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Rating: I am not narrating the literary adventures written by Mark Twain, nor the Manga episodes from some time ago. These new adventures of Huckleberry Finn are indeed inspired by the characters of the American novelist, but they are a series by Hanna-Barbera Productions made in a rather unconventional way.
First of all, it was the only experiment by H&BP that involved inserting live actors into a cartoon. Certainly not a brand new idea per se, but derived from Disney’s Mary Poppins. For the thematic revival of this series, the production started with only 20 episodes, which were supposed to be followed by others, but everything stopped at the end of the recordings. The 20 episodes were broadcast in the USA from September 1968 to September 1969, while in Italy and France, the only European countries that purchased the films, they aired in 1971 and were repeated countless times in the following years.
The story involved the three protagonists (Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Becky Thatcher) who, due to some space-time error, ended up from the real-life Missouri of the ‘60s to the cartoon set along the Mississippi River. In the cartoon, they faced many adventures, always pursued by the villain of the moment: Injun Joe, who, as in the literary plot, sought revenge for being reported and sent to jail by the boys.
The plot was imbued with a great spirit of adventure and relationships cemented by a strong sense of friendship and support for others in difficulty even at the risk of their own lives. It featured appearances of mummies, Lilliputians, improbable intelligent animals, wizards, and Moby Dick-like whales in a great tour of imagination and irony.
At times naive, especially in the final solutions that invariably brought the kids home, but very amusing and intriguing in its development, the series did not achieve the deserved success and I think it's worth remembering.
sample video:
http://dailymotion.virgilio.it/video/x2z8cg_the-new-adventures-of-huckleberry-f_shortfilms
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