The Perils of Penelope Pitstop is an American animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions that premiered on CBS on September 13, 1969. The show ran for one season with a total of 17 half-hour episodes, the last first-run episode airing on January 17, 1970. Repeats aired on CBS until September 4, 1971; and in syndication as Fun World of Hanna-Barbera from 1976 to 1982. It is a spin-off of Wacky Races, reprising the characters of Penelope Pitstop and the Ant Hill Mob.
Rebroadcasts of the show air on the Cartoon Network-owned channel Boomerang and the series can be streamed in its entirety on the Boomerang streaming service.
Production
The series was patterned on the silent movie era melodrama cliffhanger movie serial The Perils of Pauline. It originally was to also star the characters of Dick Dastardly and Muttley, though Dastardly and Muttley were later dropped in pre-production. Those characters would be later reused in their own series, Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines.
Joe Ruby and Ken Spears were the head writers for the series, and Ruby, Spears, and Warner Bros. Cartoons veteran Michael Maltese wrote the stories for the individual episodes. Deciding to feature the characters in a different setting, studio heads decided to set the characters into an active adventure format strongly reminiscent of the 1910s.
Plot
The series features characters from Wacky Races, Penelope Pitstop and the Ant Hill Mob, the latter of whom take on the role of heroes in contrast to their previously nefarious personalities.
In each episode, Penelope's guardian, Sylvester Sneekly, attempts to claim Penelope's inheritance for himself by attacking her in the disguise of his sinister alter-ego the Hooded Claw. Aided by his twin henchmen the Bully Brothers, who always speak in unison, the Claw creates overly elaborate Rube Goldberg-style plots to do away with Penelope. Even though the Ant Hill Mob often come to Penelope's rescue, she herself often needs to save the Mob from the unintended effects of their attempts to rescue her. But just as quickly as Penelope is delivered from one quandary, she almost immediately finds herself ensnared in another one of the Claw's traps. Despite their overall bumbling, however, the Ant Hill Mob always manage to rescue Penelope and foil the Hooded Claw's plans in the end.
While Penelope is curiously helpless whenever the Hooded Claw grabs her, once he leaves her tied up for his fiendish plans to take effect she usually becomes resourceful and ingenious, sometimes coming up with spontaneous or creative methodologies to escape her own predicaments.