day on weekdays and once on Saturdays. JP was a clown who was the Mayor of the City Dump. Like most kid’s shows, JP would show rockin’ cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle or Clutch Cargo, along with his sidekick, Gertrude (who was a very burly man in clown-drag wearing a weird sort of sailor dress) and his Raggedy Anne doll, Esmerelda. But, unlike most kid’s shows, the best part of the JP Patches show was the part with JP himself. There was a bottomless pit that visitors would fall down as they left the clubhouse (you would hear a fading “AHHHHhhhhhhh” as JP shoved them out the door), a phone that sang “OOGA-chucka OOGA-chucka” when it rang, the ICU2TV, the constant pies in the face. Pure awesome. The show is everything that used to be good about Seattle: snarky, irreverent, almost Python-esque humor, kitschy aesthetic, and the attitude that kids don’t need someone to talk down to them, just talk TO them.

Photo by martialstax
If you need to know anything about this show know this: Bill Gates is a Patches Pal. Kurt Cobain grew up watching this show. It inspired Matt Groening to create Krusty the Clown. Your whole world has been influenced by JP Patches, and you never even knew it. Dude even has a frickin’ STATUE here in Seattle.

Sadly, the only clip I could find is a completely throw-away mime bit of JP hitting a baseball. If you find any other footage of the show let me know!

Welp, I am now officially Mrs. Leezard! We are back and there should be new posts coming in the near future. Thanks for your patience!