The Magilla Gorilla Show 1-Disc Box Set DVD

The Magilla Gorilla Show is the mid-1960s Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning series about Magilla, a sweet-natured gorilla who lives in the front window of Mr. Peebles' pet shop, periodically gets sold to a new owner, and almost always ends up returned to the shop after some kind of escalating chaos. The show ran on ABC and in syndication from 1964 into 1967, with later airings across Cartoon Network and Boomerang giving it a long second life. Voice work from Allan Melvin, Don Messick, and Howard Morris anchors the show's specific Hanna-Barbera comic register.

What stands out is the show's commitment to the for-sale-but-unsold premise. Each Magilla short follows the same rhythm of unsuspecting buyer, brief test run, comically catastrophic outcome, and return to Mr. Peebles, with the supporting Punkin' Puss, Mush Mouse, and Ricochet Rabbit segments rotating through the broader half-hour. The animation has the unmistakable mid-60s Hanna-Barbera house style, the music leans on bouncy theme cues, and the writing keeps each short tight and gag-driven.

It belongs to a particular mid-1960s Hanna-Barbera lineage of variety-format Saturday morning shows, the same family of programs that the studio produced in volume during that period. For viewers whose Saturday morning memory has a soft spot for that lineage, Magilla Gorilla is one of its most consistently warm entries.

This collection holds a deep stretch of the original run, the most reliable surviving home for The Magilla Gorilla Show outside of scattered streaming windows that come and go. For collectors of mid-60s Hanna-Barbera, the discs keep an underseen but fondly-remembered piece of the broader catalog exactly where it belongs, on the shelf alongside the rest of the era's output, and survives independently of any one streaming service's licensing for the studio's classic library.