Peter Puck (1973)
 |
Cartoon Animal |
Outfit: ice skates / hockey gloves / vulcanized rubber facelift, assuring that his youthful image will live long and prosper
Tagline: "Howdy, fans! Peter Puck here to lay some facts on ya about hockey, the world's fastest team sport!"
Plot summary: The nigh-forgotten game of "ice hockey" was an athletic sport in which two teams of six attempted to propel a hard, frozen rubber disc into the opposing team's goal net, each of which was placed at either end of an iced playing surface called a "rink." Players would control the disc, called a "puck," mainly using a long, wooden stick with a blade at the end. Other parts of the players' bodies were also used to control the puck, such as hands and ice skates, provided that they did not pass the puck to teammates using their hands outside the team's own defensive zone.
Before the ancient game of hockey faded out of existence due to contract negotiation being the world's slowest team sport, games were often televised. This presented many opportunities for television networks to gain higher ratings, as well as several challenges in maintaining said ratings. In 1973, NBC, the United States' main supplier of televised hockey events, commissioned successful cartoon giants Hanna-Barbera to create a hockey-related character that would keep the home viewer's interest in watching the same network during a hockey game's two 15-minute intermissions. The result: a talking hockey puck who would get smacked in the side of the face & sent flying at like a hundred miles an hour as he explained the more in-depth rules of hockey ... like the history of the Stanley Cup, what all the different penalty calls mean, and how the proper introduction to a fight should go as follows: Stick, gloves, shirt. (more)
User comments: Peter Puck might not have been Hanna-Barbera's brightest idea, but their job wasn't to be wacky and original. They proved they couldn't do that after their 178th show about teenagers & their hyperintelligent talking pets solving mysteries. The goal (lol) here was just to make a character who would talk about hockey & make you pay attention enough to not change the channel in between periods. So a talking hockey puck with an alliterating name it is. It's like when sports franchises choose their mascots. New York's National League baseball team name is short for "Metropolitans." Upper management decided that a building wearing a Mets jersey and a smile would be kind of awkward, so with that in mind, a suited-up guy with a baseball for a face isn't too bad of an idea, after all.
Peter was an effective & popular hockey spokespuck. Even the players loved him. True story: one time the Montreal Canadiens traded center Dave Gardner to St. Louis a few days after he jokingly asked Peter, "How can I score goals while sitting on the bench?"
In his spare time, Peter liked to pretend his stick was an air guitar & serenade Michael Jackson with parodies of motown songs...
A few years later, Peter Puck got a gig as the guitar player for R.E.M.
User Rating: 
(403 ERROR: You are currently locked out.)