1956 saw the debut of perhaps the worst animated TV series in creation, courtesy of one of animation’s most outstanding hacks. The series was The Adventures of Pow Wow, and the man behind it was none other than Sam Singer.

Sam Singer worked for several animation studios, including Disney, in the early 1930s, then moved on to other Hollywood studios before relocating to the Midwest in the 1940s. It does not appear that Singer gleaned very much about animation or how to produce it during his travels. He soon discovered that rudimentary technique got one only so far.

Singer’s first show, Uncle Mistletoe (based on a Christmas promotion by Marshall Fields), was unleashed upon the Chicago area in 1948. Singer’s next fiasco was the 1950 six-episode series Paddy the Pelican, which featured animation so limited and rough that it barely earned the description.

Singer finally hit it “big” when he created The Adventures of Pow Wow six years later. Pow Wow found a home on the (not yet) iconic children’s show Captain Kangaroo. These miserable five-minute episodes continued with the Captain until 1958. Screen Gems then picked up the series for syndication.

42 of the 52 Pow Wow episodes were produced in 1956, roughly four per month, using a single animator. By contrast, Warner Bros.’ output over the same year was 29 seven-minute shorts made by a far more populated and collaborative studio. As can be assumed, the quality, under small-time production studio Tempe-Toons, was nothing short of wretched. Sam Singer directed every episode.

Pow Wow was a young native American lad who shared various adventures with his dog, woodland animals, and occasionally a girl known as “Indian Girl”. Most of his adventures took place in silence, with an occasional uncredited narrator trying to make sense of it all. The theme music was the work of one Monty Kelly, but the background music was an incongruous mash of Scott Joplin-style piano rags more suited to silent-era cartoons.

The stories, which centered around Pow Wow’s life as a friend to animals and nature, were primarily written by Ed Nofziger, with an assist from Warner veteran Ben (Bugs) Hardaway. They obviously intended to write humorous slapstick gags, but the atrocious pacing of the Pow Wow cartoons worked heavily against them.

The animation was done solely by Tom Baron. One can trace Baron’s career back to 1935, and he did stints with several major animation studios. He worked as recently as 1992 on a Bozo the Clown TV movie. His animation on Pow Wow was both limited and less than competent. Not that Baron had much to do; in a typical five-minute cartoon, less than half of it was actually animated. Repeated animation (as well as repeated scenes) took up much of the running time. Held poses, choppy editing, and reactions by characters took the place of any semblance of acting.

The designs of all secondary characters were amateurish, but it can be said that Pow Wow himself was not terribly bad; he looks like he could appear in a late 50s Paramount short, and his limited facial expressions are cute at times. Nothing else worked. The cartoons themselves were in color, a first for Singer.

Pow Wow found himself out of a job on Captain Kangaroo by 1957, and his cartoons were shunted to local kiddie shows (I can recall seeing them on the Big Brother Bob Emery Show on WBZ TV in Boston). The verdict: The Adventures of Pow Wow was universally panned by critics; contemporary reviews named it one of the worst television series of all time. I have seen most of Adult Swim’s most abject failures, and they were all a galactic level above Pow Wow.

As for Sam Singer, he continued to find a way to keep producing subpar animated shows such as Trips the Trapper (1959), Bucky and Pepito (1959-1960), Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse (1960-1962). And he took his final bow with Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt (1965-1966), a show so poorly produced its distrbutor (American International Pictures) had to salvage its production by hiring Hanna Barbera to finish the assigned episodes. Singer, as Executive Producer, failed to handle the demands of the production schedule, putting an ending the cartoon series.

Singer’s final notice in the animation world was about ten years later – as the announced via a trade ad in Variety, as credited director of the infamous Tubby The Tuba feature. You know, the one starring Dick Van Dyke, and produced in Westbury, Long Island by Alexander Schure, at the New York Institute of Technology. Mike Lyons wrote about that fiasco earlier this year, here. Singer was fired from this picture – but the finished film has all the hallmarks of a Singer production.

Sam Singer passed away on January 25, 2001, at age 88. He left behind a legacy of poorly animated, poorly written cartoon shorts that he appeared to believe were totally entertaining. The man had no quit in him, replacing one failure with another from 1948 to 1966. If perseverance could win Oscars, Singer would have won one every year.

Note: Twenty episodes of The Adventures of Pow Wow can be viewed on Internet Archive, but you’ve been warned.