The Get Along Gang

The Get Along Gang are characters created in 1983 by Tony Byrd, Tom Jacobs, Ralph Shaffer, Linda Edwards, Muriel Fahrion, and Mark Spangler for American Greetings' toy design and licensing division, "Those Characters from Cleveland" (now American Greetings Properties), for a series of greeting cards. The Get Along Gang are a group of 12 (later 14) pre-adolescent anthropomorphic animal characters in the fictional town of Green Meadow, who form a club that meets in an abandoned caboose and who have various adventures whose upbeat stories intended to show the importance of teamwork and friendship. The success of the greeting card line led to a Saturday morning television series, which aired on CBS for 13 episodes in the 1984–1985 season, with reruns showing from January until June 1986.

The Get Along Gang franchise was loosely inspired by Hal Roach's Our Gang series of short films. The following six members of the gang were the core members, while the other six did not make many appearances in the series, but they were regulars in merchandising and on storybooks. Sometime after the thirteen television episodes were produced, two more members were added to the gang.

Canadian studio Nelvana, in association with Scholastic Entertainment, Those Characters from Cleveland, and LBS produced a pilot episode of The Get Along Gang, which was broadcast on the Nickelodeon cable network on May 6, 1984. The plot revolved around the twelve members of the gang as they try to win a scavenger hunt despite Catchum's cheating and their own competition-fueled infighting. Although all twelve characters were involved, only the six core gang members (Montgomery, Dotty, Zipper, Bingo, Woolma, and Portia) had speaking roles. Among the voice talents in the pilot were Charles Haid (then of Hill Street Blues) as Montgomery and Dave Thomas (fresh from his days on SCTV) as Leland. The pilot also aired in syndication nationwide during the summer of 1984. John Sebastian, famous for working for Nelvana at the time, wrote and sang for the pilot.

After the pilot episode, production of the CBS series was handed over to DIC Audiovisuel, a French animation studio. Thirteen half-hour episodes were produced, each containing two eleven-minute segments. As with the pilot, the focus was on the six core members of the gang, with the other six members making very sporadic appearances. Out of those six, only Braker Turtle had a regular speaking role. The show returned to CBS in reruns from January–June 1986. From September 1986 until August 1987, all thirteen DIC-produced episodes were rerun as part of a short-lived syndicated cartoon package called Kideo TV.

Reruns of the series later aired on The Family Channel (now Freeform) from 1990–1993 and on the children's programming block of Pax TV (now Ion Television) from 1999–2001 the Pilot Episode of the 1984 The Get Along Gang aired in the year 2000 on other syndicate channels.

Each of the characters also has obvious faults, which they learned to overcome with the help of friends. For instance, Montgomery Moose, the group's leader, is quite clumsy; Woolma Lamb is extremely vain and self-centered; Dotty Dog could be careless; Zipper Cat could be overbearing, Portia Porcupine could get upset easily; Bingo Beaver could be greedy and tended to get himself and/or others into trouble (although he was not mean-spirited like the Gang's villain, Catchum Crocodile).

Cast[]

Character	USA	Mex	Bra	Bra(MasterSound)	Fra	Pol	Spa	Pol(1998)
Montgomery Moose	Sparky Marcus	Alfonso Obregón	Garcia Júnior		Michel Mella		José Carabias
Dotty Dog	Bettina Bush		Adalmária Mesquita	Márcia Regina	Céline Monsarrat
Bingo Beaver	Scott Menville
Zipper Cat	Robbie Lee	Arturo MercadoJr.	MárioJorge deAndrade			Joanna Wizmur		Joanna Wizmur
Woolma Lamb	Georgi Irene		Carmen Sheila
Portia Porcupine	Sherry Lynn		Marisa Leal			Ilona Kuśmierska
Catchum Crocodile	Timothy Gibbs	Roberto Carrillo
Leland Lizard	Nicky Katt
Braker Turtle	DonMessick
Braker Turtle	FrankWelker