Mr. Cartoon
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Mr. Cartoon was a children's program that aired on WSAZ TV 3 in Huntington, West Virginia for over thirty years. The show was originally hosted by George Lewis, who also served as host of WSAZ's Steamboat Bill children's show in the 1950s. After a few years, Lewis retired and left the station to take a job in Philadelphia in 1969, and then became Baltimore, Maryland's Captain Chesapeake.
The man most recognized by Tri-State (West Virginia, Southern Ohio, and Eastern Ky.) television viewers as Mr. Cartoon was WSAZ's weather man, Jule Huffman,who took over the show and stayed as host until his retirement in 1995. Huffman's Mr. Cartoon was accompanied by an animal sidekick, known as Beeper. Beeper joined the show in 1974. Before that, Mr. Cartoon was generally accompanied by one of Hanna-Barbera Productions' "Banana Splits". Beeper was originally known as Mr. Cartoon's "friend", and got the name Beeper following a contest in which kids got to send in their suggestions for the creature's name. The two would play cartoons for a studio audience of children, whom Huffman had decided to add to the show after Lewis left. While cartoons and commercials aired, the children would play off-camera games such as musical chairs. One of the show's daily segments featured a selected audience member attempting to answer a riddle as read by Mr. Cartoon, with Mr. Cartoon reminding the audience member that if they answered incorrectly, they would get "twenty lashes across the naked eyeball with a wet noodle" and later the "yucket bucket". (In actuality, the "yucket bucket" was a pail of confetti.) The show aired on weekday afternoons for one hour at 4PM until September 1988(The day after Labor Day). At that time, the station desired to attract a more "adult" audience which would produce more advertising revenues and replaced that time slot with "Oprah" . From Sept. 1988 until May 1995, the Mr. Cartoon program was shown on Saturday mornings.
