Silent films and an adult-oriented television comedy show might seem like odd sources for a animated kids show but that didn’t stop Baggy Pants and the Nitwits. Borrowing from the comedic stylings of Charlie Chaplin and Rowen and Martin’s Laugh In, this Saturday morning offering was certainly an interesting one.

The show was broken into two segments. The Baggy Pants segment of the show was a slapstick-based cartoon that, much like Chaplin’s work, featured no dialog, and rare for a Saturday morning show, no laugh track. The Nitwits portion of the show was based upon a sketch made famous by Ruth Buzzi and Artie Johnson on Laugh-In, who respectively played Gladys Ormphby and Tyrone. On the adult sitcom, Tyrone, a dirty old man, would make lewd suggestions to spinster Gladys while sitting next to her on a park bench. Gladys would then proceed to attack him with her purse. Since that was considered perhaps too adult of a premise for a kids cartoon, a different approach was concocted and Tyrone and Gladys were turned into…crime fighters!

Tyrone, using the alias, “Agony Nine,” used a special cane named Elmo to fly through the air to help in his geriatric crime-fighting ways.  But, it was often Gladys, with her hellacious handbag, who would have to come to his rescue and save the world. Luckily, she only had to do this 13 times – the number of episodes in this short-lived show that only managed a single season.