Aint never heard of this in UK, but thought someone might find this interesting, anyway its the last paragraph of any relavance…
• Clutch Cargo: The Complete Series, Volumes 1 and 2 (BCI, each with 26 episodes on three discs, $14.98) is more famous for its technology – called Syncro-Vox – than its storytelling or characters. The syndicated serialized cartoon adventures, which began airing in 1959, were minimally animated (airplane propellers don’t turn, for instance) and became famous for the way they superimposed human mouth movements on the cartoon characters’ faces rather than animate lips.
The hilariously awful technique is kept alive by Conan O’Brien on his late-night show, but it’s even more stunning to see it in the overall cheesy context of this show. But the DVD packages pack in a lot of material; each episode'' is assembled from several serialized segments, and extras include a text-on-screen history of Clutch and episodes from other Syncro-Vox series. One redundancy: A segment on Volume 2 calledAs seen in Pulp Fiction’’ presents an episode excerpted in Quentin Tarantino’s film, but the episode is also on Volume 1.
Synchro-Vox, I remember seeing a little report about it on Rolf’s Cartoon Club (presented by Rolf Harris) several years ago before Pulp Fiction. In actual fact when I saw Pulp Fiction at the cinema and it came to ‘The Gold Watch’ my immediate thought was of the report on ‘Rolf’s Cartoon Club’. The only people, apparently, allowed to use proper animation on American television were commercial advertisers. They had the most money. But don’t necessarily believe what I have written as one could counter that with, " Hold on. Where do the Hanna Barbera cartoons fit into this? They were made for television and they used animated lips and everything."