Adults and Quick Draw McGraw

TV critics managed to find ways to watch The Quick Draw McGraw Show even when they didn’t have to.

Larry Thompson of the Miami Herald outlined his subterfuge in his column of December 6, 1960. At least one of his kids didn’t appear to be too happy about it.

Psychology in Action
THIS WOMAN was company for dinner, and we sat around in the front room making small talk until I looked at my watch.
I called to my wife: "Don't forget, this is Quick Draw McGraw night. We'd better start dinner soon or the children won't have time to see it."
"And what," asked the lady, "is Quick Draw McGraw?"
"That," I explained, "is a cartoon character on TV. He's on every Tuesday night. So are Doggie Daddy, and Snooper, the cat detective. Our kids love the program."
"It is very considerate of you to try to arrange the dinner schedule so they can see it," the lady said.
"Oh, yes," I said. "I believe in letting the children see the programs they enjoy, as long as they are uplifting, amusing, or wholesome. A parent can't be too careful about the TV programs his children watch."
We were called to dinner, and, as usual, the children dawdled over the food.
* * *
“IF YOU DON'T HURRY," I said, "you'll miss Quick Draw McGraw. Remember, the champion gets to turn on the TV.”
"Aw, you're always the champion on Quick Draw night," said Carl.
I turned to the company.
"That is part of my child psychology," I explained. "I try to cultivate the competitive spirit — in a sportsmanlike, mannerly way, of course — by pretending that I'm in the contest with them. That way they feel that I am sharing their interests."
"Very commendable," said the lady.
“I’m the champ!" I shouted, as I swallowed the last bit of my milk. "I'll go turn on TV. Nobody else can come until they've finished."
I give the lady a knowing glance and she nodded approval at my applied psychology. It was only a few minutes before the children joined me in front of the TV:
* * *
LATER, after the children were in bed, our company commented on my excellent behavior as a father.
"Mrs. Thompson," she said, "you are most fortunate to have a husband who takes such an interest in his children. I have never seen a better example of child psychology in action."
"You mean about Quick Draw McGraw?" asked my wife, and the lady nodded.
"He does that every Tuesday night," my good wife said. "Only child psychology has nothing to do with it. He likes Quick Draw McGraw. He acts the same way when Huckleberry Hound is on."
* * *
AND I REALLY do feel sorry for grown-ups who don't have children to give them an excuse to look at those funny cartoon programs.

Thompson never really explained the “contest” or “champion” part. Maybe someone had to finish their dinner first.

Perhaps the story was in conjunction with a visit to Miami by costumed Hanna-Barbera characters. The Herald published the photo shoot below on Dec. 11.



Quick Draw was featured on the front page of the TV section of the Vallejo Times-Herald of December 31, 1960. Looking at the gopher, I wonder if this publicity art was drawn by Gene Hazelton. The story on the next page is short but explains Quick Draw’s appeal.

Quick Draw Held Funniest Cowboy
This TV fast gun is a horse.
Television watchers have grown to love this western hero with the four legs. His name is Quick Draw McGraw, at 6:30 p. m., Thursday, Channel 2. There's affection, too, for his fearless but slightly dumb sidekick named Bobba Looey. Mr. Looey is a Mexican burro.
Quick Draw and his pal are the animated cartoon creations of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, whose success on TV was already assured when they introduced such stars as Ruff and Ready [sic], Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear.
The creators feel an important reason for their success is the good taste in their productions. Parents and PTA groups have yowled long and loud over the sadism, violence and sex innuendos permeating most of the ancient theatrical cartoons rerun on TV the past several years.
HURT PRIDE
When "Quick Draw McGraw" shoots a bad man, usually just his pride is hurt, or the seat of his pants is singed. It's doubtful either that you'll ever find him casting lecherous glances at some Betty Boop saloon hostess. In spite of such distillation, Hanna and Barbera have injected enough western satire into "McGraw" to make him palatable to adults, who make up 60 per cent of their audience.
This season the boys got away from their exclusive diet of talking animals to take on “The Flintstones," a talented bunch of cave dwellers of the Stone Age. But that's another story.

Indeed. The Flintstones’ success all but killed feature stories on the Emmy-nomimated Quick Draw. Prime time is prime time, after all.

Still, the Kelloggs affiliate in St. Louis took out a two-page ad in the Post-Dispatch for a Quick Draw contest.


The Oregonian’s Harold Hughes fit in Quick Draw in part of his column of December 26, 1960. After talking about how former Portlander Bill Selleck set up a really low-budget commercial animation studio (25 frames a minute for $900 a minute), Hughes has some thoughts on Hanna-Barbera. Story missing conjunctions, other words.

BEST WAY to watch old Huckleberry Hound is to stretch out on the floor with the kids. The wind-up Yogi Bear strip is a riot. Maybe Forest Service should recruit army of wind-up Smokey Bears, put them to work fighting forest fires.
BILL HANNA AND JOE BARBERA are the heads behind Huck Hound, The Flintstones, Ruff 'N' Ready [sic], Quick Draw McGraw and the like. They plan series next year built around Yogi Bear, and there is report of full length movie on Yogi.
HANNA AND BARBERA were unemployed three years ago, like Selleck, came up with a cheaper way of producing cartoons by cutting the number of frames per minute, thus reducing the vast amount of drawing that Disney does. But both Bill and Joe worked 20 years doing cartoons for MGM, gave birth to cat-and-mouse team known as Tom and Jerry.
JOE ATTENDED banking school, took up doodling, became "cartooner." Bill studied engineering and journalism in college, worked as a structural engineer before joining Leon Schlessinger's [sic] cartoon company. Both are doggie daddies, trapped in the suburbs.

Since we’re looking at December 1960, there was merchandise just in time for Christmas, with Knickerbocker plush dolls of Quick Draw, Baba Looey, Snooper, Blabber (and, of course, Huck and Yogi).

But the one I kind of like is the Quick Draw McGraw Private Eye game, with 4 player tokens on plastic stands, 48 cards, a spinner and a 15¾ by 18½ inch folding board. One store was selling it for $1.98. Quite a while ago, I posted pictures of various H-B games. I decided to check eBay to see if one of these private eye games was for sale. I found several.

Yuletide Yogi, Holly Jolly Jetsons and Twisting Tom Cat

Yogi Bear got into the spirit of Christmas (the secular, not religious version), though not on his TV show. A couple of storybooks with Yuletide Yogi were published in the early ‘60s. One was a Little Golden Book which we reprinted in an old post. The other was “Yogi Bear Helps Santa,” a 1962 publication by Whitman Press. The artist was Lee Branscome, who later animated Jonny Quest. It seems to me he had been an in-betweener at Warners; correct me if that’s wrong.

Instead of posting all the pages here, I shall be as lazy as someone who has just feasted on a Christmas turkey and link to a copy at archive.org.

Christmas is not something I celebrate but in the past I’ve posted music and other things as my gifts to you for coming here and reading what I, rather unacademically, have to say. The blog actually ended regular posts in mid-2019 but, as you can see, I have continued with occasional entries here and there. So it is that you’re getting another music post out of me.

This music is courtesy of the late Earl Kress. He dubbed these (judging by the hiss, onto cassette) when he was working on various Hanna-Barbera music projects. It’s a little tough keeping track of what’s been posted on this blog before, but I don’t believe these have been, or appeared in commercial H-B music releases.

Before we get there, let us ask the musical question: have you bought Greg Ehrbar’s book on Hanna-Barbera’s music? You must read this. It has all kinds of information you didn’t know, starting with Scott Bradley’s scores for Bill and Joe at MGM, to the Capitol and Langlois stock music in the first TV cartoons, to Hoyt Curtin and Ted Nichols, to Colgems/Golden Records, to the studio’s decision to get into the rock music business. You can get it right from the publisher, the University Press of Mississippi. It is worth the money.

I don’t have cue sheets, so I cannot tell you if Curtin gave all these cues names. However, a few of them had names when slated.


J-112


J-128


J-200 BOSS'S THEME


J-202


J-205 ROCK AND ROLL


J-206


J-210 ROSEY THE ROBOT ALTERNATE


J-220 JUDY IS SAD


J-220 GEORGE'S THEME


J-228


J-231


J-257


J-258


J-261


JW-10

Now, here’s a piece of music I’d love to post but I have never seen it. A saxophonist named Dave Ede was inspired by Mr. Jinks and the Twist craze popularized by Chubber Checker to come up with “Twistin’ Those Meeces To Pieces”. Ede was the host of the BBC radio’s Go Man Go show. He got together the Rabin Band and together they played a David Wilkinson-composed twist version of “Three Blind Mice.” It was released in mid-1962. Has anyone heard it?

This has been a mixed year for early Hanna-Barbera fans. We have fortunately seen the Blu-ray release of all cartoons in the Huckleberry Hound Show. Seasons two and three had been partly hung up for years because of clearing music composed by Bill Loose and Jack Shaindlin. Unfortunately, we lost writer Tony Benedict and layout artist Jerry Eisenberg this year to failing health.

This blog is still considered finished, but there will be a few posts into the new year.

Hocus Pocus Focus/Muni-Mula Mix-Up

Don Messick had an odd voice that I first heard on The Herculoids. I don’t know exactly how he did it; probably by wiggling his tongue inside his mouth.

Gloop and Gleep weren’t the first Hanna-Barbera characters to have this weird, wavy voice. He gave it to the Muni-Mula robots in the first adventure of Ruff and Reddy.

Here’s one of the robots in “Hocus Pocus Focus.”

After a recap of the previous episode, where Reddy is turned into a mindless robot, just like his mechanical duplicates, Ruff chases after him. Ken Muse draws a cycle of three Ruffs, animated on twos. The Ruffs are slid over a roller-painted background (possibly by Fernando Montealegre).



Ruff chases after Reddy, who has gone with the duplicate Ruffs and Reddys into The Big Thinker’s room. After about four animation-saving seconds of a static shot, with camera shakes to simulate a fight, a robot tosses him out.



Please don’t be one of those people who asks why the garbage can is labelled in English, but the robots don’t speak it. Okay, if you’re one of those people, the answer is The Big Thinker speaks to the robots in English, so they understand it. Let’s move on.

Real Ruff pretends to be a robot Ruff to get past the guard. We know it’s the real Ruff because he winks at the audience.



Once inside, Ruff has a dilemma: which one is the real Reddy? (Yeah, I know, “Ten Little Flintstones.” Let’s move on).



The way to find out: the real Reddy won’t sound metallic when hit with a hammer. It sounds like Greg Watson or whoever handled the sound struck the side of a cowbell to make the noise.



Ruff escapes with Reddy only to be followed by a cleverly-designed (by Ed Benedict?) flying camera for which this episode is named. It transmits what it sees back to The Big Thinker, who issues a command to bring the Earthlings back to him. Reddy, still under robot control, grabs Ruff and the cartoon ends with them heading toward TBT.



Two Spencer Moore cues from the Capitol Hi-Q “D” series are heard in this one, along with something that sounds like a work part (ie., a musical effect, like a stab, a sting or a button) from the “S” series (to be honest, I’m too lazy to hunt around to see if I have it). Science fictions films of the day loved these Moore cues. L-1203 is heard in the immortal Teenagers From Outer Space.

0:00 – No music.
0:06 – L-657 EERIE DRAMATIC (Moore) – Start of cartoon.
1:52 – No music – “Don’t you know me, Reddy?...
1:58 – Musical stab (Unknown) – Camera pans down line of robots.
2:02 – L-1203 EERIE HEAVY ECHO (Moore) – “Which one of these Reddys…” to end of cartoon.

The next episode is “Muni-Mula Mix-Up.” A recap segues into Ruff demanding Reddy put him down. Remarkably, he does. Narrator Messick explains that because Reddy has a peanut brain and a thick skull “the cosmic rays [that put him under The Big Thinker’s control] bounced off like water off a duck.” Yeah, that’s the best comic analogy Charlie Shows could come up with.

Anyway. Reddy’s eyes swirl as he comes out of the spell.



What now? “Let’s get out of this creepy place,” says Reddy, though you have to wonder where he thinks he can go. There’s lots of pose-to-pose movement here without in-betweens. They try to get past a robot guard (who scratches his head in reused animation) by pretending to be Ruff and Reddy mechanical duplicates (who walk in reused cycle animation), but are again watched by the Hocus Pocus Focus.



Reddy ignores Ruff’s advice to ignore the camera and tries to swat it away. Ruff tries to “ground this contraption.” There are three seconds of a shot of Ruff with the only animation being eye blinks. Some metallic sound effects are heard, then after ten frames of Ruff in a stretch shock take, he ducks and Reddy enters the scene. There are 28 frames of Ruff, with Reddy riding the Hocus Pocus Focus on a cel pulled across the background from left to right. The only animation is three drawings of the propeller of the camera in a cycle.



Ruff tries to stop Reddy by holding onto him. Cut to a scene of the doors of The Big Thinker’s chamber. They open. But, for some reason, they don’t go into the chamber. They go past it. There’s no reason for the doors to open. Maybe that’s the Muni-Mula Mix-Up.



“Once again, Ruff and Reddy are face-to-face with The Big Thinker,” says the narrator. “Once again” gives Bill Hanna an excuse to reused some limited animation and even a dialogue track from Daws Butler.

Cut to The Big Thinker who, unexpectedly, isn’t The Big Thinker. As we hear the sound of a ceramic lid clamping down on a teapot, TBT’s head opens and closes, with a wimpy voice saying “Get me out of here." A little man with a voice like Bill Thompson’s Droopy (it’s Don Messick here) emerges and pleads with Ruff and Reddy to get him off Muni-Mula. That’s where the episode ends.



The cues:

0:00 – No music – Title card.
0:06 – TC-221A HEAVY AGITATO (Bill Loose-John Seely) – Starts of cartoon to skull explanation.
1:09 – No music – Reddy’s eyes swirl.
1:14 - L-653 EERIE DRAMATIC (Spencer Moore) – “Sometimes, it pays...” to end of cartoon.

What’s that, fans? Today is Ruff and Reddy’s birthday? The pair got mentioned in Faye “My-eyes-are-up-here” Emerson’s column of Dec. 9, 1957:

The Russians stole thunder from cartoonists Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera when they shot their dog into space. The animators had already started working on what they though was a “fantasy,” a TV serial about a dog and cat who venture into outer space. The cartoon show, “Ruff and Reddy,” debuts Dec. 14 on NBC.

This business about the Soviet Space-Pooch was raised in a news release the previous month. This was in the Miami Herald.

Cartoon Animal In Outer Space
NEW YORK, Nov. 13—NBC-TV is preparing to send a cat and a dog into outer space the latter part of December via a new cartoon program just purchased from Screen Gems. These plans were revealed immediately following the Russians' announcement of the launching of Muttnik.
"Ruff and Reddy" are the names of the two NBC space travelers. Their adventures will be depicted in a new four-minute animated serial produced in color by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, creators of the famous "Tom and Jerry" cartoons.
NBC plans to program the "Ruff and Reddy" show Saturday mornings. Each half-hour installment will consist of two episodes from the "Ruff and Reddy" adventure serial and two first-run cartoons from the Columbia Pictures library. The show will he emceed either by a human host or by Ruff and Reddy themselves.

NBC decided to go with a human host. Cartoon hosts would have to wait a year for The Huckleberry Hound Show.

The Box That Socks

No, Huckleberry Hound, it’s not a present for you, we hear in this Pixie and Dixie cartoon-between-the-cartoons. “It’s a jack-in-the-box SURprise for Jinks,” Dixie tells Huck. Jinksie grabs the box.



Jinks thinks he’s outsmarted the meeces. The jack-in-the-box will open up at the top, so he’ll duck down and his head will be beside it when he flips the latch. Wrong again, Jinks.



There’s a cycle of four drawings that fades out to end the vignette. What’s unusual about this cycle is one drawing is held for three frames and the other three are held for two frames. But it’s a different drawing held longer in each cycle. In the re-creation below, we’ve held the same drawing three times. It has been slowed down. Sorry for the TV bug.



And it’s on to the next Pixie and Dixie cartoon.

The wide mouth on Jinks above should be a give-away that this was animated by Carlo Vinci (the head moves in Vinci-esque angles when Jinks talks). I’m pretty sure the backgrounds are by Fernando Montealegre.

Tony Benedict R.I.P.

When the Hanna-Barbera studio opened in 1957, Charlie Shows was hired as the staff writer, though Joe Barbera had a lot of say about what went into the studio's cartoons.

Shows left in late 1958 and was replaced by Mike Maltese of Warner Bros. Several months later, Warren Foster was hired from John Sutherland Productions (formerly of Warners) to take over the Huckleberry Hound Show.

The studio expanded into prime time in 1960 with the Flintstones and another writer was needed. That's when Tony Benedict was tempted away from UPA.

Word has reached me this morning that Tony has passed away. I know his health had not been good for several years.

Tony started off working on Huckleberry Hound and Yakky Doodle cartoons. He was the creator of Alfie Gator; Tony loved the Alfred Hitchcock TV show and grabbed hold of a chance to parody it. He punched up gags on the half-hour prime-time shows from TV sitcom writers (non-cartoonists) to add visual elements. The Jetsons came along and Tony's legacy is the creation of Astro.

I can't imagine what it would be like to be a young guy coming into a studio and the people you have to keep up with are Maltese and Foster, two of the greatest comedy cartoon writers ever.

He made his on-camera debut in Here Comes a Star, a half-hour promotional film for TV stations about to air The Magilla Gorilla Show.

He was a man with a sense of fun and enjoyed his time with paisanos Maltese and Joe Barbera.

I had the great pleasure to talk with Tony. You can hear our conversation below.

Blu-Ray? Oh, Dear! Oh, My!

“Gee, Yowp,” says my in-box, “why aren’t you writing about these?”



Um. How can I put this delicately?

These are not great cartoons.

They are wallpaper. They’re pleasant enough and killed air time in between routines with Crazy Donkey on Channel 11 when I was a kid.

But they’re filler.

I can tell you my favourite cartoons on the Huck Show. Or the Quick Draw and Yogi Bear shows. But the plots of the five-minute cartoons (this includes Touché Turtle) are completely unmemorable. I can’t recall a single one.

Earl Kress used to joke it seemed every Lippy cartoon ended with the pair of them on a raft, with Lippy yelling “Paddle faster, Hardy,” as they escaped from who-knows-what. (None of them actually ended that way).

These cartoons, to me, marked Hanna-Barbera’s slow, downhill slide. Does any of the animation or background art in these stand out to you? Anyway, just as Hanna-Barbera would repeat plots with different characters, I am repeating myself from this post.

The best part of Wally was the theme song, which I can only assume was written by Hoyt Curtin and Bill Hanna before it was decided to take Wally out of the swamp in the opening animation. I have never been a big fan of the Golden Records’ versions of the Hanna-Barbera music, but I like their take on Wally’s theme. The low-key arrangement for the little combo is quite good, especially the piano.

For fans of Mel Blanc constantly moaning "Oh dear, oh my," the discs will be available on December 16th.