The Dread Baron is a supporting antagonist in Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
He was voiced by the late John Stephenson.
Biography[]
In the TV series Laff-A-Lympics, the Dread Baron was seen wearing a World War II-era German flying ace uniform. The Dread Baron accompanied Mumbly, a dog that was very similar to Muttley, only with gray fur and an orange trenchcoat. Mumbly actually had his own series in which he was a detective, and in a role-reversal, Mumbly acted as the team captain of the Really Rottens in Laff-A-Lympics with the Dread Baron and others serving as team members. The two later appeared in the made-for-TV movie Yogi Bear and the Magical Flight of the Spruce Goose, where the Dread Baron and Mumbly are first seen in Dick Dastardly's plane from Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines. In 2007, Dastardly makes a brief cameo as himself in a Cartoon Network commercial when, complete with a cartoon bomb, he is let into the CN headquarters because he has the proper ID with him, beating out Yogi Bear, who has forgotten his ID and can't get in.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- It is uncertain why Dread Baron and especially Mumbly (who was a good guy in his original series) were used in roles that were identical to Dick Dastardly and Muttley, especially for Yogi Bear and the Magical Flight of the Spruce Goose. Previously, it was assumed that Dread Baron was created as a substitute because Paul Winchell was unavailable for Laff-A-Lympics, where John Stephenson provided the Baron's voice. However, Winchell was available for Yogi Bear and the Magical Flight of the Spruce Goose, yet voiced the Dread Baron, not Dastardly. It has also been speculated that Hanna-Barbera didn't completely own the rights to Dick Dastardly and Muttley and the two characters were in essence shared with another company, Heatter-Quigley Productions, who refused to allow the character names to be used in those specific programs and thus new characters had to be created.