The Miraculous Moon Meet!

(I didn’t have time to write up one of the August 1978 Marvel magazines as originally planned, so I thought I’d do another fill-in issue of Marvel Time Warp and review the Laff-a-Lympics book I missed when I originally covered Marvel’s February 1978 releases.)

Book: Laff-a-Lympics

Issue No.: 3

Published: February 1978

Title: “The Miraculous Moon Meet!”

Cover Price: 35¢

Format: Digital scan

From what I’ve seen so far, Marvel’s Laff-a-Lympics is the odd-book-out among its 1970s books based on Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters. All of those books generally tell stories similar to the cartoons they’re based on. But the Laff-a-Lympics comic is more of a complement to the Laff-a-Lympics cartoon. That cartoon features a bunch of different Hanna-Barbera characters competing in silly sporting events. Marvel’s Laff-a-Lympics comic books show what happens to the characters when they’re not doing sports.

It’s one of the reasons I think it’s the best of Marvel’s Hanna-Barbera books — instead of trying to replicate the TV show, Laff-a-Lympics is taking the concept and characters from the show and doing something different with them.

There actually are some sporting events featured in this story. But they aren’t official Laff-a-Lympics events. Several of the Laff-a-Lympics characters get abducted by an alien and taken to the moon. Once there, the alien (his name is Moon Man Murray) coerces the Laff-a-Lympics characters into competing with him in a footrace, pole vaulting, and weight lifting. Murray wins each event easily. But the earthlings eventually figure out that Murray was cheating. Not cool, Murray!

Marvel’s licensed Hanna-Barbera books generally include a one-page “Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera” text piece. The “Funtastic World” article in this issue is titled “Comedy Character Scorecard.” It goes into the history of a few of the Laff-A-Lympics characters, including Snagglepuss and Mumbly. Given the fairly complex histories of Snagglepuss and Mumbly (basically, both evolved from other characters), the Funtastic World article left me confused. Thankfully, Wikipedia filled in the gaps for me, but that wasn’t an option for kids reading this book back in 1978.

Next time — Hopefully I’ll get back to Marvel’s August 1978 books.