I don’t think I mentioned this yet…
I just recently got a DVD set of a 1980s animated series called “The Littles,” a Saturday morning cartoon by DiC Entertainment (the producers of “Inspector Gadget,” “Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats,” the early 1990s “Super Mario Bros.” cartoons, “Sabrina: The Animated Series,” and the American-produced “Sonic the Hedgehog” cartoons, among others) that originally premiered on ABC from 1983 to 1986. It is about a bunch of tiny people who have their own little civilization/society among the real-world people, and the only person who knows about their existence is a 12-year-old boy named Henry Bigg. It’s actually a pretty grown-up kind of cartoon series, it has dealt with subjects like people who are blind, the affects of drugs on people, alcoholism and a few others. There are three episodes I found featuring fire alarms in them:
“The Rats are Coming, The Rats are Coming!”
Near the end, the Littles have rounded up a bunch of rats in the gazebo in the center of town with a bunch of food crumbs (the rat swarms are due to a rainstorm), and so Grandpa Little has Dinky Little lasso a paper clip on a thread to catch onto the lever on a fire alarm city call box (it doesn’t resemble a Gamewell box or some other company’s, it is just a gray box with a red lever on the side), and all the Littles tug on the thread to pull the lever. Then it cuts to the fire station as a red light flashes and a bell sounds in continuous as the firefighters jump into their truck and drive to the gazebo (the fire chief says “I don’t see any fire… good lord, rats! Hundreds of them! Quick, get the nets!”) and they capture the rats.
“The Little Babysitters”
The Littles watch over human baby Oscar while Henry disobeys his parents and goes to play with his friends when he is supposed to watch the baby. The baby accidentally starts a fire, and it starts out small, so the Littles call the Little Fire Department to the rescue (the Little fire chief rings a small bell and it makes a noise like a fire alarm bell ringing in Continuous).
“Just a Little Drunk” (this is my favorite episode!)
Alcoholic movie star Kurt Corwin attempts to do a motorcycle jump over real molten lava (while no one else except Tom and Lucy Little are around), but he is drunk and it fails, and he is knocked out unconscious as a fire erupts in the sound stage due to the lava from the stunt. They rescue Kurt Corwin out of the studio right before a burning catwalk and stage lights collapses on him, and get out safely. Grandpa Little hears of what’s going on, and runs over to a fire alarm pull station. It looks like an upside-down T-bar pull with a glass pane over it. Grandpa smashes the glass with his walking stick, pushes in the lever and sets off the alarm, which is a bell in Continuous (unlike the last two which used a more cartoony-sounding bell, this one used a more realistic-sounding fire alarm bell). Then we fade to after the fire is put out, when the episode’s life lesson occurs (being drunk was the cause for the whole fire).