Josie and the Pussycats is an American animated television series, based upon the Archie Comics comic book series of the same name created by Dan DeCarlo. Produced for Saturday morning television by Hanna-Barbera Productions, sixteen episodes of Josie and the Pussycats aired on CBS during the 1970–71 television season, and were rerun during the 1971–72 season. In 1972, the show was re-conceptualized as Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space; reruns of the original series alternated between CBS, ABC, and NBC from 1974 through 1976. Josie and the Pussycats featured an all-girl pop music band that toured the world with their entourage, getting mixed up in strange adventures, spy capers, and mysteries. Each episode featured a Josie and the Pussycats song played over a chase scene, which, in a similar fashion to The Monkees, featured the group running after and from a selection of haplessly villainous characters. (More from Wikipedia)
Josie and the Pussycats probably didn’t seem like a ground-breaking animation program at the time, when the Hanna-Barbera show debuted on CBS television in 1970; but if I am not mistaken, it was the first Saturday morning cartoon show to have all female lead characters. The cartoon show was based on an Archie comic strip of the same name, though the premise of the show was more in line with the Scooby Doo series of the same time period.
Josie and the Pussycats featured an all-girl pop band at a time when few all-female bands existed in real life. Additionally, the band’s tambourine player, Valerie was the first African-American female character in a cartoon series.
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Like The Archie Show before them, the band from Josie and the Pussycats released an album in December 1970; unlike the Archies though (who are shown only as cartoons), the actual performers are shown on the cover of the Josie and the Pussycats album, Josie and the Pussycats:
(November 2013)
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