Later Appearances
After King Leonardo and his Short Subjects ended, one season's worth of new segments of "The King and Odie" and "The Hunter" continued to be produced and aired on Total TV's Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales, which premiered in 1963. The following year, Total TV launched its most popular series, Underdog. When Underdog premiered in 1964, it featured repeats of The Hunter, while The Hunter's former spot on the Tennessee Tuxedo program was filled by repeats of Tooter Turtle.
Another segment of the original King Leonardo show was Twinkles (an orange elephant), which simultaneously appeared as a feature on Jay Ward's Rocky and his Friends . The title character served as the mascot of Twinkles Cereal, a product of the show's chief sponsor, General Mills. The 90 second Twinkles segments continued to air in syndicated reruns of the show during the 1960s, which were presented in a 15-minute format under the title The King and Odie, but were later phased out after a fireman character replaced the elephant as the cereal's mascot. The segments also appeared during some NBC network rebroadcasts of Underdog. The Twinkles segments were not included when King Leonardo And His Short Subjects was syndicated in a half-hour format during the 1980s.
King Leonardo and his Short Subjects was part of NBC's Saturday morning lineup until 1963.
The animation for the show's early segments was produced by TV Spots, with later episodes by Gamma Productions, the same Mexico-based studio that did much of the work for Jay Ward Productions. For this reason, and due to shared sponsorship by General Mills, Gamma has often been associated with both Total Television Productions and Jay Ward Productions. TV Spots was primarily a producer of animated commercials, but also was contracted for some segments of Rocky and his Friends for Jay Ward Productions.
In reruns, Total Television shorts often have been packaged alongside Jay Ward cartoons. Despite similar limited-animation styles, they were two separate studios.
King Leonardo, despite its earlier episodes repackaged for syndication as The King and Odie during the mid-1960s, never attained the popularity of Total Television's other series, Underdog and Tennessee Tuxedo, and is hardly ever aired on television today. Beginning in 2006, the Black Family Channel aired this show on its BFC Kids TV programming block until the channel's demise a year later. Syndicated episodes can be viewed on the In2TV website. The characters of this show were also featured in an eight-issue comic book produced by Dell Comics and Gold Key.
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