Need help identifying a song from an old cartoon....

May 22, 2006 12:07 AM

Need help identifying a song from an old cartoon....

I'm doing this on behalf of someone else who is unable to remember much about this song, so apologies in advance for my vagueness. My friend remembers hearing it on an old Saturday morning cartoon, and remembers this snippet of lyrics:

Kings and Queens
Knights on white horses.
All these things
mean nothing to me.

Kings and Queens
living in castles
will never be
as lucky as me.

He thinks it might be the Groovie Goolies or the Archies, but he isn't sure. Definitely from that era, though. Google isn't turning up anything useful, so I'm asking for your help. Any of this ring a bell?

posted by Anders Levant to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

Best answer: General net consensus is that it was as song from the "Groovie Goolies" show, from the episode entitled "Kings & Queens", song of same title. There's a (light-hearted) exchange here on Usenet's rec.arts.animation newsgroup about whether the song Kings & Queens is the best song from the group. (Longish thread, look around for the few on-topic remarks).Quoting the relevant original remark from the thread:

"Meanwhile, Sabrina has spun off from the Archie series into her own show, which in turn spins off the Groovie Goolies. I'd think DIC owns these as well. The Goolies also form a pre-fab band. Favorite song on this show was "Kings & Queens"."

And from a dissenter: "Bullshit! Their best song was "Chick-A-Boom", which became a top ten hit!"

Indeed, the person who wrote Chick-A-Boom was one Richard or Dick Monda, also known as Daddy Dewdrop. If you look at a biography of him, you'll see mention made that "Monda worked as a songwriter for the television series "Sabrina And The Groovy Ghoulies", a USA cartoon." And so it comes full circle. (Actually the newsgroup thread referenced mentions Dick Monda too, if you have the patience to read the whole thing).

If you want to know more about the exact episode, the Big Cartoon Database has the characters, direction, etc for the "Kings and Queens" episode. If you do visit, you may need to be patient since the site goes down frequently and is often quite slow.

A recording or full lyrics? Now that I couldn't find. Daddy Dewdrop/Dick Monda has some recordings on Amazon, but I didn't see the Kings & Queens song. Maybe he doesn't have the rights. A few other people do quote a portion of the lyrics on the web and Usenet, probably including your friend, since there's a question about it from 2000 which looks just like your post.
posted by mdevore at 1:45 AM on May 22, 2006

The bubblicious Mondo Daddykin blog just posted a bunch of Groovy Ghoulies music, though not "Kings and Queens"
posted by Scram at 11:46 AM on May 22, 2006

Well, dammit, I hosed my original reply half-way through with a misplaced quote. Interesting that it still shows up okay in Firefox, though not IE, otherwise I would have noticed immediately.
posted by mdevore at 11:56 AM on May 22, 2006

Response by poster: Thank you mdevore, that looks like the deal.
posted by Anders Levant at 1:31 PM on May 22, 2006