[embedded video: Underdog theme]

I loved Underdog. The cartoon, not whatever this was. It was shown in syndication in the afternoon and I used to watch it at my grandparent’s house when the weather was too crappy for my grandfather to take dad and I out for boating adventures in the Port Charlotte canals.

The New York Times is reporting that Underdog co-creator W. Watts Biggers died.

I looked in my archives to see how much I’ve posted about Underdog. I found this in a link round-up post from 2002. (Un)fortunately, the links were dead:

It was back to sad, however, when I saw the ain’t it cool news headline announcing the death of Rocky and Bullwinkle animation supervisor William “Tex” Henson. Henson also oversaw Underdog, which was one of my favorite cartoons. There’s not a lot of Underdog information on the web. ToonTracker has some and I found a rather disturbing quantity of Underdog fan fiction that someone wrote while, they claim, heavily medicated.

I also found this, which was disturbing in a different way, in that it was about a dream I had last year: I doubt a completed Underdog coloring book actually counts as a PhD comprehensive exam.

In retrospect, Underdog was a pretty annoying show. Still, I loved the Underdog coloring books. A lot.