Colonel Bleep was the first color cartoon ever made for television. The show took place on the fictitious Zero Zero Island, where Earth's equator meets the Greenwich Meridian. There, Colonel Bleep, a futuristic extraterrestrial lifeform from the planet Futura, protected Earth with the help of his two deputies. Representing the present day was Squeek (a mute cowboy puppet boy), and representing the past was Scratch, a caveman of great physical strength who was awakened from a sleep of several thousand years by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also the same event that triggered Colonel Bleep's travels to earth. Colonel Bleep, like other Futurans, could manipulate "futomic energy" in a variety of ways; for instance, to propel himself through space (inexplicably, on a unicycle), or as an offensive weapon. The amount of futomic energy Colonel Bleep could absorb at any given time was finite, and in several episodes he runs out of energy and becomes vulnerable.
The trio's usual nemesis was a dark and mysterious hooded figure called Dr. Destructo, who could typically be found in his flying saucer with only a visible torso. Other regular villains included The Black Knight and Black Patch the space pirate.
It was created by Robert D. Buchanan, and was filmed by Soundac of Miami. (Some sources have Joseph Barbera with a hand in its creation as well, although his contribution was short-lived before he rejoined William Hanna to form Hanna-Barbera.) 104 episodes, of varying length of between three and six minutes each, were produced. Of these episodes, slightly fewer than half are known to survive today.