Yowp

Flintstones Valentines

2012-02-14T07:18:00.000-08:00

Valentine’s Day was originally known as “St. Valentine’s Day” and there were apparently three St. Valentines connected with February 14th. As they were Christian saints, none were around as early as the Stone Age. But the Hanna-Barbera marketing department didn’t let a little thing like history get in the way of making money.

Reader Billie Towser sent me these Flintstones’ Valentines. I don’t suspect Billie did it to be my Valentine, but to give you a couple of examples what was/is available for the romantically (and maybe ananchronistically) inclined. The last one’s a little too Let-the-Sunshine-In cutsey-poo for me.

Quick Draw McGraw — Dizzy Desperado

2012-02-11T07:37:00.000-08:00

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Lew Marshall; Layout – Bob Givens; Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre; Story – Mike Maltese; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Quick Draw, Baba Looey – Daws Butler; Narrator, Stagecoach Cluney – Doug Young.
Music: Jack Shaindlin; Phil Green; Harry Bluestone/Emil Cadkin, unknown.
First Aired: week of January 18, 1960 (rerun, week of July 18, 1960).
Episode: Quick Draw McGraw Show M-17, Production J-21.
Plot: A bump on the head turns Baba Looey into a bad guy.

Some old familiar friends from Warner Bros. bubble up in Mike Maltese’s story in this cartoon. The desperado, La Cucaracha, zips past Quick Draw guarding the bank like Speedy Gonzales zooms past Sylvester guarding a hoard of cheese. And there’s a rope that gets stuck on a pulley à la Wile E. Coyote. Maltese isn’t the only Warners connection in the cartoon. The layouts were done by Bob Givens, who says he and Maltese came to Hanna-Barbera as a team. Givens had been in Bob McKimson’s unit at Warners and doesn’t seem to have stayed at Hanna-Barbera all that long; he soon was working for Larry Harmon Productions, laying out Popeye TV cartoons. His background layouts are fine. Here’s a panorama of the town that opens the cartoon. The mountains in the background are two-tone.

There’s only one character in the cartoon besides the principals, bad guy Stagecoach Clooney. Givens has given him a simplified design, like Ed Benedict might, but not as stylised. It’s almost like something out of a 1960 Mr. Magoo cartoon, which wouldn’t be surprising because Givens loved UPA. Baba looks so flat in the shot to the right, his body could be a rug on the desert.

Maltese opened almost all his Quick Draws with narration and apparently Doug Young must have been in the studio that day because he gets the job instead of Don Messick or Hal Smith. Doug puts on an urgent, somewhat raspy voice that works very well. He tells us “This the story of Little Cucaracha, the bandit” and suddenly a silhouette (that looks like a puppet) pops up against the outside of a hotel and starts firing. It’s followed by a long shot of a stagecoach. We never see the horses in anything other than this shot; besides Clooney, Givens ended up designing only some backgrounds and a few props.

Baba, for reasons of the plot I suppose, is uncharacteristically clumsy at the outset of the cartoon. He accidentally fires his rifle and it nails Quick Draw in the snout. It’s the eighth time that day he’s done it. Quick Draw isn’t drawn very attractively here. Since there were model sheets for the main characters (layout artists came up with final incidental character designs), I wonder if it’s just simply the way Lew Marshall drew him in three-quarter view.

The stage is stopped by Stagecoach Clooney. Baba shoots Quick Draw instead of the bandit. “What’s the use?” the singed-snouted Quick Draw rhetorically asks us. Clooney demands the gold-filled strong-box. Now it’s Quick Draw’s turn to be clumsy. He drops it on the head of the bad guy and then Baba. The blow doesn’t affect the bad guy, but it turns Baba into a crook who decides “I thin’ I keep the gold for myself.” This gives Quick Draw the chance to utter his first catchphrase “I’ll do the thin’in’...” etc. Now Baba speaks in a lower voice (much like he did in the first few cartoons of the series) and has adopted the name ‘Little Cucaracha’ (perhaps ‘Little Burro’ was taken). He shoots Quick Draw in the face and gives the camera a weird expression before vamoosing with the strong-box.

The narrator returns along with a pan of wanted posters. I wonder who Tim Tulley was.

Baba has somehow developed speed after the conk on the head as he rushes past Quick Draw guarding the bank twice to grab bags of gold. If you go frame-by-frame, you’ll see Baba doesn’t have any gold. It’s just the cycle animation of Baba going toward the bank turned over and inked and painted on the other side. The second time, Quick Draw calculates he can drop a large rock on Baba’s head and snap him out of his evildoing. But Baba’s too speedy and Quick Draw drops the rock on his foot. All we’re missing is Baba saying “Andale!” and Quick Draw reaction with “Sufferin’ Succotash!” We do get “Gad! The smarts!” from our hero.

Quick Draw decides to clobber the head of his former friend with a one-ton weight that he hoists up with a pulley, just like Wile E. Coyote did with a piano in ‘Hook, Line and Stinker’ (1958). And just like in the Warners cartoon (also written by Maltese), the rope sticks in the pulley after Quick Draw lets go. Quick Draw tells Baba to hold the rope while he unsticks it. Naturally, when that’s done, Baba lets go and the weight lands on ~~the coyote~~ Quick Draw, crushing him and turning him into a hat with a pair of feet (like Red Hot Ryder in 1944’s ‘Buckaroo Bugs’).

Since there was a one-ton weight conveniently in the desert, why not a cannon? That’s what Quick Draw fires to try to bop Baba. And it works. Baba is back to normal. But the cannon ball bounces onto Quick Draw’s head. Now he thinks he’s a bird and flies south for the winter, joining a pair of ducks in the air. Maltese tosses in a movie reference as Baba yells “Come back, little Quickstraw!” And he shamelessly has Baba make the old groaner observation that Quick Draw is for the birds.

We get two renditions of a Jack Shaindlin tune (I haven’t been able to identify it) with scurring strings and a happy oboe line. Actually, we get it three times because it’s edited into itself the second time it appears in the cartoon. There’s also a full version of Phil Green’s ‘Streets of the City’ from his Big City Suite No. 2. Appropriately, a harmonica version of ‘La Cucaracha’ is on the soundtrack but I don’t know its source. And there’s another short trumpet piece at the beginning of the cartoon that may be a Sam Fox library cue. It was used at the end of ‘Elephant Boy Oh Boy!’

0:00 - Quick Draw McGraw Sub-Main Title theme (Curtin).
0:14 - related to Suspense Under Dialogue (Shaindlin) – Pan of town, silhouette.
0:33 - trumpet medium dance (?) – Long shot of stagecoach, rifle goes off, Quick Draw mimics Baba.
1:00 - CB-86A HIDE AND SEEK (Cadkin-Bluestone) – Bullets fly, Baba blasts Quick Draw, strongbox lands on bad guy and Baba.
1:40 - CAPERS (Shaindlin) – Quick Draw looks at bad guy, Baba feels funny.
1:50 - jaunty bassoons and skipping strings (Shaindlin) – Baba sees gold, shoots Quick Draw.
2:21 - CAPERS (Shaindlin) – Baba runs away with gold, Quick Draw talks to bad guy.
2:48 - La Cucaracha (Trad.) – Posters, pan of buildings.
3:04 - GR-248 STREETS OF THE CITY (Green) – Quick Draw in front of bank, Bab steals bag of gold, Quick Draw drops rock on foot, one-ton weight falls on Quick Draw.
5:14 - jaunty bassoons and skipping strings (Shaindlin) – Quick Draw under hat, shoots cannon ball, ball lands on Baba and Quick Draw, Baba back to normal, Quick Draw thinks he’s a bird.
6:43 - Quick Draw Sub End Title theme (Curtin).

Stop That Pigeon

2012-02-08T08:21:00.000-08:00

The working title of ‘Dastardly and Muttley in their Flying Machines’ was ‘Stop that Pigeon!’ That would make sense as the show’s theme was ‘Stop That Pigeon’ crooned in kind of a sing/speak by that noted vocalist Paul Winchell, in character as Dick Dastardly.

Let’s face it. Yankee Doodle Pigeon isn’t really a character. He’s a plot device. He serves the same purpose as the Roadrunner or Tweety at Warner Bros. Dastardly and Muttley serve the same purpose as Wile E. Coyote or Sylvester. They fail. That’s what the show is about and that’s what the gags are built around. And, tossed in for good measure, are some already old Hanna-Barbera standbys—a snickering dog, and a dog that has to be bribed with something (medals, as opposed to Snuffles’ dog biscuits).

But it appears the show started out with the pigeon as the main character before somebody realised Muttley and Dastardly were hugely popular and it was imperative to move them from ‘Wacky Races’ to their own animated profit-centre. I never asked Jerry Eisenberg about this, and Jerry enjoyed working on this show, because it falls outside the purview of this blog. But I bring it up because the Van Eaton Gallery was selling the art you see below by Iwao Takamoto (as I understand it). Not only is Yankee Doodle Pigeon far more attractive than he ever ended up on screen, Iwao imbues him with some personality that was virtually absent from the Muttley cartoon series.

A lot of good people worked on ‘Dastardly and Muttley.’ Mike Maltese wrote some of the segments, old hands Ken Muse, Carlo Vinci, Ed Barge and Jerry Hathcock were among the animators and Ed Benedict was one of the layout guys. But, unfortunately, the gags were starting to wear around the edges, catchphrases were run into the ground, and the animation is a lot stiffer and less interesting than what the studio produced in my favourite era—when Huck and Quick Draw were the studio’s money-makers. Still, the drawings above give a hint the show could have gone in a different, and maybe a little more satisfying, direction.

Yogi Bear, Sunday, February 1962

2012-02-05T04:43:00.000-08:00

Ah, you’ve got to love it when Gene Hazelton (or whoever) manages to work in a reference to Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera in the Yogi Bear Sunday comic (Saturday in Canada). In fact, we learn that Ranger Smith’s name is “Bill.” Apparently, it’s supposed to be John, though I don’t remember him actually ever having a first name in the original Yogi cartoons

We learn, as well, that Ranger Smith and his wife have a son. He’s named Randolph. He may be a baby, but he has the Hanna-Barbera 5 O’clock Shadow.

The scans of these cartoons are odd because the top row is taken from one paper and the bottom two from another paper. The top is overexposed and the bottoms are underexposed.

February 4 features a nice-looking horse and another (Hazelton?) cute kid. And a bear in chaps.

The February 11 comic introduces Big Mouth Benny. I’m not familiar with the strip so I don’t know if this is a one-shot. Apparently, Boo Boo isn’t living with Yogi this week. Someone should be shot for the end gag.

Joe and Bill make their appearance on February 18; “Bill” being Ranger Smith. And there are forest animals, too, the ones you almost never saw in animated cartoons because it’d cost too much to draw them all.

And here’s the Smith family on February 25. Cute toy bear, cute little-nosed wife, the kid gets his genes from the father’s side. And why is the ranger wearing his uniform going out to dinner with his wife? Is it at some ranger’s mess hall?

As usual, you can click on the comics to enlarge them.

Augie Doggie — Mars Little Precious

2012-02-04T05:40:00.000-08:00

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Ken Muse; Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre, Story – Mike Maltese; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Doggie Daddy – Doug Young; Augie Doggie, Alien Baby, Irish Cop – Daws Butler; Boinka Boinka – Don Messick.
Music: Harry Bluestone/Emil Cadkin; Phil Green; Spencer Moore; Jack Shaindlin, Hecky Krasnow, unknown.
First aired: week of February 8, 1960 (rerun week of August 8, 1960).
Episode: Quick Draw McGraw Show M-020, Production J-63.
Plot: Daddy chases after a Martian baby that Augie is supposed to be sitting.

Hanna-Barbera’s short cartoons got less entertaining into the 1960s for several reasons. One of them was the writers simply rehashed the same old gags over and over. How many times do you see the “sceptical cop” character show up about half-way into an H-B cartoon? The answer is too many. And generally, he’s Irish and ends his scene with his scepticism turned into a mental self-diagnosis, then commenting on the situation to either the audience or to “Sarge” at the stationhouse on a phone.

Said cop surfaces in this cartoon, and it isn’t even the first time a disbelieving officer of the law shows up in an Augie Doggie cartoon; ‘High and Flighty’ comes to mind (which also involved Mars). In this one, we get the station-phone ending after the cop sees the baby Martian. He calls to ask about the “policeman’s triple retirement plan.” Of course, he doesn’t retire. He just returns in another guise, series after series.

As for this cartoon, it features the adult-kid version of Augie, the one who’s a scientist, or invents stuff, or communicates with other planets. I prefer the Augie who’s more kid-like. Perhaps it doesn’t matter as Augie disappears for much of the cartoon and Doggie Daddy takes over, commenting throughout to the viewers (at one point, he says “Ain’t dat just like kids, folks?” as he looks at the camera in three-quarters view).

It seems like every Augie Doggie cartoon opens with Daddy reading the paper, but that’s actually not the case. It happened only six times in the first season (of 26 cartoons), including once in a bathtub. It happens in this one. Daddy’s talking to himself. “After a hard day, dere’s nothin’ like da newspaper...” Hey! What hard day? What exactly does Doggie Daddy do for a living? (Cashing child support cheques from Doggie Mommy has been suggested by cartoon cynics). No matter. The scene cuts to Augie gibbering on a radio the size of a desk. Must be before transistors. “Are you speakin’ Upper Slovenian or Lower Slovenian?” asks Daddy. Remember, this cartoon was made when Slovenia was never heard of; it was still part of Yugoslavia. No, Augie’s speaking Martian. “Dese kids with dere electric-tronics. What an imagination!” Daddy laughs.

But it turns out he really is talking Martian and he really has agreed to sit for Boinka Boinka’s kid. An interesting little bit of animation is when Augie runs past Daddy to go to the door. Daddy’s ears and newspaper flap (with paper rustling sound). It’s a little thing that Maltese didn’t need to add into the story, but it’s nice seeing a throwaway bit that Hanna-Barbera wouldn’t have bothered with a few years later.

Daddy’s still sceptical about the Martian stuff, even when Augie wheels in a baby carriage (shaped like a saucer) containing a green kid with eyes that aren’t filled in (like Barney Rubble’s were in the early days of The Flintstones). Daddy’s stock “After all,” observation to the audience at the end of a lot of cartoons gets inserted now. “How many fathers have a boy who’s an interplanetary baby sitter?”

Augie falls asleep reading ‘Snow White’ to the child, who decides to wander around this sets up most of the rest of the second half of the cartoon.

● The child climbs the wall and ceiling. Daddy follows then realises he can’t walk on the ceiling. Crash.
● The child lifts off like a helicopter and heads out the window, landing by the neighbour’s sleeping dog. The dog stares, blinks at the camera, then bores into the ground and covers the hole on top of him.

● The saucer-carriage lifts off and flies out the open door. Daddy chases after it and runs right into the mailbox. But why doesn’t the carriage hit the mailbox, too? It doesn’t swerve to avoid it.
● Daddy chases after the saucer-carriage down the street and runs into the Irish cop we mentioned at the outset. “Shall we have another waltz, or shall we sit this one out?” Officer O’Stereotype facetiously asks.

There’s talk galore while all this is going on, a lot of it seemingly to give Doug Young a chance to show off his Jimmy Durante impression. Maltese could just as easily left out Daddy’s chat to himself (“Come back here, you Martian mosquito” is one of Maltese’s more imaginative lines. “Wabbit season! Duck season!” it’s not).

So the carriage returns to the house, Boinka Boinka’s saucer lands and the unseen Martian comes to collect his child. Like a radio sitcom where a character has the kind of an explanatory line one never uses in a real conversation, Augie remarks “You say somebody on Jupiter needs a baby sitter?” Why not have the Martian say it? Anyway, the final scene had Augie trying to tune in Jupiter on his radio. “Maybe there’s nobody home, Augie boy,” Daddy offers, before lifting up the severed electrical cords from the radio for the audience to see. Sneaky, that Doggie Daddy.

The sound cutter apparently had loads of spare time to hunt for music. There are lots of short scenes so he’s used lots of short Phil Green cues. Spencer Moore’s oboe work-part music gets used for a couple of effects. One unidentified cue is when Augie is on the radio for the first time. It may be ‘Woodwind Capers’ by Clarence Wheeler, but that’s speculation. And the baby has his own little walking theme, with someone toodle-loo-ing on an ocarina. There’s been internet talk Hecky Krasnow wrote it but I don’t have a copy to provide definitive proof.

0:00 - Augie Doggie Main Title theme (Curtin, Hanna, Barbera)
0:25 - CB-90 HAPPY HOME (Cadkin-Bluestone) – Dad reads paper, talks to Augie.
0:54 - C-C-F# woodwind underscore (?) – “Neither, Dad,” Augie on radio to Mars.
1:16 - PG-160G LIGHT MOVEMENT (Green) – Augie calls to dad, sound of saucer
1:36 - GR-333 BUSTLING BRIDGE (Green) – “Dese kids and dere imaginations,” saucer comes down, Augie rushes by dad.
1:58 - L-1158 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – Saucer touches down.
2:01 - GR-154 PICNIC OR GARDEN SCENE (Green) – Augie talks to Boinka, wheels saucer baby carriage into home.
2:41 - THE GR-455 ARTFUL DODGER SHORT BRIDGE No 2 (Green) – Baby pops out of carriage, chatters.
2:45 - GR-65 BUSH BABY (Green) – Reaction shot, Augie reads Snow White to baby, sleeps,
3:21 - sweet potato music (?) – Baby walks past daddy in chair, Daddy rushes out of scene
3:30 - CB-87A COME AND GET ME (Cadkin-Bluestone) – Daddy retrieves baby, “Ain’t that like kids, folks?”
3:52 - sweet potato music (?) - Baby walks past daddy in chair, Daddy follows him up ceiling, crashes.
4:17 - GR-454 THE ARTFUL DODGER SHORT BRIDGE No 1 (Green) – Daddy puts baby in carriage. Daddy in chair.
4:34 - LFU-117-1 MAD RUSH No 1 (Shaindlin) – Baby flies past Daddy, out window, dog buries himself in ground.
5:06 - GR-457 DR QUACK SHORT BRIDGE No 1 (Green) – Daddy with baby in carriage, carriage takes off.
5:19 - ‘FIREMAN’ (Shaindlin) – Daddy walking, chases saucer, runs into mailbox, runs into cop, baby pulls up to cop.
6:08 - GR-78 CUSTARD PIE CAPERS SHORT BRIDGE No 1 (Green) – Baby talks to officer, Daddy runs away.
6:18 - GR-98 BY JIMINY! IT’S JUMBO BRIDGE No 2 (Green) – Cop on phone.
6:28 - PG-161G LIGHT COMEDY MOVEMENT (Green) – Baby saucer carriage returns to Doggie home and lands.
6:34 - L-1158 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) Saucer drops to earth.
6:36 - GR-85 THE BRAVEST WOODEN SOLDIER SHORT BRIDGE No 1 (Green) – Augie wakes up, walks to door.
6:47 - THE HAPPY COBBLER (Krasnow) – Augie at door, radio busted.
7:09 - Augie Doggie End Title theme (Curtin).

Kids, Special Interests and Cartoons

2012-02-01T07:22:00.000-08:00

It strikes me as a simpleton mind-set when someone insists if you show a cartoon character with a gun, then kids will grow up shooting people. The people that say such things are, of course, those who saw cartoon characters with guns when they were kids. Maybe they even had their parents buy a toy one (as seen on TV) when they were a child. And they grew up just fine in spite of it. Well, except for their ridiculous grasp of deductive logic.

That’s the basic message contained in this story in the Hutchinson News of Saturday, July 2, 1960. It’s unbylined, but a chap named E. Lawson May was the paper’s TV Editor.

The early Hanna-Barbera cartoons only come in for a mention at the end of the article. But because the writer is full of common sense (and declares Huck and Quick Draw as being more than suitable for children’s eyes and minds), it’s worth printing 52 years later.

Capt. Kangaroo Helps Care for Youngsters
Educators, psychiatrists and do-gooders have been shouting louder than usual for the past year about how the younger generation is being breast fed by TV rather than books.
The optimists among us, however, are aware that the learned gentlemen assembling all these frightening statistics received their own primary education over the radio perils of Buck Rogers, Tom Mix, Flash Gordon, Omar the Mystic and well-informed criticism from another generation of analysts.
The simple truth is that TV, properly used by a parent, can offer child some delightful entertainment.
If the set’s prime function, however, is to get the youngster out of the way, the parents never should have had children in the first place. A preschool child would never be sent out on a busy city street alone, and there’s no reason why they should be expected to function in the channel-jungle without guidance.
Thanks to an easy-going, heavy-set young man named Bob Keeshan, the young mother’s first experience with television is generally quite encouraging. Keeshan, along with his friends Mr. Green Jeans, and Mr. Moose, conducts the “Captain Kangaroo” show via CBS six mornings a week.
At one time the network gave up on “Captain Kangaroo,” but a storm of protest, plus the fact that the show was outdrawing Garry Moore’s expensive morning variety show, bought Keeshan a new lease on life. Today the Captain is SRO with sponsors and mother knows she has at least 45 minutes every morning when the little one is in good hands.
“Be Good To Mother”
Bob Keeshan is not a great educator or a child psychologist, but he understands his audience. He appreciates their short attention span and never keeps any game, song or cartoon running too long. At no time does the Captain talk down to his little viewers or does he patronize them. He stimulates their imagination without frightening them, and good taste guides his every move. He closes each show by reminding the kids that “it’s another be-good-to-mother day,” and nobody is “gooder” to mom than captain Kangaroo.
Once the Captain closes up his weekday Treasure House, the television industry chooses to ignore children until around five o’clock. This is a sad mistake, because mother needs more than 45 minutes to finish her chores.
No Steady Diet
From 5 to 7:30 in the evening and on Saturday morning TV caters to kids. Some of the successful shows are little more than old movie shorts which were condemned as harmful to children a generation ago. Among these are “Our Gang,” “The Three Stooges” and
“Popeye.” Actually they are as harmful as they ever were, but kids adore this type of comic violence and, provided they’re not permitted to watch it as a steady diet, it’s a good bet they’ll survive.
But TV has developed its own cartoon empire and can point to the product with pride. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, who created “Tom and Jerry,” have come up with three of the most delightful and entertaining cartoon shows imaginable. They are such superb shows that the parents can laugh hysterically al the antics of the characters while the little ones are spellbound by the adventure.
Many a big city office is deserted early so pop can run home and enjoy “Ruff and Reddy,” “Huckleberry Hound,” and “Quick Draw McGraw” with his kids.
Perhaps “Huckleberry Hound” and his associates are the answer to many of TV’s critics. Because they are fun the parents are able to share them with the kids, and the shows are mature and intelligent, thus easing parental consciences.

Unfortunately, do-gooders today would complain about Quick Draw. He’s got a gun and shoots himself. Think of the kids imitating, blabbety, blah, blah. As it was, do-gooders manipulating studies and data managed to do a pretty good job of emasculating cartoons on Saturday mornings by about 1970. They guilt-tripped (if not pressured) networks and sponsors into filling the screens with cartoons with unsubtle (and therefore unentertaining) messages of doing good which, as we all know, ended racism, pollution, and violence forever because kids imitate everything they see on cartoons.

Oh. Right.

Yogi Bear — Wound-Up Bear

2012-01-28T07:38:00.000-08:00

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera
Animation – Don Patterson; Layout – Tony Rivera; Backgrounds – Joe Montell; Story – Warren Foster; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson (no credits).
Voice Cast: Yogi, Bill, Cabin Woman 2 (Vera), Souvenier Shop Guy, Lodge Man 1 – Daws Butler; Boo Boo, Ranger Smith, Wife, Cabin Woman 1, Lodge Man 2 – Don Messick.
Music: Jack Shaindlin; Bill Loose/John Seely; Spencer Moore; Raoul Kraushaar?.
First Aired: week of December 28, 1959 (rerun, July 4, 1960)
Plot: Yogi disguises Boo Boo, them himself, as wind-up toys to get goodies.

I don’t really want to bash Tony Rivera, but has Ranger Smith ever looked uglier than he does in cartoon? Check this drawing from a walk cycle.

And at the start of the cartoon, Mr. Ranger looks like a neckless triangle. In fairness, the rest of the character designs aren’t bad at all. Tony even created some cute toy bears in the window of a souvenir store which spark the plot of the story. Tony’s career started at Disney in 1934 and after the strike there in 1941, he bounced to and fro on his own volition (everywhere except Warners, it appears), spent time in commercial work in the ‘50s and then landed at Hanna-Barbera. His son has a web site and you can check out some of Tony’s sketches HERE.

Tony was ending his career at Hanna-Barbera when Scott Shaw! was there. Scott passes on this remembrance:

"Tony Rivera was a very talented cartoonist/layout man and a very kind man...and he could draw FUNNY...even on scenes that didn't have a scintilla of humor in the script or storyboard. Tony went out of his way to teach me many trickier points of layout when we worked together in Hanna-Barbera's layout department during the late 1970s and early 1980s. But being the gentleman that he was, Tony never acted like an instructor; he's pretend that he was asking me a layout question while showing me the best way to do, say, a bicycle pan. I owe him a lot, for both his knowledge and his friendship."

Back to our cartoon...

Ranger Smith’s character is still new. He was developed by Warren Foster after Barbera and Charlie Shows used generic rangers in Yogi’s first season on the Huck show. Smith started out as a grumpy, weary-of-Jellystone guy before he was turned into a friendly adversary. He’s grumpy in this cartoon and pretty enjoyable. Foster comes up with a great line for him in the middle of the cartoon. Fed up with endless phone calls about thieving toy bears, he slams down the phones and says (as Rivera moves in for a closer shot) “Mabel and her charge accounts. We could have had that chicken ranch by now.”

Don Patterson’s the animator here and he’s much like Ed Love; he’s trying to get a bit more animation into his scenes. At the start of the cartoon, he’s animating dialogue of Yogi Bear in a medium close shot. The lower body doesn’t move, but Patterson changes the angle of the head horizontally and vertically during the talking. Eye pupils change position. We even get Yogi (on twos) wagging his head like a bell tolling when he says the word “pic-a-nic baskets.” It would have been easier just to animate the mouth and having maybe two head positions (like Lew Marshall) but Patterson goes for a few extra drawings to try to wring something out of limited animation. You can tell his stuff by looking at his closed eyes; they’re almost like triangle cut in half.

The cartoon features the basic Ranger-vs-Yogi plot. The Ranger nails up a sign that prohibits the feeding of bears (that appears in almost nine seconds of a static shot). Yogi is hungry. He tries to con the Ranger into telling him the “new red tape” doesn’t apply to him. The Ranger responds with a threat to send him to the St. Louis Zoo. Yogi shrugs off that “it’s back to the nuts and berries” when he sees the wind-up toy bears and gets an idea.

“Whatever it is, the ranger won’t like it, Yogi,” opines Boo Boo, as he watches Yogi pound a large turn-key into a toilet plunger suction cup. The idea is to attach it to Boo Boo so he can act like a toy bear and “having a lot of yummy fun” at the picnic grounds. Boo Boo figures he’s not going to like it either. So Yogi turns Boo Boo into a common thief, as the little bear puts on a mechanical walk (two drawings on twos, with smears to show motion). He’s a success at the beginning, ripping off a cake from a bored couple. “Beats me how they get a toy to do that,” drones Bill to his wife (the preponderance of incidental characters named ‘Bill’ in cartoons produced by Bill Hanna can hardly be a coincidence).

Not only is Yogi pimping Boo Boo to get food, he’s also a pig. And a noisy one. We cut to a scene where he’s licking his fingers. Très gauche. “Very good, Boob. Next time, you get a piece,” promises Yogi. Yeah, he slobbered down the whole cake. But that’s not good enough. He’s thinking bigger. So he shoves the mechanical Boo Boo towards a tourist cabin, where the reluctant accomplice opens an oven and grabs Vera’s apple pie (Vera Ohman was a background artist at Hanna-Barbera and married to Howard Hanson, the production supervisor). Mercifully, Boo Boo didn’t burn himself opening the oven. Yogi silently chortles about the blatant theft, which he calls “a little fun, son.” Ah, for the later, creative days when Yogi warned children against such behaviour, while piloting a spruce goose or an arc or a yo or some such thing. Oh. No one watched those cartoons, did they?

The cartoon has reached the scene where Ranger Smith laments about Mabel, and off he goes to investigate. “Last year, the flying saucer, the year before, the serpent in the lake and, now, toy bears,” he says to himself sceptically before he stops at the gift shop to investigate. He has the store operator give him a demonstration of the wind-up toy. The store owner’s as Jellystone-weary as the ranger is.

Smith: Is that all these things do?
Shop Owner: You’re expecting maybe a floor show?
Smith: You wouldn’t have one that steals picnic baskets, would you?
Shop Owner: No, but I’m workin’ on one that washes cars and whistles “Yankee Doodle” at the same time.

Notice the thin 5 O’Clock shadow on the ranger and the shop owner. Rivera seems to have liked that on his characters. And Smith has a really bad overbite, which is one of Patterson’s traits.

In later cartoons, Ranger Smith would instantly suspect Yogi as the culprit. Perhaps he’s reasonably newly-invented by Foster, he hasn’t caught on to the nefarious bear’s ways. Better make that lying nefarious bear. The ranger tells Yogi he has a problem. “Tempo of the times. International tensions. Et-cetera, et-cetera,” suggests Yogi. The ranger shakes his head while Yogi’s angularly moves his from side to side. No, it’s a toy bear, Smith sadly declares. Yogi blows his chance at honest. “I never did trust those toy bears,” says Yogi, ironically holding his hands in prayer and looking skyward, as if to ask his Creator (and we don’t mean Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera) to bless his B.S. So we now have a sacrilegious, lying, nefarious bear. Foster gets out his old “you’re one of the good ones” lines and we see the hiding Boo Boo gulp as the ranger promises to take apart the thief “spring by spring.”

Boo Boo quits to open the next scene. Yogi, instead of being understanding, basically called his best friend a wuss. “Never send a little bear to do the work of a big bear,” says Yogi as he plucks the wind-up key from Boo Boo’s back and puts it on his. Then, it’s off to the Lodge where he steals a refrigerator (but not before a Gleason-eque “And away I go” which, no doubt, pleased those Gleason-loving Hanna and Barbera). Here are Patterson’s two drawings of Yogi as a wind-up toy, slowed down.

Meanwhile, Ranger Smith has all the toy bears in his office and has counted them all. “This should wind-up the wind-up toy bear bit,” he says. Reader J. Lee would point out that Smith’s eyes look toward the camera, signalling he’s about to pull a groaner on us.

The Lodge calls to report the refrigerator theft. Smith finally clues in that it’s Yogi and lets out with a crazy laugh. Ah, but he hasn’t gone nuts. He sets a trap for the thieving bear—a loaded picnic table. Yogi sees it and his hat does a spinning take (by contrast, Yogi’s body remains rigid and the background drawing slides behind him). “With food on the table, I’m willing and able,” rhymes Yogi, who then turns to the camera to make sure we got it. Yogi gets in the whole role here by enunciating like a mechanical toy. As he grabs a cake, the ranger pops out from behind a tree. Yogi still won’t give up the fraud. “I am not a Yo-gi, sir. I am a mech-an-i-cal bear,” he stiffly states. “Good,” says Smith, who then comes out from behind the tree, showing his own wind-up key in the back. “Because I’m a wind-up ranger. And I’m winding up your park career.” Yogi and the ranger are nose-to-nose. Yogi drops the cake and zips out the frame. The ranger’s nose bounces up and down, another little bit that Patterson added that you wouldn’t see in an H-B cartoon (except in a take) within a year or so.

The Ranger chases Yogi down the road and into the distance, but not before Foster fits in a reference to the song title “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis.” No one’s named ‘Louis’ here; Foster seems to think just referring to it is funny. But, obviously, the pilfering bear’s comeuppance isn’t being shipped to the zoo, any more than Ranger Smith’s wife is named ‘Mabel’ anywhere but in this cartoon. Yogi’s back in Jellystone for another adventure next week.

This is one of a few Yogi cartoons in the second season that doesn’t open with a narrator.

Lots of Jack Shaindlin music in this cartoon and there’s that short reverbed trumpet which I haven’t located.

0:00 = Yogi Bear Sub Main Title Theme (Curtin-Hanna-Barbera)
0:13 - C-3 DOMESTIC CHILDREN (Loose-Seely) – Ranger nails sign, Yogi looks in window, Yogi hammers wind-up key.
1:32 - LAF-4-6 PIXIE PRANKS (Shaindlin) – Yogi and Boo Boo walk out of cave, Boo Boo walks away with cake, makes off with pie.
2:53 - creepy muted horn music (Kraushaar?) – Ranger in office.
3:18 - LAF-10-7 GROTESQUE No 2 (Shaindlin) – Ranger in souvenir shop, talks with Yogi, Boo Boo quits.
4:57 - LAF-1-1 FISHY STORY (Shaindlin) – Ranger counts toy bears.
5:08 - L-75 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Yogi goes to lodge, takes fridge.
5:36 - LAF-25-3 bassoon and zig zag strings (Shaindlin) – Ranger in office.
6:05 - TC-437 SHOPPING DAY (Loose-Seely) – Ranger leaves cake for Yogi, Yogi grabs cake, wind-up ranger, Yogi runs away.
6:45 - LICKETY SPLIT (Shaindlin) – Ranger chases Yogi into horizon.
6:58 - Yogi Bear Sub End Title Theme (Curtin).

Ruff and Reddy Story Drawings

2012-01-26T06:41:00.000-08:00

I’m not a big fan of Ruff and Reddy, but I am a fan of old storyboards. And some story panels from a couple of Ruff and Reddy episodes have showed up on line. I suspect they’re the work of Dan Gordon, who did story sketches for Hanna-Barbera for the first two years (and then some) of the studio’s life. They’re pretty attractive.

I didn’t make notes, but I think these came from the Van Eaton Gallery, which sells all kinds of animation art.

Here’s a layout drawing of Olaf, the little Viking boy who appeared in the second season.

Joe Barbera must have been hot for scripts with little blond boys that year. The cave kid Ubble Ubble was also introduced that season.

As I mentioned, I’m not a big fan of the series so I can’t tell you which cartoon in the Pinky adventure this is from. I can tell you it was used in newspaper publicity art. And that Reddy is fatter than he should be.

One of the reasons Ruff and Reddy never appealed much to me as a kid is that it wasn’t funny like Huck or Quick Draw. I couldn’t get into the characters. And it really seems aimed at younger kids; when you’re exposed to Warners and Fleischer cartoons and adult sitcoms as a child, who wants dull kid stuff? Here’s a dialogue sheet, apparently one used by Don Messick. All the lines that are changed are Messick’s.

Someone had the sense to cross out material that made the narration seem like it was talking down to kids even more. Wisely, Barbera, Gordon and writer Charlie Shows decided the studio’s next venture, The Huckleberry Hound Show, may have been in what was a kids’ timeslot in the network radio days, but went for a general audience instead. Barbera’s stories and Shows’ dialogue were more hit than miss, and it was Huck, not Ruff and Reddy, that gave the studio its initial fame.

Flintstones Sunday Comics, January 1962

2012-01-22T08:02:00.000-08:00

I’ve now managed to find all the colour Flintstones for this month 50 years ago. They’re from different papers and some are not in the best shape but I’ll post them anyway.

The most interesting comic is the one for January 21. There’s a little girl with a bone in her hair. Yes, we all know that describes Pebbles Flintstones, but she didn’t appear for the first time until February 22, 1963. The connection between the comic and the not-even-foetal Pebbles is Gene Hazleton. He was in charge of the Sunday comics for Hanna-Barbera and Ed Benedict explained that Hazleton designed Pebbles.

With that, let’s look at the comics.

January 7, 1962

January 14, 1962

January 21, 1962

January 28, 1962

You can click on any of them to make them bigger.

Snooper and Blabber — Desperate Diamond Dimwits

2012-01-21T08:01:00.000-08:00

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Ken Muse; Layout – Walt Clinton; Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre; Story – Mike Maltese; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Snooper, Light Fingers François – Daws Butler; Narrator, Blabber, Dog Catcher – Jerry Hausner.
Music: Phil Green, Jack Shaindlin, Harry Bluestone/Emil Cadkin.
First aired: week of November 2, 1959 (rerun, week of May 2, 1959).
Episode: Quick Draw McGraw Show M-006, Production J-7.
Plot: Snooper and Blabber try to retrieve the King Size Diamond that Light Fingers François, disguised as a dog, has hidden in a fake bone.

Childhood was filled with immeasurable pastimes, and one of the more enjoyable ones was counting how many times a character ran past the same thing in the background of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Pixie and Dixie adventures seemed specially made for such a joyous activity, but there were other cartoons, too. Like this one.

The bad guy, Light Fingers François, steals the King Size Diamond and runs with it down the street. See that building with the gibberish sign? Light Fingers runs past it three times. Cut back to Snooper and Blabber. Cut back to François, who runs past it another 14 times. François loses the diamond (which is concealed in a dog bone) and it flies past the store another three times. And that’s just in this one scene.

The gibberish building appears in the first scene of this cartoon as a narrator does a Dragnet put-on, intoning “This is a true case. Only the characters are ridiculous.” It doesn’t return until the second half of the cartoon. The first half is set inside Sparkle Jewelry, where Snooper and Blabber are guarding the diamond. Blab engages in some overwrought hero worship, something he did in later cartoons. “Leave us face it,” Snoop says to us, “This kid’ll go far.”

The camera pans over to the window where the narrator introduces the bad guy, Light Fingers François. Daws Butler gives him the same Blacque Jacques Shellacque-ish voice that he used for Powerful Pierre in the Huck cartoons. François’ scam: disguise himself as a cute, lovable dog to ingratiate himself with the detectives and get close to the diamond. And it works. The fake pooch treats his bone like a rifle and walks, sentry-like, past the diamond, with some Phil Green marching music in the background. Snooper and Blabber go for a snack-type lunch.” François hides the diamond in the bone but Blab has been looking back at his new pet the whole time and sees it. The detectives start chasing him. “Here’s mud in your private eye,” cries François, lifting up his head temporarily to reveal his identity. Then Mike Maltese shamelessly puts this pun in the mouth of Snooper: “Yeah. There’s skul-doggery afoot.”

We get to see a lot of the gibberish store as the chase moves to the street. François loses the bone because he’s so busy looking back at Snooper and Blabber he runs into a light pole. The bone goes flying and smashes into a garbage can-diving bulldog in the butt. The dog thinks it has a delicious meal but François grabs the bone and darts off.

Now the bulldog joins the chase. Maltese decides to treat him as a real bulldog and not give him any lines, unlike the dog with the diamond ring on its tail chased by Snooper and Blabber later in the season in ‘Doggone Dog, Gone.’ Possession of the bone keeps changing throughout the cartoon. Snoop gets it back, but then the bulldog grabs it when Snoop hides in the garbage can seen earlier. You can tell Ken Muse worked on the cartoon; the bulldog has a resemblance to Spike in the last few Tom and Jerry shorts at MGM (as does François as a dog in a few poses). Snoop lets out with his catchphrase: “Stop in the name of the Ajax Private Eye School.”

I like the cause-and-effect gag next. François skids to a stop, pulls out a stick from somewhere and tells the bulldog to fetch it. Snooper skids up to François, who pulls out another stick. It’s only logical in Snoop’s mind that he fetches it. That’s what one does with sticks. François takes off. The dog, then Snoop, skid back into the scene with sticks in their mouths. “Leave us to admit it Bow wow. We goofed,” he says to the bulldog. Au revoir, goofers,” François says as a cap to the gag.

Blab now grabs the bone from François by hiding in a mailbox (“Fooey to you-ey, Louie,” says Blab to François, reminiscent of Bugs Bunny saying to Yosemite Sam “So long, screwy, see ya in St. Louie” in Hare Trigger, also written by Maltese). . François gets the bone back by taking a baseball bat to the mailbox. Blab vibrates out the door in back, which conveniently opens. But the vibrating bone causes François to vibrate (a gag I’m trying to place from somewhere). “Just call me ‘Shakey,’” says the smiling François to the audience.

“‘Snakey’ is better, you jewel thief,” says Snoop, whose arm reaches into the scene and grabs the bone. The chase is on again. François uses Snoop’s catchphrase: “Stop in zee name of zee International Jewel Thief Association!” Snoop skids to a stop when he sees the bulldog in front of him. He pulls out a stick and tells the bulldog to fetch it. The bulldog isn’t having any of it. “You fetch it,” he growls as he tosses Snooper out of the scene. François grabs the bone, runs and stops. He’s pleased with himself until a net suddenly slams onto of him. “How do you ya like dat? No dog license, no nuttin’,” says a dog catcher, who hauls off François. I’ll avoid comment on “some day, you’ll go to the dogs pun,” Maltese uses here.

The final scene has Snooper pleading with the bulldog to tell him where the bone is. The camera pans to reveal a hill with a bunch of holes in it and Blabber digging with a shovel trying to find it. “Pretty please with sugar on it? Strawberries in season?” grovels Snooper in a line you’d expect out of Maltese. The cartoon’s over and while François apparently never escapes from the dog pound, the gibberish building returns in a few other cartoons later in the season. It was rare for H-B to reuse backgrounds but they did it with this one (there are seven buildings of various sizes on the street).

This cartoon marks the fourth and final one for the different-sounding Blab. Daws Butler took over the role in the next cartoon then continued to do it until the day he died. The late Earl Kress had guessed the voice was originally done by Jerry Hausner, who was later the voice director for UPA.

The bulk of the music is by Phil Green and Jack Shaindlin in this cartoon, all to good effect. Green’s ‘And They All Lived Happily Ever After’ sounds like ‘The Toyland Parade’ for a good reason. Both are from his ‘Kiddie Comedy Suite’; the latter is the overture and the former is the ending. The sound cutter uses the second half of the cue.

0:00 - Snooper and Blabber Main Title theme (Curtin, Hanna, Barbera).
0:25 - PG-181F MECHANICAL BRIDGE (Green) – Pan of city street, shot of diamond.
0:40 - GR-90 THE CHEEKY CHAPPIE (Green) – Snooper and Blabber in front of diamond, pan to window.
1:17 - CRAZY GOOF (Shaindlin) – François at window, dresses as dog, gets hired, rushes out of scene.
2:18 - GR-259 AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER (Green) – François/Dog marches in front of display case, grabs diamond, “Light Fingers strikes again.”
2:45 - GR-453 THE ARTFUL DODGER (Green) – Snoop and Blab return, François/Dog runs away.
3:10 - LFU-117-2 MAD RUSH No 2 (Shaindlin) – Snoop and Blab run after François, François runs into light pole.
3:43 - PG-160G LIGHT MOVEMENT (Green) – Bone flies through air, hits bulldog, bulldog runs out of garbage can.
3:54 - SIX DAY BICYCLE RACE (Shaindlin) – Bulldog runs after François, Snoop grabs bone, jumps in garbage can.
4:12 - LFU-117-3 MAD RUSH No 3 (Shaindlin) – Bulldog reaches into garbage can, François grabs bone, skids to stop.
4:33 - GR-99 THE DIDDLECOMB HUNT (Green) – François plays fetch with bulldog and Snooper, Blabber grabs bone, François bashes mailbox, Blab shakes, François shakes, “Snakey is better, you jewel thief”
5:40 - GR-77 CUSTARD PIE CAPERS (Green) – Snoop runs with bone, bulldog growls.
5:53 - CB-85A STEALTHY MOUSE (Bluestone-Cadkin) – Snoop tries to play fetch with bulldog, François netted by dog catcher.
6:39 - ASININE (Shaindlin) – Snoop pleads with bulldog.
7:09 - Snooper and Blabber End Title theme (Curtin)

Meet the Flintstones (Collector)

2012-01-18T07:42:00.001-08:00

I’ve never been quite sure how a sheep feels so, therefore, I’m not quite sure what feeling sheepish is like. But perhaps I feel it now.

I’ve posted pictures of Hanna-Barbera merchandise from the distant past sent to me by various readers who have found it on the internet. I’m not a collector myself, other than of DVDs of the funny old cartoons (and, I suppose, the music on the original H-B cartoons). But one of our readers is. And Dave Nimitz and his Flintstones collection has been profiled on an internet web site in a post that, frankly, is far more in depth than anything I’ve ever been motivated to write here.
So please direct your attention to BEYOND THE MARQUIS, as Dave shows off what he’s found over the years and proudly displays in his apartment.

I probably should have talked to Dave and posted something here but, to be honest, my batting average getting people to agree to be interviewed here is pretty low. And this blog is a little something to do in my spare time and I really don’t have a lot of it. By the way, one thing the post doesn’t mention is Dave’s friendship with some of the great voice actors of cartoons past, like June Foray.

Now’s a good time to segue into more pictures of old H-B merchandise found on the internet by reader Billie Towzer.

Thanks to the folks at Standard Toykraft Products of Brooklyn, New York, you could make your own plaster versions of Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw and Yogi Bear. This was sold in 1960.

You think of Ideal Toys when you think of Pebbles Dolls, but (as Dave Nimitz can attest), Knickerbocker made them, too. They’re 3½ inches tall. The company made Fred and Barney, too.

Knickerbocker also made plastic banks. Here’s one of Quick Draw from 1960. There were a couple of different ones, and a Baba Looey bank as well.

Billie didn’t identify these two plastic Hucks. I’ll bet Greg down the I-5 can tell us what they are. (Late note: See the comment section).

And we wouldn’t have had Huck, Quick Draw and Yogi if it hadn’t been for the folks at ♫♪♫♪ K-E-Double L-O-Double Good... well, you know the song. Oh, horrors! Cereal with, with... SUGAR! And a gun! Hey, you can’t let kids eat that. They’ll grow up to be obese murderers.

My thanks to Billie for peering around the ‘net and passing on these pictures.

Huckleberry Hound — Pony Boy Huck

2012-01-14T07:13:00.000-08:00

Produced and Directed by Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna.
Credits: Animation – La Verne Harding; Layout – Tony Rivera; Backgrounds – Bob Gentle; Story – Warren Foster; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Narrator, Chief Crazy Coyote, Vulture, 2nd Pony Express Manager – Don Messick; Huckleberry Hound, Pony Express Manager, Horse – Daws Butler.
Music: Spencer Moore; Jack Shaindlin; Raoul Kraushaar?
First aired: week of Dec. 28, 1959 (rerun, week of July 4, 1960).
Episode: Huckleberry Hound Show No K-035.
Plot: Pony Express rider Huck has to get the mail past Chief Crazy Coyote.

Chief Crazy Coyote and the Joe Besser horse are back in La Verne Harding’s first attempt at animating Huck (her last one was in the fourth season). Harding’s animation is pretty undistinguished here, and Tony Rivera’s design of the horse is much more streamlined than Walt Clinton’s in the first Huck/Crazy Coyote match-up. Warren Foster’s story has some cute bits in it.

Foster used a narration device in a bunch of cartoons, with Don Messick as a narrator intoning “This picture is dedicated to...” This was the first one where he tried it. (Pet Vet and Huck’s Hack were the others in Huck’s second season). In this case, it’s “dedicated to the memory of the Pony Express riders” and opens with Huck and his horse in long shot. Foster tries a running gag when Huck enters the Pony Express office. Huck’s told he’s being assigned the duty of delivering a package because “you, above all others, live up to our proud motto.” Huck doesn’t know what he’s talking about. After it’s explained (“the mail must go through”), Huck promises he will live up to the “proud mott-to.” As he walks to the horse stable, he repeats the sentence over and over, emphasising a different word each time. “I gots to ree-member to learn that proud mott-to.”

The next gag’s fun. Huck’s horse is reluctant to take him on the delivery. He peeks out of the stable and up and puts his hoof out. “Oh, come on! It’s not rainin’!” Huck shouts at him.

Okay, the narration sets up some spot gags of Huck getting on the horse. He slides along the side of the galloping horse to mount him. “Performed at full speed, it was a beautiful thing to watch,” says our solemn narrator. Huck crashes into a fence post. Hanna’s timing is perfect. “As we were saying...” intones Messick. This time, the horse mounts Huck. “Now what did I do wrong?” Huck says to the audience.

We fade into the next scene and Huck is riding the horse. Huck hits the horse with a switch to get him to go faster. The horse stops, turns and tells him he doesn’t like it and won’t say it. Foster resists the temptation to add “Or I’ll give you such a pinch. You cra-zy!”

If you’ve lost track, Crazy Coyote is supposed to be the antagonist. We’re a third of the way through the cartoon and he hasn’t shown up yet. Foster has to toss in a “Neither rain, nor snow” narration gag. Messick describes torrential rains, snow-choked passes (all we see is a hat moving on top of the snow) and the deepest rivers. The horse stops short of the river but all Huck does it fly across to the other side with a wimpy sound effect landing. The gag is apparently the way Daws Butler bends his vowels when he says “starch” and “cuffs.”

Huck’s now in ‘Injun Country’, where you “cain’t be too careful...Ol’ Crazy Coyote shows up where you least expect him.” While Huck’s saying all this, the top-hatted chief is sitting right behind him on the horse, baying like (presumably) a coyote, and Huck’s telling us a coyote’s out there and not far away. Huck doesn’t notice for a good 20 seconds of screen time until Craze says he wants off at Big Rock. And even then, he’s pretty casual about it, telling him it’s against the rules to take on riders. “Oh, bro-ther!” says the Besser horse. And he doesn’t even know it’s Crazy Coyote until the chief tells him in the next scene. Harding wastes a chance at a take. All that happens is the camera cuts from a two-shot of Huck with his eyes half closed and the Chief to a shot of Huck with his eyes fully-opened. Lame.

Foster pulls a gag out of nowhere. Crazy Coyote grabs the letter Huck’s delivering so Huck pulls out his gun. The chief responds by holding up the letter wherever Huck moves the barrel of his gun because if the letter gets damaged by bullets, Huck will be fired. So Huck simply shoots into the air and a buzzard falls from the sky and lands on top of Crazy Coyote. “Sorry I had to use you, Mr. Vulture.” The vulture responds with his best impression of Señor Wences: “S’all right.”

Anyone recognise the next gag? The chief does a war dance. Cut to a shot of a chart that teaches him the steps. The only thing that screws up the bit is he explains what he’s doing and then reads what’s on the chart. Not only can we see it for ourselves, the gag’s over by the time he’s finished talking. Oh, and Craze does his “hee-haw” laugh to stretch out the scene even more.

You should recognise the next gag. Crazy Coyote rolls a boulder down the steep slope of the Great Divide to bowl down Huck and his horse. But “Shucks. Me miss-um.” The boulder rolls past the pair up the other side of a cliff and into the air. Yeah, suddenly Crazy Coyote is emulating another cartoon coyote. The boulder lands on top of him as he looks at the audience, gets into a Jackie Gleason-esque pose and says “And away-um we go.” The scene ends with Crazy (Coyote, not Guggenheim) under the rock giving a weird muffled laugh that sounds like Gloop or Gleep from The Herculoids (also voiced by Don Messick).

Short gag. Narrator: “But as the brave rider presses on”—we see more cycle footage of Huck riding the horse—“a relentless redskin draws a bead and fires!” Crazy Coyote turns as he aims his rifle and points it against a rock. The bullet, of course, can’t get out the front end, so it explodes inside the rifle. Muffled laugh by Craze again.

Huck finally arrives at the Pony Express station. But the horse keeps riding right through it, up a flight of stairs (as we can tell by the camera pan up and to the left) and out an upstairs window. Foster just gives Huck a few “whoa”s but avoids turning him into Yosemite Sam going “Aw, come on, horsey, pretty please” and so on (Foster, of course, wrote a majority of the Bugs-Sam cartoons at Warners).

So Huck “brought the mail through, just like our motto says,” the Pony Express guy behind the desk tells him. “Well, I’m right humble, and grateful, and proud, and grateful and humble...” “Never mind all that,” the Express guy interrupts. He hands Huck the letter and him told he has to deliver it in person—to Chief Crazy Coyote. The final scene has a close-up of Huck, with galloping sounds in the background, telling us he has to keep his eyes peeled for Crazy Coyote because he’s liable to show up any place. Cut to a medium shot that reveals Huck is riding atop Crazy Coyote’s hat. We hear the hee-haw laugh and the cartoon fades out to end.

Crazy Coyote made one more appearance, in the third season’s Huck Hound’s Tale, which is similar in plot to the first season cartoon written by Charlie Shows.

The music is a bit of a nightmare here. Someone decided to give Huck a chase cue every time he rode his horse, and Crazy Coyote a couple of the standard Indian cues in the Hi-Q library when he appeared. But there are cases when a cue is heard for a few seconds, then the sound cutter cuts into the middle of one of the familiar pieces of stock music generally used on Huck cartoons. It doesn’t flow. You can hear the interruption. If you have a staff composer, (s)he can blend it together, but it doesn’t work with a stock library of different composers, arrangements and tempos.

You’ll see I haven’t identified most of the music. I have some chase themes on a few reels of the Hi-Q ‘D’ series which sound similar to what’s used when Huck’s on horseback but not that one. That’s if it is only one; I honestly can’t tell. My guess is the chase theme and the Indian music were written by whoever ghost-wrote for Geordie Hormel or Spencer Moore. The Indian music may be in the Hi-Q ‘X’ series but I haven’t been able to locate it. The chase cue was only used in this one cartoon.

0:00 - Huckleberry Hound Sub Main Title theme (Curtin)
0:25 - medium dramatic chase (?) – long shot of Huck and horse on plains, Huck walks into Pony Express Station
0:38 - creepy reverb trumpet music (Kraushaar?) – Huck in Pony Express office.
1:09 - L-70 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Huck mumbles to himself, horse looks for rain, horse takes off.
1:38 - medium dramatic chase (?) – Huck tries to get on horse, horse skids to stop.
2:14 - TC-201 PIXIE COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Horse complains to Huck.
2:35 - medium dramatic chase (?) – Huck on horse, weather gags.
3:03 - four beat tom-tom/flute cue (?) – shot of Injun Territory map, Crazy Coyote howls like coyote.
3:19 - medium dramatic chase (?) – Huck on horseback, “Whoa!”
3:49 - TC-303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Huck talks to Crazy Coyote, Vulture drops on Crazy Coyote.
4:35 - medium dramatic chase (?) – Huck on horse.
4:39 - four beat tom-tom/flute cue (?) – Chief does war dance, shot of foot chart.
4:57 - two drum-beat cue (?) – Crazy Coyote laughs.
4:59 - medium dramatic chase (?) – Huck and horse up Great Divide, slide down.
5:14 - four beat tom-tom/flute cue (?) – Crazy Coyote on mountain, pushes rock.
5:20 - medium dramatic chase (?) – Huck and horse slide down, rock goes past them, lands on Crazy Coyote,
5:31 - four beat tom-tom/flute cue (?) – Crazy Coyote looks down hill.
5:35 - medium dramatic chase (?) – Rock rolls down mountain, crashes on Crazy Coyote, Huck rides, Crazy Coyote’s rifle goes off, horse rides into Pony Express office.
6:23 - no music. Pan up side of building, Huck and horse crash through window, thud.
6:32 - PIXIE PRANKS (Shaindlin) – Huck in office.
6:55 - LAF-72-2 RODEO DAY (Shaindlin) – Huck on Crazy Coyote.
7:10 - Huckleberry Hound Sub End Title theme (Curtin)

Not So Curiouser

2012-01-11T07:40:00.000-08:00

They lost with me with the television scene.

I haven’t been nine years old for some time but that’s how old I was when the Hanna-Barbera ‘Alice in Wonderland’ special aired in 1966. I haven’t seen it since then but I distinctly remember some things about it (it’s remarkable what the memory retains). I remember how much I was looking forward to it. And I remember how I was really let down. Right from the first scene.

What was a TV doing in the story? What was the point of deviating from the original storyline? And why were Fred and Barney a caterpillar? It couldn’t have been some Gazoo trick because Gazoo wasn’t there, and the cartoon wasn’t in the Stone Age, anyway. I mean, if you’re going to have Fred and Barney in a cartoon, they should be Fred and Barney, right? And what was with that hipped-up song at the end? It was loud and just didn’t fit. In fact, I didn’t like the compressed-sounding underscore used in the whole cartoon. About the only highlight for me was Janet Waldo because Janet Waldo is wonderful. Even though they wouldn’t let her sing (nine year olds can tell these things).

I only bring up this 46-year-old special because I’ve come across newspaper clippings about it in my Hanna-Barbera travels looking for information about Alex Lovy. Not all H-B fans have the same tastes—there are people who can actually stomach those Abbott and Costello cartoons—so for any of you reading who have fond memories of ‘Alice,’ let me post them.

Lovy was interviewed on a couple of occasions about the cartoon. Here’s one from the National Enterprise Association syndication service, March 26, 1966.

Alex Lovy of Alice in Wonderland Directs the Cartoon With Pencil
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
HOLLYWOOD — HOW do you direct a cartoon?
There was no shadow of doubt in the mind of TV director Alex Lovy.
“With a pencil,” he said.
Super-spectacular
The “cartoon” in question is a super-spectacular, an hour-long animated color special called Alice in Wonderland or What’s a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This, slated for Wednesday evening March 30 on the ABC-TV network.
Animation is by the team of Hanna-Barbera with a list of voices that sounds like Who’s
Who: Sammy Davis Jr. as the Cheshire Cat, Zsa Zsa Gabor as Queen of Hearts, Howard Morris as the White Rabbit and Bill Dana, as Jose Jimenez, as the White Knight.
Dana also wrote the script, which director Lovy admits is far from the original version. Because they used just the characters from the famous classic, the opening credit will read:
“With apologies to Lewis Carroll.”
But there is no apology from either Lovy or Dana about their version, which they describe as a musical. “My Alice,” says Dana “is a contemporary girl. I wouldn’t want to compete with Lewis Carroll.”
This is Lovy’s explanation of how he directs with a pencil:
“The actors take my direction in their voice interpretations and then I direct with a pencil to the animators. I tell the artists how each person moves. I draw the moves and the artists work them in.”
How important this direction-by-pencil can be is spotlighted by the fact that the hour show required 70,000 individual drawings. The mere words “Good morning, how are you?” from Alice required more than 24 drawings to give the illusion of motion.
An oddity of the production is that at no time did any member of the “voice” cast meet another cast member. All recorded their voices separately in Hollywood with the exception of Sammy Davis Jr. Because he was starring in “Golden Boy” on-Broadway, director Lovy recorded his voice in New York.
Two Voices
Another oddity is that Alice required two voices, the speaking voice of Janet Waldo and the singing voice of Doris Drew Allen.
Dana says his version of “Alice” is not an adaptation but a fantasy. “I wouldn’t do an adaptation because I didn’t regard Alice as a children’s book. It was a satire of ‘in’ jokes for the six close friends for whom Lewis Carroll wrote the story.”

Joe Barbera, who could sell wire hangers to Joan Crawford, was unleashed to do his P.R. magic on the press yet again before the cartoon aired. You can depend on Joe to include in any interview “We won seven Oscars, you know” and “our cartoons aren’t kid programming.” He has the task of trying to spin the cartoon as being new, and that’s good, but old, and that’s good. Contradictory? Ol’ Smoothie doesn’t give people time to come to that realisation as he does his pitch.

This is another syndicated piece, found in newspapers starting March 27, 1966:

TV Set Replaces Looking Glass In Alice Special
By EDGAR PENTON
HOLLYWOOD — “Curiouser and curiouser!” as Alice would say. There’s a White Rabbit playing guessing games, the hep feline Cheshire Cat, a two-headed caterpillar working in show business, and a hard-boiled egg named Humphrey Dumpty.
Any similarity between these characters and the inhabitants of that Wonderland first encountered by Lewis Carroll’s Alice over a century ago is purely intentional.
They are 1966 versions of the Carroll characters and will be seen in Alice in Wonderland or What’s a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This, ABC-TV’s fully animated musical color special airing Wednesday, March 30.
HOW DID they come up with a title like that, a title that had Carroll-philes shaking their heads when it was announced last year?
David Sontag, director of special programs for ABC, had this reply. “The title comes from one of the show tunes sung by Sammy Davis Jr., ‘What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This.’ We liked the song and Sammy’s rendition so well it was decided to incorporate it in the title of the show.
“The appellation, which may well be one of the longest in television history, is an indication of the concept of the show. . . it’s current; a contemporary version written in the style of Lewis Carroll.”
Sammy Davis Jr. voices the Cheshire Cat, a fourth generation feline from Jersey City. Zsa Zsa Gabor, as the Queen of Hearts, manages to get in an occasional “dahlink” in between shouts of “Off with her head!”
Bill Dana, making use of his Jose Jiminez character for the White Knight, carries on his battle with the English language by insisting that the “K” in knight be pronounced.
Howard Morris provides the voice of the “zany” White Rabbit, and the late Hedda Hopper gives voice to a new character, Hedda Hatter, wife of the Mad Hatter, vocally portrayed by Harvey Korman.
Talented young actress Janet Waldo speaks the words of Alice, with Doris Drew Allen performing the heroine’s musical numbers. Daws Butler does double duly by voicing the King of Hearts and the March Hare. Allan Melvin is heard as Humphrey Dumpty.
SPECIAL GUEST stars Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, of the network’s The Flintstones, are voiced by Alan Reed and Mel Blanc. They play, respectively, the front and rear ends of the caterpillar.
Co-producing the special are William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, winners of seven Academy Awards for their animated productions. Screen Gems is associated in the venture.
“This is our first hour-long television venture,” Barbera says.
“It would be impossible to do the complete Carroll story in that time. Without changing the original Carroll concept, we have given our story a line that children today can easily understand and identify with.
“INSTEAD of Alice entering Wonderland by a rabbit hole or through a looking glass, she finds her way into the wonderous kingdom by falling through the screen of the family television set.
“I don’t mean to imply that the special is strictly for the youngsters. The story of Alice is not just another cute kiddie tale. It has a charm and sophistication that appeals to adults as well. In essence, it has all the ingredients to make it fun and entertaining to the entire family.
“To do a successful TV special today you must give the audience something they are familiar with. This we are doing in story and personalities. We believe the show will become a perennial.”
BILL DANA, a top comedy writer but better known to the public as Jose Jiminez, adapted the Carroll classic.
Barbera, speaking of Dana and his script, said, “Bill has done a remarkable job of maintaining the original flavor and feel of the Carroll work. His whimsical and light approach to life and to writing made him a natural choice for the job. That same ‘flibbity-jibbity’ type of dialogue that made ‘Alice’ a part of the language is still there.
“BILL HAS sustained the absurb-but-unspoiled-by-‘common-sense’ outlook of the Carroll characters. Alice is still the polite young lady who never receives a straight answer to any of her questions, and the characters answering her are just as delightfully improbable as ever.”
The production features original music by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, composers of “Bye, Bye, Birdie” and the current Broadway hit, “Golden Boy,” starring Sammy Davis.
In addition to the Sammy Davis title tune, the special has four other original songs:
“Life’s a Game,” sung by the White Rabbit; “I’m Home,” a ballad by Alice; “They’ll Never Split Us Apart,” sung and danced by the two-headed caterpillar, and “Today’s a Wonderful Day,” a duet by Alice and the White Knight.
Lewis Carroll's “Alice” has been entertaining readers, theater and movie audiences for over a century. The adventures of his wonderous heroine has passed into polyglot and in Mother England one can purchase any number of booklets dealing with every facet of the story and its author.
“ALICE” comes to television on her 101st unbirthday.
Alex Lovy, director of the special, discussed some of the technical and statistical aspects of the television version in a recent interview: “From inception to finished show represents better than18 months work by approximately 125 people, not including performers and musicians. Animation alone required roughly 8000 man hours.”
Asked if any of the animated characters were difficult to create, Lovy answered, “Alice was our biggest problem. There were over 50 drawings of one before we felt we had the right one. It was just the opposite with the Cheshire Cat. The first drawing submitted on him was so well liked by everyone that we stuck with it.
“An interesting thing about this show," continued Alex, “is that only three of the characters will be seen in caricature. These are Bill Dana, Hedda Hopper and Zsa Zsa Gabor.”
LOVY WENT on to explain why caricatures of the three performers were used. “Since we had a hat gag segment in the show whore Mrs. Mad Hatter tries on a number of hats, it
seemed only natural to use a likeness of Hedda Hopper.
“With Dana it was more than an identification with his already well-known Jose Jiminez character that prompted us to caricaturization. The amazing amount of character and elasticity in Bill’s face made it perfect for the White Knight. I could have had our artists create a cartoon knight, but why bother when we already had the perfect face in the real Bill Dana?
“ZSA ZSA’S caricature was a matter of love,” he added, jokingly.
“When it was learned she was to do the voice of the Queen of Hearts, it wasn’t hard to picture exactly what the character should look like. And the artists working on her likeness enjoyed their work very much.”
Carroll’s original work was described recently by a journalist as a “dream-bible for
children.” A passage from the original “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” best describes ABC-TV’s modern translation.
“. . . and make their young eyes bright with many a strange tale, perhaps even with a dream of Wonderland of long ago. . .”

Finally, let’s hear about all the casting of an H-B regular amongst all those big names. This unbylined story ran in the Sandusky Register on March 30.

Janet Waldo As Alice
“Knowing the character,” one of the principles of acting, paid dividends for actress Janet Waldo when she auditioned for the voice of one of literature’s most wondrous heroines — Alice.
Actors usually study a character after being cast in the role. Janet's advance understanding
of Alice was instrumental in her being selected to voice the title role in ABC-TV’s “Alice in Wonderland or What’s a Nice Kid Like You Doing In a Place Like This.” The hour-long, animated musical special will be telecast in color Wednesday, March 30, 8-9 p.m. on Ch. 5, 7, 13.
“We tested dozens of young actresses for Alice,” said co-producer Joseph Barbera, “and I was surprised by the answers many gave to questions regarding the character. The majority of them didn’t know who she really was. They were familiar with Lewis Carroll's books, but had their characters confused with those from other well-known stories. Many had never read the books at all.
“Janet not only knew all about Alice, but about the author as well. When she was growing up, reading the Carroll classics was a part of the process.
“I don't want to give the impression that we cast Janet simply because she knew that Alice was a girl who got into some “kooky place” through a mirror. Janet is an extremely talented actress and one of her greatest loves is doing voices,” he continued.
Janet won the reputation of one of America’s most irresistible teen-agers as the star of her own radio and TV series, “Meet Carliss Archer.” [sic]
Since beginning her acting career at Seattle’s Penthouse Theater, Janet has voiced numerous characters, robots and dogs as well as people. In commercials, her voice, sultry and sophisticated, has been heard extolling a cosmetic, or as a frustrated housewife who hasn’t discovered a new time-saving product. A blithe comedienne, she appeared as Tony Franciosa’s secretary on ABC-TV’s “Valentine’s Day,” and as the voice of the teen-age daughter in “The Jetsons.” Recent TV credits include ABC-TV’s “The FBI” and “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” and “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” and “Get Smart.”
“Janet has done voices for Hanna-Barbera Productions before,” said Barbera, “so we were familiar with her talent.
“Because she so thoroughly understood the character, she was able to get the 14-year-old shading and expressions demanded by the part into her voice. Her animated voice brought the mechanical animation to life.”

Ah, that Joe Barbera. Considering how many liberties were taken with the story, what difference would it make if Janet knew more about the original story and Carroll than whoever Joe had on his casting couch? Still, could you find anyone better for the role? Janet had that teenaged girl sound—and, amazingly, still does.

Considering Janet’s work in theatre, it’s surprising a voice double was brought in to do her song. Alan Reed suffered the same fate. His singing voice was Henry Corden, who took over as Fred’s speaking voice as well after Reed died. Mel Blanc, who, like Reed, had sung on network radio and in cartoons, warbled for himself, as did Howie Morris and Bill Dana.

I'M HOME

LIFE'S A GAME

WHAT'S A NICE KID LIKE YOU

THEY'LL NEVER SPLIT US APART

TODAY'S A WONDERFUL DAY

And, as a bonus, here s another story you can click to enlarge and read.

Pixie and Dixie — Cat-Nap Cat

2012-01-07T07:10:00.000-08:00

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Ken Muse; Layout – Bick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Bob Gentle; Story Sketches and Dialogue – Dan Gordon and Charlie Shows; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Pixie, Voice on Phone – Don Messick; Dixie, Jinks – Daws Butler.
Music: Bill Loose/John Seely; Jack Shaindlin; Geordie Hormel.
First aired: week of March 9, 1959.
Production: Huckleberry Hound Show K-24.
Plot: Pixie and Dixie stops Jinks from having the cat-nap he needs to make him an effective mouser.

This cartoon is kind of the inverse of Hanna and Barbera’s Sleepy Time Tom (released 1951) where Jerry tries to get tired old Tom to sleep so he can be kicked out of the house. Here, Pixie and Dixie learn Jinks’ secret to catching them—he gets catnaps. So they try to keep him awake. The one thing they have in common is both cartoons were animated by Ken Muse. You can see the similarity in the split upper lip in the way that he Jinks to the way the cats are drawn in the nice little opening and closing sequences of the Tom and Jerry cartoon.

Sleepy is kind of the operative word here because you could snooze waiting for this cartoon to get into the plot. A real failing of some first season cartoons is they’re brimming with humourless (and occasionally superfluous) chatter and cycle animation to fill time. This is one of them. It isn’t until the 3:15 mark that the mice do much. In the meantime, there isn’t a lot going on, just a long set-up. In the opening scene, we learn Jinks is a domineering jerk. He runs back and forth in their yard, stopping Pixie and Dixie from getting away from him by stepping on their tails with time being filled with cycling drawings of the mice running in place (Why? Is the grass slippery or something)? The best part of the scene is the multiples and brush work when Jinks zips off stage right and re-emerges on the next background drawing stage left.

Here’s some of Shows’ witty dialogue during the opening scene: “Ever hear the expression cat playin’ with the mice? That’s what I’m doin’.” And after he scoops Pixie and Dixie in a paper bag: “Well, what have we here? A sack of goodies.” That’s the best he can come up with? And Shows can’t make up his mind. It was pretty well established by the time this cartoon was written that Jinks calls Pixie and Dixie “meeces” because he doesn’t know the plural form of the word “mouse.” But in this scene, Shows uses “meeces,” “mouses” and “mice”. Yes, he gets the word right. Joe, can you hurry up and hire Warren Foster, please?

This goes on for the minute and 15 seconds of the cartoon. The scene is interrupted by an off-camera phone ringing. Then we get 3½ seconds of a static shot of a garbage can. “Ta ta and aw revvor, meeces,” is how Jinks mangles French as he tosses the crunched up paper bag with Pixie and Dixie in it into the aforementioned can.

The dialogue’s a little better in the next scene when Jinks is on the phone but the humour’s undermined by the music the sound cutter has picked. It’d be perfect over a pan of scenic Jellystone Park (which is what it was used for in several cartoons) but it’s too low-key for the arrogant braggart Jinks. “I’ve just been named Cat of the Year? A wise decision,” he jauntily tells whoever is on the other end. He’s also been elected captain of the Olympic Mouse Catching Team and asked to endorse cat food (he accepts “for a reasonably exorbitant fee, of course”). During the scene, Barbera cuts back to shots of the meeces’ head sticking out of the garbage can. One lasts seven seconds and the other ten. They consist of nothing more than eye blinks and head turns in three drawings. No wonder Ken Muse could slash out the footage.

Jinks explains on the phone the secret to his mouse-catching success is getting a cat-nap that gives him “wim, wiggour and witality” (with those “w”s for “v”s, Jinks have originally spoken Latin). The meece overhear it and decide to see that Jinks doesn’t get any sleep. Now we can finally see some gags.

● Jinks is snoozing on a hammock. The meeces pull it down and let go. Jinks flies straight up, then back down into the hammock, which twirls him around and lands him hard on the ground. Jinks: “Them mices has attack-ed me.” Sweet milk of magnesia in a bottle, Charlie, that’s a quip? The best part is Bob Gentle’s background, which shows the meece have their own address (and I don’t think the stylised brick wall was used in any other cartoon).

● Jinks goes for a “short, snappy siest-er” on the living room couch. Oh, geez, Charlie Shows is back with his rhyming dialogue. “Shall we try this pot on for size, guys?” says Dixie. But there’s no “guys.” He’s only talking to one “guy”—Pixie. Great barking antelope, Charlie, stop being so contrived. Anyway, Dixie puts a pot over Jinks’ head and Pixie hits the pot with a spoon. There’s a bell sound and Jinks’ head vibrates in three drawings on twos. He has no comeback. He just stares at the camera. I guess Charlie Shows got tired of me complaining and decided no dialogue was better than lousy dialogue.

Pixie runs one direction and Dixie runs the other way into a mouse hole. Jinks wags his finger. “You guys can’t humil-erate the Cat of the Year, you hear?” But there’s no “guys” again. Pixie ran away in a completely different direction, there’s only one mouse in the hole, Charlie. Sigh.

● Jinks gets sleepy at the mouse hole and dozes off. Dixie puts a balloon in his mouth. Jinks’ snoring blows up the balloon and it pops, waking him up. “Uh, what went ‘kapoom’?” Jinks says at the camera.

● The meece thoughtfully leave Jinks a “sofy piller on which to rest my weary head bones” outside the mouse hole in the other side of the living room. It’s just a ruse. Jinks sleeps. Dixie sticks a bugle through Jinks’ ears and blows. It sounds like a ’53 Pontiac instead of a bugle, but we get the gag. You’ve seen it before.

● A closet seems like a good place for a nap. Nope. The meece have left a stick of dynamite inside. The fuse goes under the door. Pixie lights it. Whoever in Roberta Greutert’s ink and paint department (I think she was in charge at the time) uses a nice bit of brushwork here to show the meece getting away from a standing position. Shot of the door moving, smoke coming out, camera shaking and the door falls. We don’t see how badly Jinks is scarred but we do see the surrender flag waved (four drawings on twos).

Those are the gags. All four of them.

So Jinks signs a peace treaty (with three Xs) including an agreement to sleep in the doghouse. Then Jinks falls asleep on the paper, talking in his sleep “I hate mice” in between snores until the time on the cartoon is up.

The music is sufficiently dreamy in the closet scene and a sound cutter can never go wrong using ‘Toboggan Run’ in a chase scene.

0:00 - Pixie and Dixie Main Title theme (Curtin-Shows-Hanna-Barbera).
0:26 - LAF 5-20 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) – Jinks steps on meeces tails; blows up bag.
1:36 - no music. Jinks pops bag.
1:40 - TC 204A WISTFUL COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Phone rings, phone call, part of “win, wivour” line.
2:52 - TC 436 SHINING DAY (Loose-Seely) – end of “wivour, vitality” line, Jinks in hammock, Jinks sproings up.
3:34 - ZR 47 LIGHT ANIMATION (Hormel) – Jinks in air, crashes to ground, skids to mouse hole, shakes finger.
4:04 - TC 432 HOLLY DAY (Loose-Seely) – Jinks on couch, pot clanged over head.
4:24 - LAF 5-20 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) – Jinks sees mice run, goes to mouse hole, starts snoring.
4:46 - TC 300 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Dixie comes out of hole, balloon bursts.
5:11 - ZR 48 FAST MOVEMENT (Hormel) – Mice running, Jinks sleeps on pillow.
5:47 - no music. Bugle blown through Jinks’ ears.
5:51 - ZR 49 LIGHT EERIE (Hormel) – Jinks in closet, kaboom.
6:26 - F 3 RECESS (Shaindlin) – Jinks waves flag, signs agreement, sleeps.
7:10 - Pixie and Dixie End Title theme (Curtin).

Art Goble

2012-01-04T08:04:00.000-08:00

When you watch an old movie and see the credit “Gowns by Adrian” or “Music by Bernard Herrmann,” you have a pretty good idea what that entails. The same can’t be said for the credit “Titles, Lawrence Goble” on the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

It’s logical to think that this would apply to the title card in front of each cartoon, like the ones Iraj Paran drew for a later generation of H-B cartoons. But that’s not the case. Dick Bickenbach, I’m told, was the one who designed all of the early cards. So what exactly did he do? And who was Lawrence Goble?

There’s a bit of confusion in who he was because he only seems to have gone by his given name in the credits of Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Everyone knew him as Art Goble, at least in adulthood. What he was known as a boy is unclear.

Census and death records show Lawrence Samuel Goble was born on August 12, 1897 in Bates, Missouri to Edward C. and Mary E. Goble, the sixth child in the family (three more followed). The 1900 Census lists him as “Samuel L.,” but future census reports have him as “Lawrence S.” By age 12, he was living in Allen, Kansas. Some time in the 1920s, he moved to Kansas City where he married his wife Beryl. More importantly, he got into the animation business there. Yes, at the same Kansas City Film Ad company that employed all the early names of Hollywood animation—Disney, Iwerks, Harman, Ising. Bugs Hardaway worked in Kansas City. So did Carl Stalling. And Friz Freleng. And many more.

Goble arrived in Los Angeles between 1930 and 1932 and was the ink and paint supervisor at the Leon Schlesinger studio by 1936. But, like Freleng, he got a call from Fred Quimby the following year. And the Motion Picture Herald quotes from an MGM news release naming 31 key employees of its new cartoon studio. It announces the hiring of Bill Hanna as a director, Joe Barbera as a storyman and “L.S. Goble is inking and painting head.” Interestingly, the article names the former studios of most of the hirees, but not Goble.

He seems to have remained at Metro until its cartoon studio closed in 1957, with his name never appearing on a theatrical short. Well, with one exception.

There’s Goble’s name on that certificate on the jail cell in Tex Avery’s ‘Cellbound’ (1955). Incidentally, the other name is Vera Ohman, who married Howard Hanson, the first Production Supervisor of the Hanna-Barbera studio.

It’s because of Avery that I first heard of Art Goble to begin with. More specifically, Joe Adamson’s interview with Avery in his book Tex Avery, King of Cartoons. Writer Mike Maltese is in the room with him:

Avery: Remember the Coke machine that would let you almost get the next bottle out, but you couldn’t? So we took the cap off. . . .
Maltese: . . . and put in a straw. . . .
Avery: . . . and we siphoned it. And we sent the mail boy to get a double shot of booze, and poured it in there. . . .
Maltese: . . . put it in the Cokes. . . .
Avery: . . . double shot of bourbon. . . .
Maltese: . . . then we replaced the cap. . . .
Avery: . . . and found a sucker. It was Art Gobel [sic]. Art took that drink, and he went over to the sand pot and spit it right out. He felt this hot stream going right down, you know. He said “I’ve been poisoned!”

As Maltese arrived at Schlesinger from Fleischer’s in 1937, the “poisoning” had to take place that year.

When the MGM studio closed in 1957, Hanna and Barbera took some—but not all—of its key employees. Art Goble came along but not as the head of inking and painting. His former assistant, Roberta Greutert, got that job. Instead, he credits a credit under “Titles.” Considering Bickenbach did the main title card and the only titles on The Flintstones were calligraphic, it may simply be that Art Goble took care of the lettering of the credits superimposed over the animation at the end of each show. Or, in the case of Loopy de Loop and the other shorts, lettered some title cards.

Art Goble would have certainly been in animation longer than anyone else at the studio at the time it began (Dick Lundy arrived almost two years later; his career started in 1929), even longer than Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera themselves. Goble’s last credit was on Top Cat, which was the first to use a rectangular, slightly-shadowed lettering. Goble died in Los Angeles on February 25, 1968.

Yogi Bear, Sunday, January 1962

2012-01-01T07:36:00.000-08:00

Let’s start the first Sunday of the New Year looking back at the Yogi Bear Sunday comics from 50 years ago this month. My usual source isn’t on-line so all but one are from the Ottawa Citizen, which published them the previous Saturday.

Little forest creatures, the kind you almost never saw on Yogi Bear cartoons, grace the optional top panel of the January 7 comic. The punch line panel is kind of creepy. Incidentally, the Hanna-Barbara script logo is the same one that was on title cards for the Huck, Meeces, Quick Draw, etc. cartoons that year.

Is there no end to “injuns” who “talk-um” like “heap-big” stereotypes? We’ve got another one here. And “Rain in Face”? Spare me. I like how whoever is lettering the comic for January 14 makes sure we catch the rhyme at the end by putting it in bold. In fact, all four of these comics do it.

Cute story in the January 21 comic. Yogi’s doing a Highland dance in one of the panels and the Arthur Murray pun doesn’t just settle for a pun on his name, like on a Flintstones episode. Sorry for the poor quality; this one was snipped from newspapers in Joplin (which has the full three rows but in poor quality)and another paper I don’t normally use.

A good-looking Quick Draw McGraw makes an appearance on January 28. Yogi interrupted a TV Western shoot at Jellystone in ‘Droop-a-long Yogi’ which should have aired about the time this comic was published.

Click on any of the comics to enlarge them.

Yowp Note: Due to difficulties locating the Flintstones Sunday comics, I won't be posting them any more. You’ve had a chance to view the first couple of months.

Quick Draw McGraw — Kabong Kabong’s Kabong

2011-12-31T08:05:00.000-08:00

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – George Nicholas; Layout – Walt Clinton; Backgrounds – Bob Gentle; Story – Mike Maltese; Story Director – Alex Lovy; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voices: Quick Draw, Baba Looey, Man from Bank, Bank Manager, Engineer, Newspaper Reader 2, Sheriff, Townspeople, Phoney El Kabong – Daws Butler; Narrator, Horseface Harry, Newspaper Reader 1, Deputy, Townspeople, Phoney El Kabong – Don Messick.
Music: Phil Green; Jack Shaindlin, Louis DeFrancesco?, unknown.
First aired: week of March 14, 1960 (repeated, week of Sept. 12, 1960)
Episode: Quick Draw McGraw Show M-025, Production J-72.
Plot: El Kabong tries to clear his name when bandit Horseface Harry assumes his identity.

Was there ever a bad El Kabong cartoon? This is the fourth and last one produced for the 1959-60 season and it has exactly what you’d expect: catchphrases, shameless puns, lots of kabongs and crashes, stylised layouts, and a fight scene that stops for a pleasant conversation. And the bad guy loses, but so does the good guy (with Baba making an observation to the audience to finish the cartoon).

It also has the return of Horseface Harry, although he’s played by Don Messick this time instead of Doug Young. I like the fact that Quick Draw’s supposed secret idea is known by Horseface, who steals it.

George Nicholas handles the animation. You can tell by the little horseshoe shape at the side of the mouth when the characters say certain vowels. His animation is, unfortunately, not as fun as some of his stuff earlier in the season. But, like Dick Lundy, he’ll turn Quick Draw’s head at an angle during dialogue so he’s not just doing head bobs like Lew Marshall. Walt Clinton has some stylised incidental characters. And Bob Gentle’s mountains in the background are a solid colour for a change but with a bit of spongework at the bottom.

The earliest El Kabongs began with poetic narration and that’s what happens in this cartoon. There’s a pan over Spanish-style buildings and purple mountains in the background, resting at a statue of El Kabong (with guitar).

This is a tale of a quiet Western village
That once was the scene of plunder and pillage
‘Til those responsible, the doers of wrong
Were caught by the phantom El Kabong.

The music and scene suddenly changes, and we’re informed by a tiny-pupilled little man (a Nicholas trademark) the bank has been robbed. The narrator laments “If only El Kabong were here,” and the little guy tells us that’s who is robbing the bank. A mini-crime spree follows, with kabongings of a bank manager and a train engineer (with the voice of Cap’n Crunch) in between newspaper headline gags.

Man (reading): “El Kabong Turns Bandit. Robs Bank on Beautiful Spring Day.” I can’t believe it! The weatherman said it was going to rain.
Man (reading): “El Kabong Robs Train and Fleas.” What in the world would he want with fleas?

We fade to the sheriff and his deputies, deciding how to capture El Kabong, and the solution is for one of them to dress up as a damsel in distress to lure him into an ambush, yelling “Won’t someone help a damsel in distress?” There’s a rifle-laden posse hidden in an adobe storefront, an old ranch house and a wooden cart (and shots of each).

The scene cuts to Quick Draw, happily strumming his guitar while a barely-tolerating Baba Looey listens to him croon: “Ohhhh, I’m not a cactus, honey. I just forgot to shave.” We don’t get the rest of the lyrics because Baba interrupts the song because he hears something. “Sounds like a female critter yellin’ her head off,” Quick Draw observes, meaning it’s a job for El Kabong, so he ducks behind a boulder to change outfits. As in the Warners cartoon Super Rabbit (1944), he emerges with the wrong one. One corrected, there’s a repetition-dialogue gag, with the disguised deputy referring to himself as a “poor female critter in distress.” El Kabong now jumps from a building, swinging on a rope to the rescue, but is stopped in mid-air by the posse’s bullets. All Quick Draw can say is his catchphrase: “Oooh. That smarts.”

Despite this, the posse doesn’t capture Quick Draw or even talk to him. In the next scene, Quick Draw is standing and talking to Baba Looey, saying he’d “give a plug-ged nickel” to find out why he was being shot at. Just then, an off-camera “Olé!” and Quick Draw gets kabonged. Alex Lovy, or whoever, heightened the violence by adding two frames of black in the middle of the kabong. Quick Draw recognises who is responsible. “That handsome critter is Horseface Harry, the outlaw, who looks just like handsome me.” Harry demands the plugged nickel. Quick Draw doesn’t even “have a real nickel” so he gets kabonged again. We get three black frames and two white frames in the middle of the kabong this time.

So Quick Draw hatches a plan. He hands Baba Looey a bag of gold that came from somewhere and when Horseface Harry shows up and kabongs him, Quick Draw will kabong the bad guy right back. Baba doesn’t thin’ he likes the plan, which gives our hero a chance to give us his “I’ll do the thinnin’ around here, Baba Looey, and don’t you forget it.” The plan doesn’t work anyway. The two El Kabongs swoop down on Baba and end up colliding in mid air.

The two now get into a battle with their guitars (which magically appeared from somewhere; they didn’t have them when swinging on their ropes). The clash gets interrupted when Quick Draw complements Horseface on the quality of his kabonger and the two start chatting about Pop Brady’s guitar shop in San Antone. I like how Nicholas saves some drawing in the shot by having the guitars in reverse; no need to draw strings. Baba interrupts the pleasantries to remind Quick Draw he’s got a job to do. That, of course, reminds Horseface, who kabongs Quick Draw and makes off with the gold.

Baba Looey thin’s he’ll “take the shortscuts and give Quickstraw some assistance.” That he does. He disgustedly shoves a boulder on a rope at Horseface swinging on a rope. A collision is inevitable. Of course, so is the rope snapping and the boulder plummeting onto Quick Draw. The bash knocks him silly. Well, sillier than usual.

So that takes care of Horseface Harry. Only one problem. El Kabong forgets to collect the $25,000 reward for his capture. So he swings from his rope through the glass window of the sheriff’s office. The sheriff, who originally though Quick Draw was El Kabong, now isn’t impressed. “Well, you can join the other phoney El Kabongs outside.” Quick Draw looks out the door and there are about eight of them, including one with the wimpy voice Don Messick used in another El Kabong cartoons. You’d think someone could figure out which one was the real El Kabong by comparing them all to the statue in the town square but, no matter. Quick Draw tries to assert his rightful identity as El Kabong (tossing in a “Hold on thar!” in the process) and gets clobbered by the fakes. The tag line by Baba as Quick Draw runs away, ouching and ooching: “That Quickstraw. He’s got a soft heart. And a head to match.” It appears we’re out of catchphrases, so it’s a good reason to end the cartoon.

Jack Shaindlin’s ‘Crazy Goof’ makes two appearances on the soundtrack. I’m presuming the harmonica versions of ‘Red River Valley’ and ‘La Cucaracha’ are from the Hi-Q ‘X’ series but I haven’t located them.

0:00 - Quick Draw McGraw Sub Main Title theme (Curtin).
0:15 - Red River Valley (Trad.) – Narrator, shot of statue.
0:27 - GR-387 GATHERING THE PRODUCE (Green) – Man runs from bank, manager kabonged.
0:46 - GR-96 BY JIMINY! IT’S JUMBO (Green) – ‘Spring Day’ newspaper.
0:56 - MAD RUSH No 3 (Shaindlin) – Train engineer kabonged.
1:05 - GR-99 THE DIDDLECOMB HUNT (Green) – ‘Fleas’ newspaper, sheriff’s office scene, deputy caterwauls.
1:47 - guitar strumming (?) – Quick Draw strums guitar.
1:53 - tick tock/flute music (Shaindlin) – Baba hears something, baby outfit, Quick Draw shot.
2:43 - GR-76 POPCORN SHORT BRIDGE No 2 (Green) – Quick Draw in mid-air, drops.
2:49 - CRAZY GOOF (Shaindlin) – Quick Draw kabonged by Horseface, vows revenge.
3:41 - SF-11 LIGHT MOVEMENT (DeFrancesco?) – Baba with gold, Horseface on cliff.
4:13 - related to Sportscope (Shaindlin) – Horseface jumps, collides with Quick Draw, Quick Draw kabonged.
4:32 - GR-472 HICKSVILLE (Green) – “Mighty fine kabonger,” Quick Draw and Horseface chat, kabong!
4:55 - SIX DAY BICYCLE RACE (Shaindlin) – Horseface grabs gold, collides with boulder, boulder drops on Quick Draw, goofy song.
5:32 - CRAZY GOOF (Shaindlin) – Baba reads Cactus Sentinel, Quick Draw crashes through window, looks out through door.
6:15 - La Cucaracha (?) – Phoney El Kabongs clobber Quick Draw.
6:33 - Fast circus music (Shaindlin) – Quick Draw runs.
6:43 - Quick Draw Sub-End Title credits (Curtin).

Extra Special Quick Draw

2011-12-28T08:20:00.000-08:00

Some layout sketches and drawings from the Quick Draw McGraw cartoon ‘Extra Special Extra’ (1961) have surfaced on-line. I suspect they’re by Bick Bickenbach, though there are no credits on any of the copies of the cartoon I have. But the little newspaper editor and unibrowed bad guy resemble incidental characters in earlier cartoons Bickenbach worked on.

Let’s compare the layouts to what was in the actual cartoon. Again, I don’t know who the background artist is due to a lack of credits and I’m not confident enough to guess (other than it’s not Art Lozzi).

Several Quick Draw, especially El Kabong adventures, started with a left-to-right pan over a western town. You can see how Bick (or whoever) changed the diner and eliminated the outhouse.

This is from the second scene. The cartoon features a running gag with the editor misspelling “Daily” on his front window.

This layout doesn’t quite represent a scene in the cartoon. The editor’s head is up like that only in a closer shot that doesn’t show the whole printing apparatus.

And here’s Bat Belfry greeting Quick Draw, who knocked on his door.

Now, an extra special extra. Here are what I suspect are models of the Quick Draw McGraw show characters for promotional art, signed by Ed Benedict. Seems to me I’ve seen at least one of these in an old newspaper ad.

Grumpy Christmas to You

2011-12-25T09:00:00.000-08:00

Any guesses what Hanna-Barbera artist came up with this?

There’s only person you’d expect would be bah-humbugging at Christmas time. That’s right, none other than Ed Benedict.

I’ve been mulling over for some time about doing a post on curmudgeonly Ed and his influence at Hanna-Barbera (and, ultimately, television animation). But then I realised how superfluous it would be. Ed’s death in 2006 brought a flurry of laudatory articles on the internet and I really don’t think I could add anything new or profound. But his Santa drawing is giving me a chance to go back and revisit some things.

A number of years ago, Animation Blast devoted space, both in print and on the web, to Ed’s work. It’s not on a current web site, but the Wayback Machine at archive.org is your friend. Click HERE and browse. Especially check out Ed’s industrial artwork from the ‘50s. Ed loved the stylisation of UPA that found its way into many of the commercial studios (Ed himself worked for Paul Fennell starting in the late ‘40s).

Scott Brothers, who links to this blog, had a great post three years ago featuring Ed being interviewed by John Kricfalusi. Ed talks about his designs at Hanna-Barbera being watered down so they weren’t so stylised. And how Mike Maltese put Ed’s photo of Douglas Fairbanks in his garage. Read it HERE.

The popular press reported on Ed’s death, something unheard of for a person who wasn’t a cartoon producer or director. Credit animation historians with raising awareness that seeped into the popular culture, thereby making a wire service more likely to do an obit. The other fascinating thing is the Associated Press didn’t report on the death until five weeks after it happened, yet news had already spread on the internet. The length of time is a little unusual but, even today, the wire may be a couple of days late on the death of someone in cartooning that’s the talk of the virtual world (Jerry Robinson’s recent passing is a good example)

Noted Cartoon Animator Is Dead At 94
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 11—(AP)—Ed Benedict, a legendary animator who put life, love and laughter in TV cartoon characters such as Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble and Yogi Bear, has died. He was 94.
Benedict died Aug. 28 in his sleep in Auburn in Northern California, his longtime friend and fellow animator David K. Sheldon said Tuesday.
“He was quite an interesting fellow, that’s for sure,” Sheldon said.
“He was the main character designer for all the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw.”
Benedict, who worked at MGM, Universal and other studios on short, theatrical cartoons, joined Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera soon after the pair launched their groundbreaking Hanna-Barbera TV animation studio in the late 1950s. Among his many designs for them were the characters for their first series, 1957’s “The Ruff & Reddy Show.”
For “The Flintstones,” the story of a “modern Stone Age family,” Benedict not only designed the hapless cavemen Fred and Barney, but also their long-suffering wives, Wilma and Betty, and the show’s clever array of Stone Age houses and gadgets, including the characters’ foot-powered cars.
“The Flintstones,” one of the first cartoon series created for adults as well as children, debuted in 1960 and was an immediate hit. Forty-six years later, Fred and Barney remain squarely in the public consciousness as pitchmen for various products, including Flintstones’ vitamins.
Without the time and budget that were lavished on theatrical cartoons, TV animated comedies had to leave out beautiful backgrounds and lifelike movement in favour of witty dialogue and stories with vivid characters.
“It would not be an exaggeration to say that a large part of H-B’s success in TV animation is owed to Benedict’s incredibly appealing and fun character designs,” cartoon historian Jerry Beck wrote in a tribute posted on the website cartoonbrew.com
Before joining Hanna-Barbera, Benedict worked for cartoon legend Tex Avery at Universal and MGM studios. At MGM, he was the lead layout artist and designer on “Deputy Droopy” and other popular theatrical shorts.
He also worked with “Woody Woodpecker” creator Walter Lantz on several shorts, including “The Dizzy Dwarf” and “Unpopular Mechanic.”

Someone may be able to recall if Ed’s name was on the Roll of Death at the Emmys the following year.

Let’s close with some of Ed’s art from an on-line sales site. I imagine this is from his personal collection; John K. had some of the same drawings accompanying his post about Ed’s death. I don’t know if the cat is an early concept of Jinks, but the aliens were supposed to be from The Huckleberry Hound Show.

Augie Doggie — Fuss N’ Feathers

2011-12-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Animation – Ken Muse; Layout – Walt Clinton; Backgrounds - ?; Story – Mike Maltese; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Augie, Chicken, Archie, Joe – Daws Butler; Doggie Daddy, Bill – Doug Young.
Music: Phil Green, Jack Shaindlin; Harry Bluestone-Emil Cadkin.
First Aired: February 29, 1960 (rerun August 29, 1960).
Episode: Quick Draw McGraw Show M-024, Production J-77.
Plot: Doggie Daddy copes with Augie’s hungry pet Ostrich.

Evidently, there’s much that goes on when the camera is turned off on our favourite cartoon characters. Toward the end of this cartoon, Augie points out that Archie the ostrich laid an egg. “It’s time you learned the facts of life, Augie,” says wise old Dad. “He didn’t leave no egg. She did.” Well, if we’re following the facts of life, since Augie and Daddy had Archie since the time it was hatched, how did Archie get pregnant? The ostrich has been seemingly been in their house the whole time, being a nuisance. We can only presume that in between scenes, when the camera was off, Archie stole away to tryst with another ostrich that happened to live in the neighbourhood.

Or we could just ignore the facts of life. One can go nuts applying real-life logic to cartoon plot holes.

The cartoon’s pleasant enough because the characters are pleasant enough, but poor Mike Maltese is working on fumes here. This was the second-last, and 77th, cartoon he wrote for the Quick Draw show that season. He did at least one Huck cartoon as well and perhaps some Loopy De Loops. And the Flagstones were about to go into production. So Mike’s dialogue doesn’t have a lot of oomph here.

The first part of the cartoon is taken up with watered-down Pepé LePew. Maltese could write inspired fractured Français for Chuck Jones at Warners but the best he can come up with here is “Eggs dee Chicken Over Easy.” And Augie reading his menu isn’t even consistent; sometimes “the” comes out as “zee” instead of “dee.” “Dat’s my boy whose talkin’ Lithuanian,” Daddy remarks to the viewers.

Then Maltese gives us a couple of premises well-worn at Hanna-Barbera even by 1960. 1) Something escapes or accidentally falls from a van (elephant, kangaroo, Mexican fighting rooster) and 2) Augie wants to adopt it (horse, kitten, annoying duck). In this case, it’s an ostrich egg that bounces out of a zoo delivery van. Hanna-Barbera ate up ideas quickly and both Maltese and Warren Foster had to start repeating them.

So Mike does his best with sight gags. The best one may be at the beginning. The egg rolls into the Daddy family hen house (yes, a dog lives in the suburbs and keeps chickens), and into the nest of Cleo-Elizabeth; the chicken’s name is a delightful bit of incongruity. The chicken is excited to see “her” huge egg, proving that size matters and rushes to tell Augie. “You should be proud of yourself, Cleo-Elizabeth,” beams Augie. The chicken strikes a sexy pose to demonstrate how attractive (and, therefore, fertile) she is.

Augie runs past the same house in the background six times (the Daddy back yard must be a Back 40), cracks open the egg and an ostrich pops out. So now Augie names him Archie (maybe Maltese thought it was a funny name) and wants to keep him. “He won’t eat much,” Augie assures Dad. Except the ostrich eats his pipe.

We cut to six weeks later (during which time the aforementioned tryst must have happened). Archie has swallowed Daddy’s favourite bowling ball. Dear old dad goes through a list of stuff the ostrich has eaten and everything is ordinary sounding; if Maltese were on his game, he would have thrown in something offbeat. Augie does some more begging to give Archie another one more chance. So Daddy does it. We’re about halfway through the cartoon now.

Augie stretches logic for the sake of the plot by carving a clay statue of himself. Augie explains dad will be so happy seeing it, he won’t be mad at the ostrich. Uh, okay. Anyway, Daddy walks off camera to the sound of a gulp. Cut to a shot of the ostrich with the statue in his throat. Of course, Daddy thinks he’s swallowed the real thing. Does he mourn? No, he starts chasing the ostrich. “No son of mine is gonna be for the birds.” Ken Muse gives Daddy a weird running cycle with his arms hanging down, six drawings on ones.

Archie has stopped in the back yard with his head in the ground. “Where did he go? Ostriches have a peculiar way of hidin’,” Daddy says to himself. Then he buries his head under ground. What? That’d make sense if he spotted the ostrich and wanted to talk to him, but he didn’t know where the ostrich was. Apparently, there’s a huge cavern under the Doggie yard as neither of the heads are surrounded by dirt. We can see them clearly. Of course, if they were truly buried, it’d make any dialogue impossible. Then Augie shows up. He doesn’t notice the bodies sticking out of the ground but buries his head instead. Don’t worry, Mike. You’ve only got about two minutes of story to fill.

Now that Daddy learns his son is okay, Archie runs back into the house and swallows a box of bullets. That gives him the hiccoughs and he turns into a living rifle firing at, well, you can guess. Now both Augie and Daddy have a stiff-armed run cycle as they get away from the bullets. “If it’s one thing I can’t stand,” Daddy remarks, “is an ostrich who shoots his mouth off.”

The zoo delivery truck we saw earlier appears again. It has one person in the cab in the medium shot but two in the close up. The guys are named Joe and Bill for reasons I shouldn’t have to explain. Now Bill stretches logic for the sake of the plot. “Hey, look Joe,” he says, “there’s our lost ostrich egg. Only he ain’t an egg any more.” How he made that deduction is something we won’t try to figure out, but one of the two slam a butterfly net on him and drive away to the zoo, with the bird still firing bullets at Augie and his dad. Quips Dad: “He’ll be safer there. And so will we.”

The last scene has Daddy in his living room chair, reading the Daily Bugle, telling us how things are “back to sub-normal.” He’s more correct than he thought. Augie discovers another egg, the Archie look-a-like ostrich hatches and swallows Daddy’s pipe. The Muse striff-armed run cycle is back, except the drawings are reversed and the two run stage left. But Daddy’s never really bothered by anything. He chuckles and says “Here we go again folks,” as the ostrich makes his strange “gepp gepp” noise and looks at the camera as the iris closes.

Incidentally, the last cartoon put into production that season was ‘Poodle Toodle-Oo’, which was a lot funnier than this one. It was a Snooper and Blabber cartoon, so maybe Maltese just tired of coming up with gags for the Augie series.

Phil Green supplies the bulk of the music in the cartoon. I don’t have names for two of the Jack Shaindlin cues. Of the two versions of the cartoon in circulation, there are no end titles and only an opening title card.

0:00 - Augie Doggie bumper music.
0:05 - GR-155 PICNIC OR COUNTRY SCENE (Green) – Augie reads French breakfast items, egg falls out of van, rolls into nest, chicken excited, Augie breaks egg.
1:52 - GR-65 BUSH BABY (Green) – Egg hatches, pipe swallowing scene.
2:32 - EM-107D LIGHT MOVEMENT (Green) – Closet scene.
3:15 - GR-65 BUSH BABY (Green) – Augie makes sculpture, Archie swallows it, runs away.
3:58 - MAD RUSH No. 2 (Shaindlin) – Archie runs out door, Daddy skids to a stop.
4:06 - G-255 PUPPETRY COMEDY (Green) – Daddy looks around, heads in the ground, Archie swallows bullets.
5:08 - related to SPORTSCOPE (Shaindlin) – Archie shoots bullets.
5:18 - Fast Circus Music (Shaindlin) – “Run, Augie,” Augie and Daddy arrive.
5:36 - MAD RUSH No. 1 (Shaindlin) – Van on road, Archie caught, Daddy and Augie run.
6:06 - CB-83A MR TIPPY TOES (Cadkin and Bluestone) – Daddy reads paper, ostrich hatches, eats pipe.
6:35 - Fast Circus Music (Shaindlin) – Daddy and Augie chase after ostrich.
6:49 - iris out.

Where is Bedrock Anyways?

2011-12-22T07:43:00.000-08:00

For years, people watching The Simpsons have kiddingly debated in which U.S. state Springfield may be found (most fans suggest, considering the quality of the show for a long time, it should reside in a cemetery). Viewers of The Flintstones can rejoice that there is an answer to the location of Bedrock. It’s in Thailand.

Want proof? Reader Evan Borisinkoff has sent a note about a resort in Thailand where, according to this CNN web story, “guests can stay inside buildings shaped like Fred, Wilma, Barney, Betty and Dino.”

But, wait a rock-pickin’ minute! Bedrock’s not in Thailand. It’s in Iraq.

In hunting around the internet for more Flintstones news, I came upon the rather startling revelation that Saddam Hussein was a fan of the Modern Stone Age Family. And he even built a Flintstones Village for his grandkids. So among his evil deeds is not getting licensing permission from Hanna-Barbera.

You can find out a bit more in the caption to the photo above at this North Dakota news web site.

But, wait again! Bedrock may be in Australia. At least, Fred’s car appeared in a local charity bed race, according to this news story. But wait some more! It may be in Glasgow. At least some Flintstones were spotted there, also raising money for charity, according to this news story.

One thing’s for certain—the Flintstones continues to have a worldwide appeal more than 50 years after they were created. No doubt, their owner hopes that translates into big money with the coming remake by the Family Guy guy (which we’ve actually heard little about lately.

My thanks to Evan for the tip.

A Real Yogi Christmas

2011-12-21T08:41:00.000-08:00

You’ve heard me complain about unentertaining H-B Christmas specials with characters wearing skunk hats and on and on. But the Yuletide season is supposed to be about caring and giving. So allow me to give you a real Hanna-Barbera Christmas adventure.

Okay, this is kind of like re-gifting. I’d rather say that than “pilfering.” This comes from the nice blog “Golden Gems” which was posting scans of Little Golden Books. A year ago, we reposted pages from one of the Yogi Christmas books uploaded there. This is from another, “Yogi Bear Helps Santa”, copyright 1962. It was drawn by Lee Branscome, who provided background art for the original Jetsons and Jonny Quest shows. Read along or just enjoy the drawings.

If you’re interested in old Little Golden Books, check out Barbie’s site HERE. It’s a shame family matters have forced her to stop blogging but it’s nice of her to leave up her old posts.

The folks at Golden Books brought you Golden Records, and here’s where we go from the sublime to the you-know-what.

This time, I’m re-gifting from myself. I posted this a year ago. Golden came out with a Yogi Bear Christmas record in 1961, with both sides written by Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera and Sylvia Parnes. Faithful readers know Daws Butler and Don Messick had an exclusive record contract with Colpix, so someone else had to be found to voice Yogi and Boo Boo, someone in New York where the Golden Records were pressed. The city had plenty of voice actors doing commercials, Allen Swift was probably the busiest. Golden had its own little stock company of actors and the man assigned to try to replicate the sound Daws’ and Don’s characters was Frank Milano. Unfortunately, doing so was not among Frank’s many gifts. Listen to them at your own peril.

HAVE A HAP-HAP-HAPPY CHRISTMAS

GIVE A GOODIE FOR CHRISTMAS

The last couple of Christmas Days, we’ve posted cartoon music from the Capitol Hi-Q library. I wish I could do the same this year. But I’ve not been able to find any more music from the cartoons. The late Earl Kress and I held out hope that more of Jack Shaindlin’s music from the Langlois Filmusic library would surface somewhere but, unfortunately, that just hasn’t happened. Collectors of stock music tend to go for English and European labels, not American, so copies of Langlois discs are extremely rare. We’ll have to substitute another type of H-B Christmas bonus instead.

Ripping Good Holiday With Huck, Yogi and Jinks

2011-12-18T15:21:00.001-08:00

Huckleberry Hound and his tele-mates are as loved in the U.K. and they are in North America. And here’s a bit of concrete proof.

It’s ceaselessly amazing that people around the world not only read this blog, but some link to it. One of those readers is in Scotland and his link is at KID ROBSON’S SITE. He’s posted a neat Christmas colour comic from 1960 that was part of TV Express Weekly. It features all the regular characters from the Huck show of the day.

Ranger Smith looks dreadful in a couple of panels, but the design of the old car is neat and you’ve got to love a dog from North Carolina talking about the “boot” of a car.

Kid has an interesting site for those of you into comics, and a very extensive blog roll of related sites. It’s worth taking a peek.

Alan Reed and Daws Butler Speak Today

2011-12-18T10:48:00.001-08:00

How many people were involved with old cartoons would you love to hear from, but their time has passed and they’re no longer alive to give interviews? You’d probably stop counting after awhile because coming up with a number would be a fruitless task.

Part of the problem is a lot of people didn’t care about cartoons. Interviewers dismissed them as unworthy of their time. Well, some didn’t. Mike Barrier recorded many conversations with some of the lesser-known people in classic animation, people like Mike Maltese and Dick Bickenbach who played huge roles in the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Eventually, I hope, Mr. Barrier will get around to transcribing them and posting them on his site. But there’s no financial gain for him to do it, so we’ll have to wait until he gets the time and inclination for it to happen.

Someone else who did a couple of interviews, once upon a time, was an aspiring voice actor named Joe Bevilacqua. As a young man, Joe learned to use his voice from a master, Daws Butler. And he’s been using it ever since.

When we last left Joe on this blog, he was hosting a programme called ‘Cartoon Carnival’ on Shokus Internet Radio. It was a fairly eclectic, and somewhat freeform, mix of soundtracks of old cartoons, Joe’s voice work, interview snippets and other bits of audio Joe accumulated over the years.

Shokus has morphed from a streaming radio station into a two-hour live interview show on the web (with a next-to-no-cost archive of old chats).

Joe, meanwhile, succumbed to the workload of assembling and editing a weekly show, but he’s still busy on the internet and has a couple of projects that may be of interest. One to fans of The Flintstones. Alan Reed, the voice of Fred, is no longer with us, but Joe’s done his damndest to bring him back in a five-hour, six minute audio book called “Yabba Dabba Doo!: The Alan Reed Story.” From Joe’s site is gleaned this summary:

Narrated by Alan Reed Jr., Alan Reed Sr., Joe Bevilacqua, Joe Barbera, Tony Reed, Bill Marx.
The autobiography of the voice of Fred Flintstone is brought to
life by veteran radio-theater producer Joe Bevilacqua and Alan Reed Jr. This is
an enhanced unabridged audiobook of the print book features rare interviews with Alan Reed himself, an interview with Joe Barbera, commentary by Joe Bevilacqua, and clips from Reed's radio, TV, and film career, including The Fred Allen Show, The Shadow, The Life of Riley, Life with Luigi, Duffy’s Tavern, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Viva Zapata, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and The Flintstones.

Fans of old radio shows should be delighted to hear that contained within the mound of audio (if audio came in mounds) is Bill Marx narrating letters Fred Allen wrote to Reed. People may not realise Alan’s Falstaff Openshaw character was an early resident of Allen’s famous Alley; Allen used the Falstaff character to comment on political and social affairs through rhyming verse. Allen gave ownership of Falstaff to Reed when he left the show. The Openshaw voice was the one Reed used for ‘Frederick’ Flintstone in “The Split Personality” (1960).

“What’s the URL?” you’re asking. Patience, dear reader.

Joe has also combed through those mounds of audio (if I may mix metaphors) to come up with Volume One of “The Best of Cartoon Carnival.” This features Joe’s personal interviews, some of whom are no longer around to talk today: Joe Barbera, Leonard Maltin, Bob Clampett, Stan Freberg, Daws Butler, Mel Blanc, Bill Marx, June Foray, Bill Scott, Hoyt Curtin, and Craig Marin. The almost three-hour compilation show also features narration from Doug Young (Doggie Daddy) and Janet Waldo (Judy Jetson), both happily still with us today.

Give ‘em the URL? Quiet, Joe. This is my blog.

Anyway, just a sampling of the other things Joe has put together.

► “Daws Butler Teaches You Dialects. Lessons from the Voice of Yogi Bear!”
Can you possibly learn from anyone better?

► “Rare Daws Butler: Comedy from the Voice of Yogi Bear!”
Where to start? Mr. Jinks reciting ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ in his own, like, you know, cooool hipster fashion? How about Daws teaching you how to get Bert Lahr upset (ie. voicing Snagglepuss)? There’s a lot packed into under an hour of audio.

As you can see, this is stuff by the wonderful Mr. Butler that you won’t find in the Neiman-Marcus catalogue, no matter how hard you look. It’s only on Joe’s site, lovingly crafted by Joe himself. And, without wishing to make this sound like an advertisement, I’ll bet it costs less than anything in the Neiman-Marcus catalogue. And is a lot more fun.

Oh, yes, that URL. Joe’s web site is HERE. And he has a blog as well.

Alan Reed’s gone and Daws Butler is gone. But, thanks to old cartoons and radio shows, and one Joe Bev, they really are still here.

Yogi Bear — Hide and Go Peek

2011-12-17T07:56:00.000-08:00

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Animation – Ken Muse; Layouts – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre; Dialogue and Story Sketches – Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson (no credits).
Voice Cast: Yogi – Daws Butler, Charlie, Ranger; Narrator, Joe/Melvin, Elephant – Don Messick.
Music: Bill Loose/John Seely, Spencer Moore, Geordie Hormel, Jack Shaindlin.
First Aired: week of March 23, 1959.
Episode: Huckleberry Hound Show K-026.
Plot: Yogi tries to save an escaped circus elephant from men trying to bring him back.

Bill and Joe weren’t afraid to borrow from themselves if it meant getting a cartoon series on the air, but there’s some pretty heavy lifting going on here.

This cartoon has its genesis in Jerry and Jumbo (1951), where a baby elephant falls off a circus train and rolls into the home of Jerry Mouse, who hides him from Tom by disguising him as a giant mouse. Next we arrive at the second storyline of Ruff and Reddy (1958) where the lead characters hide an escaped baby circus elephant from its violent guards. That basic idea was borrowed yet again when Yogi Bear escapes from a circus as guards hunt for him in The Runaway Bear earlier in the season.

The story structure here is pretty good. It’s treated as a tale by a narrator who intros the story, lets it play itself out, then returns at the end. There’s a running dialogue gag and some violence gags. Oh, there’s an appearance by an old cartoon law: Elephants always use their nose as a vacuum (it happened in Tom and Jerry, Ruff and Reddy, and again in 1960 when Quick Draw McGraw tried to escape a doting circus elephant).

And it also has some really nice backgrounds. Here’s “beautiful Jellystone Park” in a reassembled shot. The evergreens are sketchy, and the sponged, semi-transparent clouds with an outline around them are a nice effect. You can find the same type of cloud drawings in ‘In the Picnic of Time,’ an early Augie Doggie production with backgrounds by Monty from layouts by Bob Givens.

I asked John Kricfalusi for a quick summary about the work of the three background artists at Hanna-Barbera at this time: Bob Gentle, Art Lozzi and Fernando Montealegre. Here’s how you can tell them apart:

Bob Gentle. His sponge work is softer than Monte and Lozzi’s. Like the paper is wetter when he applies it. Also he uses a lot of colored pencil lines

Monte has generally the starkest boldest graphic look of the 3. Brighter colors

Lozzi generally has more details and likes to make a lot of patterns with flowers and leaves and stuff on top of the sponged bigger elements.

The narrator outlines the wonders of the park, including a couple of animated geysers which don’t enter into the plot (but they break up the monotony of the shot in three drawings on twos), and the camera finally comes to rest on “a fantastic formation called Elephant Rock. With this strange formation goes an even stranger story—the story of an elephant that vanished in Jellystone Park, never to be seen again.”

That’s when the flashback begins. And we’re instantly greeted with cost-saving on the screen. A circus convoy is rolling through the park. Yet the trucks are just being moved across the same background being repeated. The wheels of the trucks don’t turn; Ken Muse simply draw white bars to represent light reflecting off the hubcaps and moves the location of the bars every two frames.

As you can see in the drawing, the elephant (wearing a top hat for reasons that aren’t explained) isn’t happy and escapes. It’s not animated. There’s a shot of the two circus workers in the cab of the truck talking, a thunder sound (with the camera shaking), then a cut back to a shot of the truck with the bars broken. Not only were the workers facing backward before the shot of the truck with them facing forward in silhouette, there’s a line of dialogue and no lips are moving. It’s just a static shot. Then the shot cuts back to the two workers in the cab, facing backward. We learn ‘Joe’ is the dark-haired one.

They decide to “form an elephant posse or somethin’.” The posse consists of the pair of them and that’s it. They decide to check Jellystone Park and happen across a ranger at a station that looks more like an information booth. “Pardon me, Mac,” says the red-haired circus guard, “You see a elephant go by here?” “Uh, what colour? Stripe? Chequered? Polka dot?” asks the ranger. That’s the running gag of the cartoon.

The guards pass a thin tree. The bulky elephant peeks out from behind it then makes a dash for it. Ken Muse uses outlines and brush strokes to indicate speed.

Then the elephant disguises himself as a tree. The guards buy it. Charlie Shows’ wit: “Yeah. You can’t see the elephant for the trees.” “I gotta start wearin’ bifocals.” The elephant has eyes much like Ed Benedict would design them, not quite oval and of different sizes. But despite the Benedict-like lump on the back of the head, the guards have a Bickenbach basicness to them.

Cartoon time gets eaten up with some running cycles with Spencer Moore music underneath that doesn’t augment the action at all. And we get a name change. Suddenly, the voice of the red-haired guard (Daws Butler) is calling the other one “Melvin.” But I thought his name was “Joe.” Ah, well.

The elephant runs into Yogi’s cave and hides under the bed. The commotion wakes up Yogi who jumps out of the bed, only the drop is longer than he expected. A bunch of dialogue follows (Daws has Yogi say “Necessess-arary”). There’s with a trunk-vacuum gag when Yogi walks outside his cave to turn in the elephant for a reward, but then he decides to protect the animal when he hears the guards (we learn the red-headed one is “Charlie”) promising to give the elephant “a couple of good k-nocks.”

Yogi and the guards (“Melvin” is back to being “Joe”) chat at the cave entrance and the bear pulls off the “Stripe-chequered-polka dot” line. The guards are about to leave when they suddenly notice elephant footprints leading into the cave. They suddenly notice because they weren’t there in the part of the scene with Yogi and have magically appeared. Yogi and the elephant vamoose out of the cave’s secret exit. A secret exit from a cave?? Has Yogi been watching Batman? Or did Joe Barbera need a Deus ex machina to get him out of a plot corner? I pick the latter. Whatever the case, it gives Yogi a chance to use his catchphrase: “You gotta admit. I’m smarter than the average bear.”

The bear and elephant make a run for it and jump behind the bushes when they see the ranger coming. Muse simply uses some brush strokes to indicate the quick exit. By the way, the bushes, ground and sky colour are the same in this scene as in Duck in Luck and so are some of the tree designs in the previous background drawing. The ranger meets up with the hunting circus guards and we get the “Stripe-chequered-polka dot” line again. “This bit just don’t quit,” remarks Joe/Melvin/Joe. Oh, wait. It’s actually Charlie with the wrong voice coming out of him.

Yogi shoves the elephant up a tree. The guards show up and we get the “Stripe-chequered-polka dot” line again. Charlie gives Yogi the count of three to tell them where the elephant is. He doesn’t have to. The elephant apparently can’t hold on to a tree branch and lands on top of the pair (Yogi zips away just in time). The shot cuts to a repeat of the ranger’s walk cycle and the sound of gunfire. The pair insists to the ranger they’ve been hunting an elephant, at which point Yogi shows where the bullets really ended up (these guys must be incredibly bad shots to mistake a bear for an elephant, and a bear that doesn’t yelp in pain after being shot, at that).

The circus types are kicked out of the park by the sceptical ranger and that ends the flashback. The narrator returns. The camera pans over to the rock formation.

Narrator: Well, that’s the story. The elephant just disappeared and was never seen again. If the bear did know where the elephant was, he never told a soul. A strange story.

Suddenly part of the rock formation, shaped like an elephant’s head, turns around. Why, it’s the elephant, who informs us the story is true and laughs away like characters became apt to do at the end of many a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

This was the last Yogi cartoon written by Charlie Shows to be aired. The following season, Warren Foster took over the writing and storyboarding of the Yogi cartoons.

All the music should be pretty familiar to anyone who likes the first season of Yogi cartoons.

0:00 - Yogi Bear sub-main title theme (Curtin)
0:13 - TC 204A WISTFUL COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Shot of Jellystone, elephant escapes.
0:58 - TC 301 ZANY WALTZ (Loose-Seely) – Guards at Jellystone gates, meet ranger.
1:38 - L 78 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Elephant peeks from behind tree, disguised elephant, hides under Yogi’s bed.
2:30 - TC 432 LIGHT MOVEMENT (HOLLY DAY) (Loose-Seely) – Yogi stretches, talks to elephant.
3:12 - L 1154 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – Yogi walks out of cave, sucked back in.
3:27 - TC 432 HOLLY DAY (Loose-Seely) – “Now, just a doggone minute!”, guards talk to Yogi.
4:27 - TC 202 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – “If I could be of any help,” run out secret exit.
5:07 - ZR 48 FAST MOVEMENT (Hormel) – “Smarter than the average bear,” zip behind bushes.
5:18 – LAF-25-3 bassoon and zig zag strings (Shaindlin) – Ranger walk cycle, guards talk to ranger.
5:33 - LAF-10-7 GROTESQUE No 2 (Shaindlin) – Yogi shoves elephant up tree, elephant lands on guards, shoots at Yogi.
6:30 - LAF-1-1 FISHY STORY (Shaindlin) – Yogi points to butt.
6:41 – LAF-25-3 bassoon and zig zag strings (Shaindlin) – Closing narration.
6:59 - Yogi sub end title theme. (Curtin)

Bill and Joe and Tom and Jerry and Ruff and Reddy

2011-12-14T07:03:00.000-08:00

This post isn’t intended to be a history of the start-up of the Hanna-Barbera studio or Ruff and Reddy, let alone a definitive one. Such would require more time to flesh out than I’m prepared to spend, and more space one would tolerate for a simple blog post. And Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera both wrote books giving their recollections of how it happened anyway.

Hanna bragged about being an unequivocal Hugh Harman-Rudy Ising loyalist, sticking with them when they left Leon Schlesinger in 1933 for half-starvation and then MGM—until Fred Quimby made him an offer four years later and he walked out on them. Barbera was enticed by Quimby through a couple of intermediaries to forsake Paul Terry’s studio in New York and come to MGM. The two teamed up as directors (as Barbera remembered it, “I said to Bill: ‘Why don't we try a cartoon of our own?’”) and came up with the first Tom and Jerry cartoon Puss Gets the Boot, released in February 1940. Neither Hanna nor Barbera are credited but, remarkably, their identities were revealed in an Associated Press story less than three months after the cartoon was released. The only version I’ve found has no byline.

Introduce New Cartoon Technique
Hollywood. May 4—(AP)—A very entertaining cartoon making the making the rounds deserves some belated attention. It’s [sic] title is “Puss Gets the Boot.”
We here get so accustomed to seeing the “credits” at the beginning of pictures, looking for names of neighbors and fellows we have met, that when there are no names we are curious and a little disappointed.
The credits for “Puss” are conspicuous by their absence. At the beginning, it says a man named Ising produced the picture for M.G.M., but more than one person wondered who conceived the characters and the plot and directed the story. I was one. And, in addition, told it with such simplicity that it will not confuse children—nor bore adults.
The answer is a pair of young fellows Joe Barbera, who used to work in a bank in New York, and Bill Hanna, who started his film career as a janitor in a cartoon studio the day after he got out of high school.
From now on, because Puss is so good, Joe and Bill are a team of producers and they will have their names in large letters on every moving picture they make.

Office politics weren’t in short supply at the MGM cartoon studio in the late ‘30s and they waft from this story. Ising and Hugh Harman were re-hired by MGM only as a last resort after being fired and it seems clear Fred Quimby decided, or was told, to line up some potential replacements as soon as he could. This newspaper story would certainly be a slap in the face to Ising and a tacit but public message that a new, rising team had arrived—and was responsible for “his” work.

Seven Oscars and 14 Academy Award nominations later, things couldn’t have looked better for Hanna and Barbera. Or the MGM cartoon studio. From Boxoffice magazine of June 4, 1955:

MGM to Double Output of Cartoon Department
HOLLYWOOD—Concurrent with its projected upsurge in feature film production, MGM is doubling the output and personnel of its cartoon department and henceforth will turn out 18 pen-and-ink subjects annually, all in CinemaScope and Technicolor.
Hal Elias, associated for 18 years with the production and distribution of MGM short subjects, has been upped to manager of the cartoon division, headed by Fred Quimby, who is leaving on an extended vacation.
At the same time Joseph Barbera and William Hanna, writer-director team on the “Tom and Jerry” series, were promoted to full producer status and will supervise all of the 18 planned cartoons. Nine will be in the “Tom and Jerry” group, six will star “Droopy” and the balance will be adapted from published works.

According to Barbera’s autobiography, Quimby made his vacation permanent after announcing his retirement to the studio staff in early 1956.

But MGM was in turmoil. Trade papers reveal a merry-go-round of top-level executive changes and shareholder unrest. And then came a phone call to Hal Elias. At least, that’s how Bill and Joe remember it. Boxoffice explains what happened in its issue of December 22, 1956:

MGM Halts Production Of Cartoons Temporarily
While much of the industry’s limelight during recent weeks has been directed toward Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, its executive personnel and its future program, Leo’s cartoon department is getting set for a complete shutdown—not because the mighty Metro is going to stop the production of animated subjects, but due to the fact that the studio reportedly has a two-year backlog of shorties, and the front office brass considers that a halt should be called while some of this finished celluloid is absorbed by the market.

Barbera once mentioned another reason; old MGM cartoons could be re-released (and had been since November 1947) and make the studio 90% of the profits of new cartoons, with only the cost of printing and distribution to worry about. MGM had been booking a compilation of shorts (live action and animated) called the Tom and Jerry Cartoon Festival only several months earlier, complete with promotional manual for theatre owners.

So Hanna and Barbera got together and formed their own company. And they either went to, or got an offer from, the man who directed Anchor’s Aweigh (1945), for which Hanna and Barbera supplied animation of Jerry dancing with Gene Kelly. From Boxoffice of July 13, 1957:

George Sidney Organizes Cartoon Production Firm
Columbia executive producer George Sidney has announced plans to branch out into the production of cartoons with the formation of H.B. Enterprises, Inc., under which banner he will make feature cartoon films for theatrical consumption as well as shorter television and industry products.
Associated with Sidney in the organization are former MGM cartoon toppers William Hanna and Joe Barbera, who created, wrote and directed all the “Tom and Jerry” cartoons.
The new project has no connection with George Sidney Productions, releasing through Columbia and which already has made “Jeanne Eagels” and “Pal Joey.”

Sidney’s percentage of the action was not disclosed.

So we have six and a half months between the time of the announced shutdown of the MGM cartoon studio and the formation of H-B Enterprises. When did Ruff and Reddy get created? Joe Barbera recalled in his interview with the Archive of American Television:

We went over, finally, to Screen Gems. In the meantime, I had sat home one time and I did a story, I boarded it, and I created a dog and a cat, called ‘em Ruff and Reddy. And my daughter Jayne who’s 12 years old, she put the color on them.

Barbera created it? It just may be the idea germinated months before the MGM announcement and Joe Barbera didn’t have a thing to do with it.

Keith Scott’s wonderful book The Moose That Roared reveals that Bill Hanna entered into a partnership with MGM’s other cartoon director—Mike Lah—in a company called Shield Productions. As a side note, a third partner was MGM background artist Don Driscoll, a buddy of Ed Benedict’s who had been working on CinemaScope remakes of old Tex Avery cartoons. Scott’s book says Shield was working on resurrecting the first real made-for-TV cartoon, Crusader Rabbit. But there was more than that. Shields had several shows in production. Guess what one of them was? The U.S Government Catalog of Copyright Entries shows the following:

SHIELD PRODUCTIONS, INC.
Ruff and Reddy, 2 v. © Shield Productions, Inc.; 25May56; A238905-238906.

But these weren’t actual cartoons. What was copyrighted was two volumes in book form. So were these synopses of cartoons? Unless someone actually goes through the records, we won’t know. What is clear is the idea of Ruff and Reddy—and all we have is the name and nothing else—was in Bill Hanna’s head before he found out the MGM studio was closing and that it was tied in with a cartoon house separate and apart from Joe Barbera.

Shield ran into trouble over the rights to Crusader Rabbit when the company was three months into production. That apparently ended Shield Productions. But it didn’t end Ruff and Reddy, which Hanna used to kick off his new company with Barbara. Dick Bickenbach told historian Mike Barrier that he roughed out the animation for the titles of the show the last two days he was at MGM, though no date or even month is revealed.

So, we’re back at July 1957. Days after Sidney came on board, he brokered a deal with Screen Gems, Columbia Pictures’ TV arm. The meeting resulted in an option for five, five-minute cartoons at $2,700 apiece for the first two, $2,800 each for the second two and $3,000 for the last one. And somewhere on the way, Columbia’s Harry Cohn got a chunk of the company (20% as Joe Barbera remembered it).

With capital in hand, H-B Enterprises moved into the old Chaplin studio on Highland Avenue. Then, according to Barbera’s book, Cohn mistook a pencil test for a real cartoon and ordered Mitchell to stop production for good. But Barbera goes on to say Roger Muir, the producer of The Howdy Doody Show at NBC in New York,

Heard about ‘Ruff and Reddy’ [Barbera doesn’t disclose how] and wanted us to use the cartoons much as we had originally planned—as bookends [on a new puppet show] between which hoary old theatricals would run. Muir’s offer kept us alive, and Screen Gems went ahead with the deal. Now we had to swing into production full tilt.

But the Saturday Evening Post of December 2, 1961 has a far more lacklustre version in an article on the studio:

Screen Gems, Columbia Pictures TV subsidiary, gambled $10,000 to see some sample cartoons about a dim-witted dog named Ruff and a frisky cat named Reddy. Almost immediately Screen Gems sold the samples to NBC as a series and Hanna-Barbara Productions was in business.

It’s uncanny how all contemporary stories about the studio speak of instant success, while Barbera’s recollections later in life feature a multitude of tales about a studio and characters being rescued at the last minute from more melodramatic endings than Penelope Pitstop.

Whatever the case, the NBC deal was done by early-ish November, when newspapers and trade publications started mentioning the show. From Oscar Godbout’s Hollywood news in the New York Times of November 11:

It looks as though N. B. C.’s “Gumby” show on Saturday morning may be supplanted by a pair of space-traveling animals. The network has purchased a new cartoon series, “Ruff and Reddy,”—a cat and a dog—from Screen Gems. The four-minute films will form part of a half-hour children’s program. The animated films depicting the adventures of the characters on the “Aluminum Planet of Muni-mula,” will be seen beginning next month. Each comprised of “Ruff and Reddy” installments and two first-run cartoons from the Columbia Pictures studio film library.

A Billboard story out of New York on November 18 mentioned a start date of Saturday, December 21 but the first Ruff and Reddy aired the Saturday before (December 14th), 10:30 a.m. in the East, 9:30 a.m. in the central states and 9 a.m. on the West Coast, though, if TV listings are to be believed, KRCA in Los Angeles ran something else and didn’t air the show until the 21st. The Billboard story called the studio “B&H Productions” and one newspaper referred to “Fred Hanna and Joe Barber.”

There were 12 adventures in all, each in 13 parts running about 3½ minutes. I’m loath to copy what fill-in-your-own-blank internet sites say about when each aired, but it appears the cartoons aired in first-run over the course of three seasons. They were copyrighted as follows:

September 15, 1957 (H-B Enterprises): Series ‘A’, Planet Pirates; Series ‘B’, Pinky the Pint-Sized Pachyderm; Series ‘C’, Westward Ho Ho Ho; Series ‘D’, Treasure of Doubloon Lagoon; Series ‘F’, Egg Yeggs; Series ‘G’, Scary Tale of a Canyon Trail.
September 15, 1958 (H-B Enterprises): Series ‘H’, Fantastic Phantom; Series ‘I’, Missile Fizzle; Series ‘L’, Dizzy Deputies; Series ‘M’, Spooky Meeting at Spooky Rock.
September 15, 1959 (Hanna-Barbera Productions): Series ‘N’, Sky High Guys; Series ‘O’, Misguided Missile.

There were no series ‘E’, ‘J’ and ‘K’. ‘E’ was used for Pixie and Dixie production numbers, ‘J’ for cartoons in the Quick Draw show and ‘K’ for the Huckleberry Hound half-hours.

Huck debuted in 1958 and Quick Draw in 1959, so it appears Ruff and Reddy was still in production when those two series were being animated. Quite a load, considering Loopy De Loop first appeared in theatres in fall of 1959.

The only credits I’ve ever seen on the cartoons are Hanna’s and Barbera’s.

Both Bill and Joe told how they hired many, or most, of the people who worked with them at MGM. That’s not quite the case. Credited artists at Metro in the last year were Lew Marshall, Ken Muse, Jim Escalante, Carlo Vinci, Irv Spence, Bill Schipek, Ken Southworth, Herman Cohen, Dick Bickenbach, Bob Gentle, Fernando Montealegre, Roberta Greutert, Don Driscoll (who remade backgrounds from old Avery cartoons for CinemaScope) and Ed Benedict, along with director Mike Lah. Escalante, Spence, Southworth, Cohen and Driscoll seem to have moved on. It’s unclear whether Schipek was with H-B Enterprises at the start. Lah fit in some animation and layouts for the new studio while working at Quartet. Of course, none of the uncredited assistant animators (Lefty Callahan, Joe Finck and a chap named Jerry Eisenberg among them) were needed. But uncredited background artist Art Lozzi was found a place. Brightman carried on supplying material for Walter Lantz cartoons. There was no expensive orchestra; Scott Bradley’s services were replaced by a sound cutter working with production library music. And Barbera recalled sound and camera work was originally sub-contracted. A random viewing of a handful of the cartoons in the first season shows some familiar artists at work—Vinci, Muse, Lah and Benedict among them. Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon worked on the first two Ruff and Reddy seasons, but whether they were responsible for the two adventures in the 1959 season (26 cartoons in all), or Warren Foster and Mike Maltese were (they were writing the other H-B cartoons that season) isn’t known. And it’s well-known that Daws Butler and Don Messick, who had freelanced at MGM, did all the voices on the new series.

There’s one puzzling thing in all this. Hanna’s book relates “NBC signed up to a five-year contract to produce and develop additional (italics mine) cartoon series for television,” presumably as a result of Ruff and Reddy. But what happened? The studio did nothing of the kind. Within that five year period, it created three half-hour shows for Kellogg’s (Huck, Quick Draw, Yogi), another set of cartoons for syndication (Lippy the Lion, Touché Turtle, Wally Gator) and three prime-time half-hours for ABC (Flintstones, Top Cat, Jetsons). What about the deal with NBC? Joe Barbera’s later books and interviews are completely silent on it. Steven H. Scheuer, in a syndicated column from May 11, 1958, mentions “NBC has a ten-year option on Ruff ‘N Reddy and evidently plans to continue running the show on Saturday morning” but nothing at all about that five-year contract. I’ve not researched contemporary trade publications to see if it was mentioned. It’s hard to believe Hanna was mistaken. It’s easier to believe something fell apart, the deal was torn up and Barbera couldn’t figure out how to spin this into a good-publicity cliff-hanger so he simply ignored talking about it. In any case, it’s something for historical diggers to solve.

Ruff and Reddy is not a great show. Shows goes overboard with his cheesy rhyming couplets and titles in his coy attempt to be amusing. It’s a far cry from the smart-ass dialogue Warners cartoons that smart kids could watch the same morning. Reddy is an ignorant blow-hard far too impressed with himself and who thinks fists solve anything. Audiences are supposed to cheer for that? Ruff seems to spend most cartoons either running from something or saying “Reddy’s in trouble!”; a co-star should have a bit more to him than unwavering earnestness. And why is the cat named ‘Ruff’? Wouldn’t it make more sense for that to be the dog’s name?

Elements of Ruff and Reddy were borrowed by Hanna and Barbera for later cartoons, mainly some secondary character designs and Reddy’s North Carolina hound-dog voice (Daws Butler made Huck sound a little more laconic so the two don’t quite sound the same). But Ruff and Reddy’s true accomplishment was it sparked the Hanna-Barbera empire. And, for that, it deserves a bit more than being a footnote in television history.

Flintstones, Sunday, December 1961

2011-12-11T08:38:00.000-08:00

There are anti-anachronistic types out there who complain that the Flintstones shouldn’t celebrate Christmas because the Stone Age was before the birth of Christ. Cartoons with animals that talk, they can handle. But cartoons with Christmas before Christ just ain’t factual, they bemoan.

Well, leave it to good old Gene Hazelton (or whoever wrote the story) to come up to an explanation. We’ll get to it in a bit. But, first, the other Flintstones Sunday comics (Saturday in Canada) from 50 years ago this month.

Wilma’s fickle in the comic from December 3. I like how Dino appears in the opening panel, even though he doesn’t really have anything to do. It happened in a bunch of comics. And that model in the pillbox hat. “White House.” 1961. Hmmm.

Barney was sure fascinated with flying, wasn’t he? Flintstones fans have seen ‘The Flintstone Flyer’ (1960) countless times, no doubt. It was reworked into one of the Sunday comics. There was another flying story on December 10. It features the old, dopey version of Barney.

Ah, the smug version of Fred. Pebbles took care of that, didn’t she? But Pebbles wasn’t around on December 17 so Fred isn’t Mr. Doting Domestic Daddy yet. He’s still a jerk. And he gets his in the end.

Here’s the Christmas comic, from December 24, featuring the Psychic Psanta. I can hear Hal Smith as the Jolly Old Elf. Humbug to you who still complain about Christmas Before Christ after this.

Barney’s nostrils make an appearance on December 31. They were featured in one of the earliest TV cartoons, too, but I can’t remember which one now.

As usual, click on any of the comics to make them bigger.

Snooper and Blabber — Not So Dummy

2011-12-10T08:35:00.000-08:00

Produced and Directed by Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna.
Credits: Animation – Carlo Vinci; Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre; Story – Mike Maltese; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Lawrence Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Snooper, Blabber, O.U. Goony, Irish Cop – Daws Butler; Baby Pants Pinkie, Ventro, Ringmaster – Doug Young.
Music: Phil Green; Jack Shaindlin, Emil Cadkin/Harry Bluestone.
First Aired: week of December 14, 1959 (repeated, week of June 13, 1960).
Episode: Quick Draw McGraw Show M-012
Plot: Snooper and Blabber try to catch a crook disguised as a ventriloquist dummy.

The ventriloquist’s dummy is alive! Well, that’s not really quite the concept here, which was used so well by Rod Serling on The Twilight Zone in 1962. But, a few years before that, Mike Maltese concocted a nice little (and far less dark) story where it turns out the ventriloquist’s dummy really is just a disguise (see footnote).

Maltese and Daws Butler are the best parts of the cartoon. Chuck Jones used to say that Maltese was more of a gagman than a storyman, but the story here is well constructed, with gags, a few surprises and a climax along the way. And Daws tosses in a bunch of mangled pronunciations, something that fits Snooper, whose voice is borrowed from someone who did the same thing—Archie of radio’s Duffy’s Tavern.

Maltese is borrowing from himself, as well. This is the second cartoon where Snooper and Blabber take on Baby Pants Pinkie, who is a reworking of Baby Face Finster of Baby Buggy Bugs (1954) he invented at Warner Bros.

Carlo Vinci’s here, too, with some of his distinctive visual tics. Snoop makes a diving leap exit off stage and Pinkie has that huge bar of teeth that Vinci liked using in the first couple of years at Hanna-Barbera (he seems to have phased them out after the first episode of The Flintstones he drew).

The opening shot closes in on one of Monty’s backgrounds. A bunch of Snooper cartoons opened with a shot of an eyeball on a door or a window, no two of them alike. Snoop answers the phone by tagging out his line with a non-sequitur “We also make keys and restring tennis rackets.” We find out “some dishonest crook”—as if there’s an honest kind—“has been stealing the receipts from Goony Island” (Daws pronounces the “p”).

Off they go. Here’s a rare case of a background being re-used. The same cityscape with the garbled letters on one storefront first appeared in Desperate Diamond Dimwits then again in Flea and Me. Another city backgrounds ended up in a couple of cartoons in the first season, the one with fountain in Disappearing, Inc.

They arrive at the Goony Island amusement park. Interesting poster by Monty in the background.

On the way to O.U. Goony’s office, they pass Ventro the Ventriloquist with his dummy. Blab gets insulted by the dummy but is too much of a dummy to realise it. Bick tries a silhouette layout in Goony’s office. A shame the studio never tried this more often because it’s a nice effect. Goony explains “the lack of lucre” in the till started happening when Ventro got hired, so Snoop decides to “interrogate this dummy tonsil.”

Snoop butchers the language when he kicks open the door to Ventro’s dressing room and says “Pardon the incision” and decides to check the closet to see what “family skulk-ertons” are in the closet. He opens the door and, just like in a horror movie, the body falls out. But Snoop realises he’s not a ventriloquist at all, which means the dummy is the real ventriloquist or, rather, he’s Baby Pants Pinkie (he introduces himself by whipping out a gun and pointing it at Blab). Baby Pants makes a run for it (to the tune of Jack Shaindlin’s ‘On the Run.’

Snoop: Halt in the name of the alumni of Private Eye High!

Here come the puns. Snoop pokes his hole in a tent. “You ain’t got a chance, Baby Pants, so you’d better play ball.” Indeed he does. Snoop’s peering into one of those throw-the-baseball-at-the-target games. And Baby Pants nails his target—Snoop’s head—every time in a bit of cycle animation.

Snoop: I gotta admit. This Baby Pants’d be great in the Little League.

Baby Pants takes off again. Snoop corrals him inside a tent. “Let him have your gun,” Blab demands. You can guess the result. Next, Snoop chases Baby Pants onto a roller coaster. “Folly that crook,” he says to the empty car. You can guess the result (how would an empty car know to zoom off, anyway?). Snoop gets in another car and rides the coaster standing up. A sign reads ‘Please Remain Seated.’ Snoop begins to read it but by the time he’s finished, uh, you can guess the result.

Meanwhile, a ringmaster—except there’s no ring because he’s outside—is introducing on a platform high above, The Great Divo, who will dive into a glass of water below. He doesn’t get the chance. Snoop drops past him and into the little glass. Maltese brazenly puts this line in the dialogue:

Snoop: Leave us face it. I’m in a glass by myself.

As the audience recovers from the pain of the pun, the scene cuts to Baby Pants marching to Ventro’s dressing room door to grab the loot and get away. He opens the door and is shocked to find Ventro “your dummy” standing there with a gun. Baby Pants runs away to surrender and then Ventro removes his head to show it’s really Blab in there (who did a pretty good impression of Doug Young talking, too). He turns to the camera.

Blab: Who’s the dummy now? Right, folks?

Now that the cartoon’s climax has been reached, there’s one thing left. Blab hears Snoop off-stage crying for help.

Blab (to Snooper): You look terrible. Can I get you a glass of water or somethin’?

Snoop responds and the cartoon’s at an end.

Some of the music selections are pretty good in this. Snoop’s fall is accompanied by a piece of scale-dropping string music by Harry Bluestone and Emil Cadkin. And the climactic scene in the dressing room is accompanied by the giddyup strings of ‘Suspence Under Dialogue’ by Jack Shaindlin. And this is another cartoon that ends with Phil Green’s ‘Custard Pie Capers.’

0:00 - Snooper and Blabber Main Title theme (Curtin).
0:25 - GR-65 BUSH BABY (Green) – Office scene.
1:08 - GR-248 STREETS OF THE CITY (Green) – Car scene.
1:25 - related to ‘Sportscope’ (Shaindlin) – Blab talks to dummy.
2:05 - GR-93 DRESSED TO KILL (Green) – Goony office scene.
2:29 - CB-85A STEALTHY MOUSE (Bluestone-Cadkin) – Dressing room scene.
4:01 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) – Snoop and Blab chase Pinkie, Snoop pokes head through hole.
4:22 - fast circus chase music (Shaindlin) – Baseball tossing scene, Snoop and Blab skid to a stop.
4:53 - CAPERS (Shaindlin) – Snoop demands a surrender, gets shot, Blab points.
5:12 - circus running music (Shaindlin) – Pinkie runs, roller coaster, sign clobbers Snoop.
5:46 - CB-83A MR TIPPY TOES (Bluestone-Cadkin) – Snoop falls, lands in glass of water.
6:21 - EXCITEMENT UNDER DIALOGUE (Shaindlin) – Pinkie goes to dressing room, runs away, Blab takes off mask.
6:53 - GR-77 CUSTARD PIE CAPERS (Green) – Snoop in glass, iris closes.
7:10 - Snooper and Blabber End Title theme (Curtin).

Yowp note: Hanna-Barbera used a ventriloquist dummy disguise, in a manner of speaking, in Itty Bitty Fred (1964), where Fred Flintstone shrinks himself by accident, then tries to cash in by pretending to be Barney Rubble’s dummy. Story by Tony Benedict.

Buy Hanna-Barbera Today!

2011-12-07T08:07:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows the Capitalist Cartoon Credo:

● Create a popular character
● Merchandise the crap out of it.

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera learned it from Walt Disney, who learned it from Pat Sullivan (Felix the Cat) who learned it from, well, maybe Bud Fisher (Mutt and Jeff), who probably learned it from someone before him. And every time you see a Buzz Lightyear doll on a store shelf, you’ll know that studios are still learning it today.

Yowp freelance correspondent Billie Towser has scoured the internet for objets d’Hanna-Barbera, and we pass them on for your viewing pleasure.

These are button puppets, made in Hong Kong. Push the button underneath, and the character jumps around. Dino’s the colour he was on the first/second season opening and closing. I’d rather not think what that is sticking down under Hoppy.

And here’s Cindy, Yogi , Huck, Yogi, Mr. Jinks (holding a meece) and Magilla Gorilla (with an exceptionally big muzzle). Jinks is not only the wrong colour and looks more like Fibber Fox, he’s staring for some reason. And what’s Magilla holding?

You thought Hanna-Barbera liked channelling the The Jackie Gleason Show? First, Yogi borrowed Ed Norton’s hat and vest and a bit of his voice. Then Fred Flintstone borrowed Ralph Kramden’s bombast (and Barney Rubble, when played by Daws Butler, purloined another bit of Ed Norton’s voice). Oh, and then there are the times Yogi raises up his arms and says “And away we go!” like Gleason at the start of his show. Now, Yogi’s restaurant uses another Gleason catchphrase “How sweet it is!” But it appears the dinner special is borrowing from The Beverly Hillbillies. Who needs Honey-Fried Chicken when there are gizzards in the deep-frier.

If you grew up in the 1960s, you had a View-Master. It was the perfect family invention. Parents could watch boring 3D rotary slides of the canals of Venice or something like that. Kids could watch cartoons. It was a little odd, but fascinating, seeing the characters you watched on TV when they weren’t flat. Here are some great ones of Yogi Bear. Does anyone know anything about the artists who made these? Talk about unsung.

Here’s something I’ve never heard of and about all I can find out about ‘Silly Sun Pix’ is it sold in 1965 for 99 cents. I have no idea how the camera works. And I have no idea why I’d want a picture of Mushmouse, anyway.

And I post this because I’m sipping on a cup of tea right now. Granted, I boiled water and dumped it on top of a tea bag in a coffee cup from a defunct radio station. I didn’t use this fine, four-inch tea pot with Huckleberry Hound on it. It was made in Japan back when that meant “people buy fine American-made Oldsmobiles, not junky Datsuns.” Times, of course, change, and no longer can you buy a new Olds. Or drink from a Huck Hound tea service for that matter. I like the fact it serves three and comes with a two-inch-wide cream pitcher. Perfect for mom, dad and child to watch The Huckleberry Hound Show. See how Huck kept families together? Could Gilligan’s Planet say the same thing?

My thanks again to Billie, who has sent me a bunch more snapshots which we’ll get up in the new year.

Yogi Bear, Sunday, December 1961

2011-12-04T07:11:00.000-08:00

What’s with Yogi Bear and Boy Scouts? Oh, right. Bill Hanna was heavily into the scouting movement. Yogi met up with Scouts in ‘Cub Scout Boo-Boo’ (written by Warren Foster) and then again in the comics twice in 1961. The second time was on December 3rd. They’re über-cute. Big dots for eyes and large freckles.

Incidentally, did you know there are two Yogi Bear Scout songs? The lyrics are HERE and HERE. You can even follow along with the movements you make while singing it. You’re supposed to pretend you’re flipping hair like an airhead or being a model when you act out “Cindy Bear.” I wonder what women’s groups think of that?

Yogi puts on over on Ranger Smith on December 10th. Several animated cartoons featured “Do Not Feed the Bear” signs and, of course, one was featured in the opening of ‘The Yogi Bear Show.’ In fact, the end gag here is a variation on the one in the opening when our hero scrawls “Except Yogi!” on the sign.

The itinerate, helpful Yogi is featured in the December 17th. I like it when he can get away from Jellystone and do other things, but it happened all too rarely on TV once Foster started writing his cartoons in 1959.

No, Yogi Bear’s first Christmas wasn’t in a wretched 1980 TV special. It was in the comics in 1961. Appropriately, on December 24th, the comic features Yogi playing Santa for a group of Disneyesque forest animals. Naturally, the real St. Nick shows up. It’s kind of cute. Better than TV shows with some guy wearing a Davey Crockett skunk hat.

Heap-big character talk like stereotype-um in the December 31st comic. This is an odd one. I wonder if it could have been turned into an animated short. I suppose someone like Tex Avery could do a string of avoiding-the-rain sight gags but it might have been a bit much for the dialogue-heavy H-B studio.

As usual, click on the comic to make it bigger. We should have The Flintstones newspaper comics for the same month next weekend.

Huckleberry Hound — A Bully Dog

2011-12-03T07:23:00.000-08:00

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Animation – Ken Muse; Story – Warren Foster; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson (no credits).
Voice Cast – Huckleberry Hound – Daws Butler; Narrator, Dog, Woman – Don Messick.
Music: Bill Loose, Phil Green, Spencer Moore, Geordie Hormel, Jack Shaindlin, Raoul Kraushaar?, Hoyt Curtin, unknown.
First Aired: week of November 2, 1959 (rerun, week of June 6, 1959)
Production No K-031.
Plot: Huck must get past a dog to deliver a telegram.

You can’t get much more basic than this cartoon. Dog snickers. Huck chats to audience then tries to get something past dog. Dog crushes plan. Dog snickers. Huck makes crack to audience. And over and over it goes until Huck succeeds and there’s a surprise ending.

Yes, this is the plot of Postman Panic from the previous season, except Warren Foster made Huck a messenger boy instead of a postman. Yes, the same white, studded-collared, snickering dog that bothered Huck in Postman Panic and, originally, in Fireman Huck, is back. And, yes, this is pretty well a tried and true cartoon format; you don’t have look much past some of the Sylvester and Tweety cartoons that Foster wrote.

This is the only Huck cartoon I can’t find any credits for. You can easily tell the animation is by Ken Muse. For the first two seasons of the Huck show, no one else drew characters with a thin, half-row of upper teeth. The most interesting background is the very simple, stylised streetscape at the start of the cartoon. And as for character design, check out the dowager with the Fred Flintstone Five o’clock Shadow. If I had to guess, I’d say Bick Bickenbach was responsible; it’s sure not Walt Clinton or Ed Benedict’s work.

Well, the opening’s nice, too. A map of North America with different vast communication hubs, like Minot, North Dakota, lighting up as Don Messick’s narration builds. “Today, the very life of a nation depends on swift communication,” he announces in his best documentary style (appropriately, a cut called ‘Documentary Main Title’ in the Hi-Q library is in the background). Two background drawings of telegraph poles follow, with the camera panning over them, quicker and quicker, meaning about eight seconds of no footage for Ken Muse to draw. “Millions of messages are sped across the wires, linking city to city. And the final link in this chain of speed, speed and more speed is—the messenger boy!”

That’s when Huck strolls into the picture, kicking a can on a sidewalk, singing ‘Clementine.’ He’s got a message to deliver to Mr. Muggins, 400 Regency Drive. He reaches the address. But there’s a dog house. “That can mean trouble.” We can see the dog hiding behind a tree, out of Huck’s sight. Cue the snickering. The half-eye look is a novel design.

The snickering gets really tiresome after awhile. Evidently someone at Hanna-Barbera realised that. About a decade later, Precious Pupp generally limited his snickering as a cap after the bad guy got powdered, not before and after.

Huck doesn’t have any uproarious lines. But it’s typical Huck. He makes his casual observations, then deals with pain, but doesn’t get bothered by anything that happens to him. Daws Butler adeptly bends some syllables that I couldn’t begin to try to spell.

Another old cartoon device is dredged up—the instructional manual with advice that never works. Huck has one on how to deal with dogs (but shouldn’t he know? He is a dog, you know). That’s where the gags come in. Here’s a summary of them.

● Huck asks the dog to “come and sniff my friendly hand. Closer. Closer.” The dog bites it. “That’s a might too close.”
● Huck gives the dog a bone to bury. The dog buries the bone—and Huck.
● Huck does a high wire act to get to the house. The dog runs into the house and gets a rolled up trampoline. I like the shot from Huck’s perspective of the trampoline; there are a few looking slightly up layouts in the cartoon as well. The dog bounces higher and higher on the trampoline (to some music that’s joined in progress; the edit is not good) and bites Huck in the butt.

● Huck uses a pair of bed springs (Mike Maltese used this gag in Ready, Woolen and Able, one of his last Warners cartoons before leaving for Hanna-Barbera). The dog swats him down with a tennis racket before Huck can get over the brick fence. Huck bounces down a manhole and bounces up and down in the sewer, his head bulging the road above. “Well, back to the li’l ol’ helpful hints book,” is the best tag line that Foster can come up with. No snickering in this scene.
● Huck hides in “a ashcan.” The dog, who is on a branch up a tree, drops a convenient anvil on him (the impact is off camera).
● Huck (without a Tarzan yell) swings from a thin rope toward an open winder, uh, window. The dog and his trowel quickly fill the window with bricks. Huck crashes into them. “Well, at least I got to the door,” he sighs to us.

● Huck rings the doorbell. “Telegram for Mr. Muggins!” The woman with the 5 o’clock shadow opens up and cries for Mr. Muggins. It turns out Mr. Muggins is the dog, who chomps Huck on the butt again. She sent the telegram to her dog for his birthday. Despite all this, the smiling Huck is delighted to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the dog, still attached to his rear because “it’s the Code of the Messenger Boys.” So the cartoon ends with ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to ‘Clementine,’ as the dog snickers.

Foster brought back the dog and his snicker the following season in the funnier Nuts Over Mutts. The dog doesn’t have a name in that one. Those inflicted with Continuity Obsession Disorder will now insist the dog is named “Mr. Muggins” in all his appearances, but the name was merely used to set up a gag in this one cartoon. Yowp recommends anyone who can’t control their desire to inflict continuity on cartoons in an era where such never existed should join C.O. Anonymous.

The sound cutter back-timed a circus-evoking cue in the trampoline scene, but I can only guess its origin; probably the Sam Fox library, though Jack Shaindlin liked using saxophones in some late ‘40s cues. And that unidentified short, reverb, muted trumpet and bass clarinet cue makes another appearance.

0:00 - Huckleberry Hound Sub Main Title theme (Curtin).
0:13 - EM-147 DOCUMENTARY MAIN TITLE (Green) – Telegraph poles, can kicked on sidewalk.
0:32 - Clementine (Trad.) – Huck appears, Narrator: “Delivering a message to...”
0:49 - L-80 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – “Mr Muggins...”, dog bites Huck, opens book, decides to be friendly.
2:21 - creepy reverb muted trumpet cue (Kraushaar?) – Dog bites hand scene.
2:49 - ZR-51 LIGHT ANIMATION (Hormel) – Huck decides to get bone, drops bone on string.
3:09 - LICKETY SPLIT (Shaindlin) – “Whilst I deliver...”, dog buries Huck.
3:30 - LAF 27-6 UNTITED TUNE (Shaindlin) - Huck reads book, walks line toward house.
3:51 - LICKETY SPLIT (Shaindlin) – Dog runs out of house with newspaper.
3:56 - Clementine (Trad.) – Huck on line, dog snickers next to trampoline.
4:14 - trapeze music (unknown) – Huck on wire, dog bites Huck in butt.
4:28 - TC-437 SHOPPING DAY (Loose-Seely) – Huck on bed springs scene.
5:12 - C-3 DOMESTIC CHILDREN (Loose) – Garbage can/anvil scene.
5:38 - C-14 DOMESTIC LIGHT (Loose) – Window scene, Huck talks to woman.
6:38 - Clementine (Trad.) – Huck sings ‘Happy Birthday’ to dog.
6:55 - Huckleberry Hound End bumper cue (Curtin) – cartoon fades out.
6:58 - Huckleberry Hound Sub End Title theme (Curtin).

The Hanna-Barbera Story, 1960

2011-11-30T08:22:00.000-08:00

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera spent several decades polishing the tale of how their studio rose to fame. The story sounded a lot better over time as details got a bit of a make-over.

Here’s a feature piece by Larry Wolters of the Chicago Tribune of November 13, 1960. That was still in the “Wonderful Huck” period of the studio. Hanna-Barbera cartoons were lauded everywhere. They weren’t the old theatricals that critics were tired of (ironically, those were the cartoons where Hanna and Barbera got a lot of their gags and situations). And they compared pretty well, humour-wise, to live-action comedy shows on TV at the time (can anyone really sit through ‘I Married Joan?’).

Anyway, here’s the article with some poor photocopies of two of the four pictures that went with it. I’ll make a couple of observations below.

YOGI BEAR and HUCKLEBERRY
Channel 9's Cartoon Rascals Are the Rage at Yale, the South Pole, and at Home
RECENTLY a telephone conversation between a grandfather and his 5 year old grandson ended abruptly with these words: “I can't talk anymore now, gramps, Huckleberry Hound is on.”
Huckleberry Hound and his friend Yogi Bear and another TV cartoon show Quick Draw McGraw are causing parents to race their offspring to the best viewing spot in front of the set to follow the adventures of these amusing channel 9 characters.
A poll at Yale university last season proved them to be the most popular TV characters at this Ivy league institution. A learned society at Pasadena asked that the shows be shifted to a later hour so the membership could watch.
In two short years Huck and Quick Draw have become famous in far-flung outposts of the world. Down in the Antarctic’s Bellinghausen sea sits a tiny island that bears the name of Huckleberry Hound. It was named by the crew of the United States coast guard icebreaker Glacier who love the noble hearted pooch with the look of a bloodhound and a voice not unlike that of the drawling Andy Griffith.
The show is also a hit in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Syndicated on some 180 American stations, these creations of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera have become just about the most beloved cartoon characters since Disney invented Mickey Mouse.
Huck’s friends include Mr. Jinks, a method acting cat; Yogi, a porkpie wearing bruin who reminds you of Art Carney. Huck is a sort of canine Robin Hood. Once he took out after a tyrant who refused to permit his subjects to pay their taxes with credit cards. This and other good works so endeared him to the Hull (England) Jazz and Cycling society that it changed its name to the Huckleberry Hound club.
Huck’s friends don’t go in for such complicated social reforms as he does. Yogi Bear and his small bear buddy, Boo-Boo, live in Jellystone park, a national preserve, where they try to cadge food from tourists. Mr. Jinx [sic], a masochistic cat, has a lot of misadventures with Pixie and Dixie, two roguish mice.
Quick Draw McGraw, just as popular as Huck, is the hero of another western but no ordinary western. He’s a horse. And his adventures are not child’s play. He’s more adult than any adult western.
Others who help enliven his adventures are Bobba Looey [sic], a Mexican burro with a heart of gold who sounds like Desi Arnaz; Shagglepuss [sic], a playful lion with a Bert Lahr inflection; Snooper, a cat duplicate of Ed (Archie) Gardner; Blabber, probably the first mouse to work in cahoots with a pussy; Augie Doggie, a potential juvenile delinquent dog; Augie’s dad with a voice like Jimmy Durante’s, and a goat whose voice and romantic outlook are similar to those of Maurice Chevalier.
Hanna and Barbera used to do the Tom and Jerry animated cartoon series at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. They lost their jobs after a 20 year stint. They turned out more than 125 cartoons while in the movies and won seven academy awards for the studio. Hanna works as the idea man, Barbera as the cartoonist.
In three years Hanna and Barbera Productions has become the nation’s largest cartoon factory. Besides Huck and Quick Draw they have Ruff and Reddy, and a new one called The Flintstones, a TV cartoon series for adults. It’s a gentle satire on a stone age couple forced to live in current times with Paleolithic problems.
Oddly enough, neither Hanna nor Barbera began their careers as artists. Bill, born in Melrose N. M., spent his school years studying engineering and journalism. After college he joined a firm in California and acted as a structural engineer for the building of the Pantages theater in Hollywood where he later was to receive those Academy awards.
Hanna’s engineering efforts did not last long and he joined Leon Schlessinger’s [sic] cartoon company.
Joe Barbera was born in New York City and attended the American Institute of Banking. After graduation he went to work for a trust company as an accountant. He did more doodling and dreaming, however, then checking up on accounts and started submitting cartoons to leading magazines.
Some of them were accepted so he left the world of finance. In 1937 he joined M-G-M as a story man. Hanna became an animator.
Leaving M-G-M proved the biggest break in their lives. The motion picture business was at an all-time low in 1957 so they asked for and got a release from their contracts. Shortly thereafter M-G-M discontinued cartoon production.
Armed with some new ideas and revolutionary techniques for producing animated cartoons for TV they made the rounds of various ad agencies and production companies. They were met with the same answers everywhere: “It can’t be done. Good animation is too expensive, limited animation too shoddy.”
But on July 7, 1957, Screen Gems decided to take a chance on them. Their new concepts caught on quickly. Their first one was Ruff and Reddy, a story about a frisky cat and a dimwitted dog. Huck arrived a year later and Quick Draw in 1959.
Perhaps one reason why Hanna and Barbera’s shows are so successful is that they’ve gone back to the primary objective of cartooning—to caricature and satire. However, they don’t labor the satire. As one intellectual put it: “You can almost hate children for liking Huckleberry so much. He’s too good for them.” That was the case, too, with Burr Tillstrom and Kukla and Ollie.

It’s interesting that Bill and/or Joe claim they got let out of their contracts before the studio closed. In later years, both made it appear they were callously tossed out on the street and used their last pennies to save their career and create an entire industry—which makes for a better story.

The article mentions a whole list of characters and ends with a no-name goat. He appeared as a gag toward the end of the Quick Draw McGraw cartoon ‘Lamb Chopped.’ Perhaps significant is the mention of Snagglepuss (Wolters really should have checked his spelling), who didn’t have his own cartoon series and wasn’t even a regular character. But, obviously, he made an impression—the early Snagglepuss was arguably a better character than the later version—and no doubt Bill and Joe kept that in mind when looking for two other stars to round out the Yogi Bear Show that debuted only two months later.

Perhaps it’s because the story dealt with television, there’s no mention of the Loopy De Loop theatrical cartoons being made by Hanna-Barbera.

The brief mention of The Flintstones is a foreshadowing of a real change at the studio. In a way, The Flintstones were Hanna-Barbera’s equivalent of Snow White for Disney. Before Snow, all the attention was paid to Disney’s shorts, which were endlessly praised. After, they became the poor step-sister to feature production. So, too, at Hanna-Barbera, that after the debut of The Flintstones, attention was shifted to the studio’s prime-time efforts. No one talked about Huck and Quick Draw, who were relegated to reruns. They deserved a lot better. That’s why this blog is here.

Pixie and Dixie — King-Size Surprise

2011-11-27T05:02:00.000-08:00

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Lew Marshall; Layout – Walt Clinton; Backgrounds – Bob Gentle; Dialogue and Story Sketches – Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voices: Pixie – Don Messick; Dixie, Mr. Jinks, King-Size – Daws Butler.
Music: Bill Loose/John Seely, Jack Shaindlin, Spencer Moore, Geordie Hormel.
First Aired: week of March 2, 1959.
Plot: A dog agrees to protect Pixie and Dixie from Jinks after they help him.

When he and Bill Hanna opened their own studio, Joe Barbera had spent 17 years at MGM writing almost nothing but cat-vs.-mouse cartoons. So it’s not too shocking that when his studio needed instant ideas for 22 cat-vs.-mice cartoons, he’d borrow a bit from his old Metro shorts. And it’s no more apparently than in this cartoon, which owes an awful lot to 1944’s The Bodyguard.

Of course, the idea of ‘I’ll-help-you-because-you-really-helped-me’ goes back to Androcles and the Lion, and Tex Avery took into ridiculousness in the great Bad Luck Blackie (1949). But this cartoon even lifts gags wholesale from the MGM original. One thing this cartoon doesn’t have in common with The Bodyguard is animator Lew Marshall. He wasn’t at MGM when it was made.

It starts the same. In spirit, anyway. Pixie and Dixie are running away from Jinks, who has been chasing them.

Jinks has hidden himself behind the garbage can where the exhausted Pixie and Dixie are vowing to fight the cat “two against one.” Afraid not. Jinks clobbers them with the garbage can lid (do they make metal garbage cans any more?). The vibrating take is the gag. It’s on two drawings on twos.

Charlie Shows works in a rare-for-him pop culture reference. Jinks asks “Are you, like, all shook up?” It’s still early in Jinks’ career so he doesn’t consistently call them “meeces.” In this scene, he calls them “mousies.”

Next scene finds Pixie and Dixie on a sidewalk curb forlornly remarking that Jinks has pushed them too far. Their state of resignation is interrupted by a dog who wants help. In The Bodyguard, the dog has been caught by dog catcher but in this one, he’s only worried about being caught because his dog license tag has fallen through a drainage grate. Shows rhyme time: “Calm down, hound,” says Dixie. Doesn’t Marshall’s dog look like something from a late ‘50s MGM cartoon in this shot? The meece rescue the dog tag or, as Dixie puts it “Operation Dog Tag in the bag.” The dog pledges eternal loyalty to the mice. Unlike The Bodyguard, where the bulldog tells Jerry to whistle if he needs help, this dog tells Pixie and Dixie to “yelp for help.”

The mice now decide to be vengeful and smug. Poor Jinks is merely resting his weary self (can he look any uglier in Marshall’s snore cycle?). Pixie collapses the lawn chair which crashes loudly on the lawn (An explosion sound? On a lawn?). Exclaims the surprised Jinks, “Wow, now!” Good lord, can someone please burn Charlie Shows’ rhyming dictionary? “What’s the matter? All shook up?” says the facetious Dixie. Bitter doesn’t become you, meece.

Jinks grabs the mice who yell for help. Sure enough, just like in The Bodyguard, the cat gets a fist in the face from the dog.

The blog’s revealed before that Marshall has an odd way of animation punches or hits without any contact. This time, he uses four drawings on ones. Here they are slowed down.

“So that’s the scoop-arooni, eh?” exclaims Jinks. How can you not love a cat that uses the word ‘scoop-arooni?’ Anyway, the cartoon emulates The Bodyguard some more as Jinks gets punched every time the meeces call for the dog. First “behind-st” a closed front door. Then in a closet (Dixie: “We have just begun to have fun, son.” Charlie, go away). Then Barbera lifts a gag right out of his old cartoon with a garbage can lid clobbering.

Marshall gives us a Jinks run cycle. It’s six drawings on twos. I’ve slowed it down.

The cat darts under the front steps with the evil mice right behind. Yet another really ugly Jinks drawing from Marshall; the three have turned to zip under the steps. Pixie and Dixie drag Jinks out so he can get clobbered again.

The plot carries on with Barbera digging up more gags from a 15-year-old MGM cartoon as the meeces scream for help. Here they are. First, Jinks fills out his will.

Jinks prays.

But the dog doesn’t come. The dog catcher has him.

King Size lost his dog tag again. So the cartoon ends much the way it started, with the cat chasing the mice. See, meeces? If you had only been forgiving to Jinks, this never would have happened.

Only seven cues are used by the sound cutter (possibly Greg Watson) but, surprisingly, Jack Shaindin’s chase cue ‘Toboggan Run’ isn’t among them as it doesn’t seem to fit the story.

0:00 - Pixie and Dixie instrumental opening theme (Hanna-Barbera-Shows-Curtin).
0:26 - LAF-4-6 PIXIE PRANKS (Shaindlin) – Jink clobbers mice, dog wants help.
1:39 - TC 202 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Mice get dog license, dog promises help.
2:34 - TC 303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Jinks sleeping, King Size punches him, punches cat through door, “Just keep comin’...”
4:31 - TC 300 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – “You keep hollerin’,” closet scene, Jinks hides in garbage can.
5:34 - L 81 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Jinks sees mice, dragged out by mice, King Size in net.
6:35 - LAF-1-1 FISHY STORY (Shaindlin) – King Size apologies, Jinks has “another suggestion.”
6:50 - ZR 48 FAST MOVEMENT (Hormel) – “You’d better really start yelpin’...” Jinks chases mice.
7:10 - Pixie and Dixie closing theme (Curtin).

Yowp note: The unfortunately now-dead Alberto’s page at immaginariofiorentino.com stated Lew Marshall started at MGM in 1947. Former MGMer Martha Sigall says he was an assistant animator—there’s been speculation on the web he was Ray Patterson’s—before becoming a full animator in the studio’s last few years. He did some work on the side; a book called ‘All About Our Dog’ (1949) was illustrated by him and he worked on at least one ‘Flip ‘n’ Dip’ cartoons in Tom and Jerry comics for Western Publishing in 1953. Marshall was born in 1922 and died in 2002. There was a Lewis A. Marshall living in California born in 1922 who was drafted in 1942, but listed his occupation as a metalworker, like a tinsmith or coppersmith.

Dancing Girls and Storyboards

2011-11-25T06:45:00.000-08:00

Pebbles was the beginning of the ruination of The Flintstones, but there are some episodes where she appears that are enjoyable. Daddies Anonymous immediately comes to mind. And I’ve always liked the running gag in Pebbles’ Birthday Party where the Boulderettes high-step their way through the cartoon. There’s a pretty funny scene—it looks like Carlo Vinci’s work—where Fred just can’t get rid of the dancers while trying to restore some kind of normality to the party at his home.

An auction house has some storyboard drawings from the cartoon for sale and you know I’ll use any excuse to post story panels. This isn’t the complete board but you can get an idea of the basics of how the scenes were set up. Fred looks a little overweight in some of these drawings, doesn’t he?

The story was by Tony Benedict. Tony was a more-than-capable and funny artist, but I was surprised when he told me he didn’t draw these. They were done by Alex Lovy, who was the story director on the cartoon. Tony was kind enough to e-mail me an explanation of what happened.

I asked Alex why he re drew my board. Staging for minimum production cost was something he excelled at I had to learn. My boards began sailing through with minimum changes after my chat with Alex.

Lovy had been around since the ‘30s and had directed at Lantz during World War Two, while Tony’s animation career was in its relatively early stages at this time.

A nice gag in the cartoon is where Fred tries to get the kids to play games and they start a round of poker. One of the kids is named Harvey and I note one of the layout artists is the kid of Harvey Eisenberg named Jerry.

The cartoon revolves around a standard plot where a caterer gets Fred’s order for the Water Buffalo Lodge party (where the dancing girls are supposed to be) with his order for his little series-wrecker’s birthday party. The caterer is a sarcastic lippy type, just like the floorwalker Jack Benny used to meet up with on his radio and TV show. I asked Tony about that.

...you are quite correct about the Frank Nelson character. I often wondered why we didn’t use the actors we had in mind when we wrote their parts. They in effect helped to create the characters. Perhaps labor agreements permitted one actor to do additional voices with no additional compensation. But I can't quite imagine money playing such a role.

What it may have boiled down to was versatility. Frank Nelson was a good dramatic actor, but when it came to comedy, he really could only do one voice. Doug Young was doing supporting voices in this cartoon so it was easy to add another character to his list, though Nelson did appear in the show’s first season.

Huck and Yogi by Warren Foster

2011-11-23T07:11:00.000-08:00

Warren Foster took over the writing and storyboarding of the Huckleberry Hound show in 1959 when he arrived from Warner Bros (after a brief stop at the John Sutherland studio). Hanna-Barbera had two good storyboard artists in Dan Gordon and Alex Lovy but Foster was no chicken-scratch sketcher. He had drawn his own boards at Warners and did it when he moved to H-B. His panels are attractive and expressive, and a good starting point for the layout artist.

The Animation Guild Blog has posted a nine-panel sheet from one of those cartoons-between-the-cartoons from the Huck show. It’s a shame the cartoonette itself isn’t around but Foster’s drawings should give you a good idea what it was like.

You can see all nine of them by going HERE. Stephen Worth has identified them as Foster’s. Compare them to Foster’s panels from Ice Box Raider (1961) we posted here before.

It’s nice to see some drawings have survived and we hope a few more surface on the internet for today’s fans to enjoy.

Quick Draw McGraw — Locomotive Loco

2011-11-19T08:11:00.000-08:00

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Animation – Carlo Vinci; Layout – Walt Clinton; Backgrounds – ?; Story – Mike Maltese; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson (no credits available).
Voice Cast: Quick Draw, Baba Looey, Narrator, Eastern Engineer, Western Official, ‘There It Goes’ Man, Ronald Roundhouse – Daws Butler; Western Engineer, Eastern Official, Moose Caboose – Don Messick.
Music: Jack Shaindlin; Phil Green; Hoyt Curtin; Bill Loose/John Seely; Lou De Francesco (?).
First aired: week of February 15, 1960 (rerun, week of August 15, 1960).
Episode: Quick Draw McGraw Show M-021, Production J-56.
Plot: Quick Draw is hired to find the Golden Spike stolen by Moose Caboose.

Cartoons can teach you more than you can learn in a classroom. Cartoons can teach you the lyrics to “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.” They can teach you there was once an actress named Greta Garbo who had really big feet. They can even teach you that books come to life at night then sing and dance. But they don’t teach history all that well.

A good example is this cartoon. It’s about that event which actually had people hovering around telegraph offices eagerly awaiting the first news via dots and dashes—the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Oh, the cartoon starts out accurately alright. Construction of the first coast-to-coast railroad started on both ends of the country and crews worked toward each other. Trains chugged along the tracks from both directions and finally touched cowcatchers (in Promontory, Utah in the U.S. and Craigellachie, B.C. in Canada). The two lines of track were joined together, with the final spike being a golden one (in the U.S., at least), in a ceremony crammed full of watch-chained dignitaries.

However, don’t believe the rest of this cartoon, kids. Moose Caboose did not steal the golden spike and was not hunted down by Quick Draw McGraw in Abilene. Real history teaches us the last spike was quickly removed and replaced lest any Moose Caboose-like thieves made a stealthy appearance. In fact, real history is completely silent about whether there was someone named ‘Moose Caboose’ but it does tell us there is, in fact, a place named Abilene. And a song, too. Probably sung on Karaoke Night at a pub named the ‘Moose Caboose’. But I digress.

Real history isn’t silent when it comes to the delight this specific cartoon brought, and not just to happy kids in Abilene watching this cartoon when it first aired on KPAR Channel 12 in Sweetwater. Vince Leonard of The Pittsburgh Press had this to say about my favourite bit of dialogue in the cartoon in his column of October 12, 1965:

Cartoons continue to hook the adults with the lines. Liked Quick Draw McGraw’s segment on the railroad’s golden spike, stolen by Moose Caboose. “Why don’t you just get another spike?,” he asked. “Because we railroad men have one-track minds,” came the answer. The theme was carried out and it was enjoyable.

It’s a fairly typical Quick Draw cartoon. Our hero does some idiotic things, Mike Maltese comes up with more overly-descriptive dialogue, and Carlo Vinci’s here with a thinner line around the characters, less jerky animation than earlier in the year but his familiar ticks ticking away.

There’s a clever effect at the beginning that I like when the trains are chugging toward each other. They jerk a little forward and backward on the track when travelling across the moving background. It looks each train was on a different place on each cel in a little cycle of halting movement. You’ll notice the trains aren’t quite identical, though their numbers (and presumably their railroad names) are mirror images of each other. I’m surprised they’re not cars from the ‘H and B Railroad.’ Who knows if ‘C and R’ means anything, though designer in this cartoon was Walt Clinton.

A narrator sets up the plot over the initial action, then we get some of Maltese’s contrived dialogue:

Narrator: Officials met to drive in the golden spike.
Western Official: Drive in that terribly expensive golden spike, Eastern Official.

Notice how the spike shines. The glow is on four drawings on twos. No effects animators; Carlo did this all on his own as far as I know.

The spike is grabbed. The Eastern Official engages in one of Carlo’s two-drawing stunned takes. I’ve slowed it down. I presume Walt put camera instructions on his layout. I wonder why he wanted the camera so tight on Carlo’s drawings.

Moose Caboose is spotted on a hand-car holding the spike. He indulges in a little Yogi Bear-type rhyming.

Moose: When I cash in this golden spike, Moose Caboose will live fast and loose.

At least Maltese didn’t put “vamoose” in there.

The next scene is in the office of railroad president Ronald Roundhouse, who must be an Old West relative of Mr. Cogswell from The Jetsons, judging by his voice. This is where we get Vince Leonard’s favourite line. Quick Draw agrees “by Casey Jones!” to track down the golden spike in exchange for a life-time choo-choo pass. Only one. Poor Baba will have to pay.

So Quick Draw sets out. I’d love to have the animation drawings for this loose-limbed walk cycle. The hands and feet are in eight drawings on twos, while the snout goes up and down in four drawings on twos (the second and fourth positions are the same). This is Quick Draw’s idiot scene. He puts his ear on the tracks to hear Moose Caboose’s rail car vibrate on the tracks. But that means he’s not looking when a train chugs toward and over him (the train chugging along is reused from earlier in the cartoon).

Actually, Quick Draw’s half-right. Moose is on the train. Great contrived dialogue from Maltese:

Quick Draw: Return that terribly expensive golden spike, Moose Caboose!
Moose: If you want it, I’ll be in Abilene, a typical, wide-open, rip-roarin’ lawless Western town that was prevalent at the turn of the century.

This line provides an example of Carlo’s way of handling dialogue. Lew Marshall made a nose go up and down like a hamster smelling something. Ed Love used up to seven different head positions, varying the number of frames for each drawing. Mike Lah had the head still and the mouth moving around on the side of the face. Carlo likes the head tilt. When he started at Hanna-Barbera he was doing it in two head drawings and it looked jerky. He later did it in three head positions, changing when he felt the need. He always seems to have used the same angle. You can get idea of it in these drawings.

There’s the big row of upper teeth Carlo liked drawing.

The next scene has Quick Draw and Baba in Abilene (the repeating background consists of six buildings) where they spy a stranger. Catchphrase 1: “Hold on thar!” Quick Draw says to a stranger.

Quick Draw: Have you seen anything of a bad guy hereabouts?
Stranger: Which one? We’re all bad guys in Abilene.
Quick Draw: This here ‘un had a stolen golden spike.
Stranger: You mean Moose Caboose. Well, bein’ a bad guy myself, I don’t mind snitchin’. He’s getting’ purdied-up at the Polecat Barber Shop.

Quick Draw disguises himself as a barber. His scheme: to spin the bad guy around in the chair and let centrifugal force (Quick Draw pronounces it correctly) anything loose from Caboose’s body. And the plan actually works. Baba makes a checklist of everything that goes flying—and that includes the golden spike. But something’s bound to go wrong. It does. The crook has a gun and starts firing at our heroes. Carlo’s standard stretch-dive exit follows (for Baba anyway; Quick Draw leads with the lower part of his body) and Quick Draw runs smack into a post on the porch of the barber shop (Maltese fits in another rhyme: “It’s the calaboose for you, Moose Caboose.”

Caboose grabs the spike from the prone Quick Draw. Now we’ve reached the big scene. Caboose jumps on his handcar with Quick Draw in a locomotive after him. There’s a static shot of a background with two cliffs and three trestles connecting them. Quick Draw and Caboose zip back and forth from side to side, using tunnels like doors in a French bedroom farce. I don’t know whether Bill Hanna handled the timing in this cartoon, or the story director did, but there’s real speed going on here. The trains appear and disappear in nine frames once and ten frames twice. Then after the two screech to a head-on stop, they leave the trestles, there’s a cut, 32 frames go by, and there’s another cut. At Hanna-Barbera, you think of a medium shot with a bunch of chatter, followed by a close-up to break up the monotony, then back to the same medium shot. Quick cutting like this simply isn’t seen in an H-B cartoon.

It’s a shame the cutting doesn’t become faster and faster and then BAM! After the 32-frame footage, the pace slows so Maltese can fit in a dialogue gag. Baba and Quick Draw are now in separate trains heading head-on, chatting to each other like they’re standing next to each other (forget the distance and the noise of the trains). They’ve got Moose Caboose on the tracks in between them.

Baba: Hey, Quickstraw, I thin’ we got him between second and third.
Quick Draw: (to audience) You gotta admit, the li’l feller knows his baseball.

Nope, no “I’ll do the thinnin’ around here” in this cartoon.

The two engines crash into each other. Remarkably, they’re just fine. And they trap Moose Caboose between them. He gives up.

So Quick Draw brings in the golden spike. But you know something’s got to go wrong. It does. The Eastern Official goes to drive in the spike—but misses and clobbers Quick Draw’s foot instead. Catchphrase 2: “Oh, that smarts!” Quick Draw leaps around in pain. Incidentally, you’ll notice the Eastern Official lost the pinstripes on his pants and the rail line looks different in the final shot.

The sound cutter drops in a honky-tonkish piano version of the Quick Draw theme in the middle of the cartoon. It was used in the background of those cartoons-between-the-cartoons on the Quick Draw show. It’s a shame this version of the cue was never released. The rest of the music is of the stock variety. The last cue is a hoedown piece which does not have a composer listed in the Capitol Hi-Q catalogue. It’s been re-released by another music service with the composer’s name removed. My educated guess is it’s by Louis E. De Francesco, simply because his name has been removed from other cues by the same service.

0:00 - Quick Draw McGraw Sub Main Title theme (Curtin).
0:15 - PG-181F LIGHT MECHANICAL BRIDGE (Green) – Trains pull toward each other and stop, greetings from eastern engineer.
0:31 - GR-333 BUSTLING BRIDGE (Green) – Greetings from western engineer, “I’ll be glad to.”
0:52 - GR-248 STREETS OF THE CITY (Green) – “One for the money,” Moose Caboose on train.
1:14 - GR-472 HICKSVILLE (Green) – Ronald Roundhouse scene.
2:10 - TC-205 LIGHT MOVEMENT (Loose-Seely) – Quick Draw and Baba walk on tracks, ear to track.
2:38 - related to Suspense Under Dialogue (Shaindlin) – Shot of train, train runs over Quick Draw, shouts at Moose Caboose.
3:10 - GR-334 LIGHT AGITATED BRIDGE (Green) – Moose Caboose going to Abilene.
3:26 - THAT’S QUICK DRAW McGRAW (Curtin) – “I shall track him down,” Quick Draw talks to stranger.
4:03 - GR-87 SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD (Green) – Quick Draw soaps Caboose, confides in Baba.
4:45 - GR-248 STREETS OF THE CITY (Green) – “Get going, barber!”, stuff flies out, Quick Draw runs into post, trains crash.
6:13 - GR-98 BY JIMINY! IT’S JUMBO BRIDGE No 2 (Green) – Caboose in between trains, gives up.
6:19 - SF-11 LIGHT MOVEMENT (De Francesco?) – Spike ceremony, “Oooch, ouch!”
6:43 - Quick Draw McGraw Sub End Title theme (Curtin).

Flintstones, Sunday, November 1961

2011-11-16T10:51:00.001-08:00

Shall we visit those Modern Stone Age days before Pebbly-Poo, when Fred Flintstone was a grumpy, petty, jealous, insecure jerk? Let’s.

Here’s how Fred was behaving in the Sunday comics (in Canada, Saturday), 50 years ago this month.

I don’t know why Fred and Barney are riding lizards on November 5, but they are. We have a fish that writes in English. And, as much as it looks like a word is missing in the balloon on the sixth panel before Fred says “Luck,” one isn’t. I’ve checked several versions of the cartoon.

Other than Baby Puss, the whole cast appears on November 12. There’s a bit of foreshadowing here. A Goony Bird played by Mel Blanc made an appearance on TV in Fred’s New Job (1963). When I read this comic. I pictured Don Messick.

You loved Gary Granite in The Monster From the Tar Pits. It aired a year before this comic brought him back on November 19. Can you read this dialogue without hearing John Stephenson?

Ah, here’s a gratuitous appearance by Baby Puss on November 26. I like the layout in the fourth panel with all the goats. Did Harvey Eisenberg do this one?

You can click on any of the cartoons to enlarge them.

A Treasury of Hanna-Barbera Bumpers

2011-11-12T09:10:00.000-08:00

Animator Mark Christiansen has alerted the world to someone (and I suspect I know who) that has posted a little gold mine of early Hanna-Barbera stuff I haven’t seen in years.

Maybe it’s just me, but I like watching animated characters outside the actual cartoons, in places like commercials, bumpers, interstitials, um, whatever they’re called. It seems so many of those have been lost to the ages. The late Earl Kress forlornly told me of trying to track down those little cartoons-between-the-cartoons for the Huck and Quick Draw shows. He found some but couldn’t find others.

Someone has them, because they’re on YouTube. I don’t recall any of these being on DVD sets. These are from 1961.

Let’s start with Huck. Mark points out Ed Love animated it and Tony Rivera did the layouts. You’ll notice Hoyt Curtin’s music contains the original Yogi Bear theme but Yogi wasn’t on the Huck show by this time. Hokey Wolf had replaced him. I think Bob Gentle is the background artist here, it looks like his trees.

Here are Ed and Tony again. By the way, Bill Hanna saved money on all these by having Dixie speak but Pixie silent. Saves paying Don Messick to do a voice; Daws Butler did all of them.

It’s the two Eds here, Ed Love and Ed Benedict. The building is like the one Ed Benedict designed for the Augie Doggie cartoon Whatever Goes Pup.

One more from Ed and Ed. If I had to guess, I’d say Art Lozzi did the backgrounds. There’s just the Huck theme in this arrangement, with Curtin’s trombone players at work.

Finally, an original opening and closing for the last episode of The Jetsons, with a little sponsor credit cartoon for Scotch Tape.

The announcer was all over the place in the 1960s. You heard him on ‘The Wonderful World of Disney.’ You loved him on ‘Lost in Space’ (“Danger Will Robinson!”). It’s Dick Tufeld speaking.

When The Jetsons DVD came out, the end credits of all the cartoons had been stripped and replaced with credits from one episode (and disgracefully full of interlacing, see frame to the right). This snippet has the original credits, which shows only Carlo Vinci and Hugh Fraser animated Elroy’s Mob, the story was by the late Barry Blitzer and among the layout artists were Irv Spector and Willie Ito. I learned to distinguish voice artists by watching the credits and you can see (and easily hear) Shep Menken is on this one.

Augie Doggie — Fan Clubbed

2011-11-12T08:02:00.001-08:00

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Dick Lundy; Layout – Walt Clinton; Backgrounds – Art Lozzi; Story – Mike Maltese; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Augie Doggie, Captain Zoom Zoom, Newscaster, Gorilla – Daws Butler; Doggie Daddy – Doug Young.
Music: Jack Shaindlin, Phil Green, Hecky Krasnow.
First Aired: week of January 18, 1960 (rerun, week of July 18, 1960)
Episode: Quick Draw McGraw Show M-017, Production J-54.
Plot: Daddy fills in for an ailing Captain Zoom Zoom at Augie’s birthday party.

One of the pitfalls of watching so many Hanna-Barbera cartoons over the years is you watch one and end up saying to yourself “I know that from somewhere.” Situations, voices, characters. They all seemed to get used over and over by the studio, sometimes with a new take and sometimes barely whitewashed over. Eventually, and slowly, the cartoons suffered through the inbreeding of ideas. Ask me if I’d rather watch Huckleberry Hound or Squiddly Diddly.

A nasty case of Hanna-Barbera Déjà Vu has struck me again watching this cartoon. The character at the centre of this is one Captain Zoom Zoom, who has a catchphrase of “Fweep, fweep, fweep, fweep, fweep!” “Consarn it, Yowp,” I said to myself (or would have if anyone still used the word “consarn”), “I know someone had that ‘fweep’ catchphrase in another cartoon. Who was it? Pixie and Dixie? Elroy Jetson? Magilla Gorilla?”

The internet tells me the correct answer is Wally Gator in an episode I can only presume was written by Mike Maltese borrowing from himself. My aging brain tells me it was also used somewhere else but I can’t think of where. Consarn it. (Note: the answer is in the comment section).

There are a few other familiar things in this cartoon. It’s another one where Daddy reluctantly does something to please Augie only to get bashed around for his trouble. And Augie does a variation of the line he stole from Sylvester, Jr. by putting the back of his hand to his raised forehead and exclaiming “Oh, the birthday shame of it!” And, of course, the ‘TV space captain’ idea got a workout several times as well. Perhaps it’s appropriate in this Maltese effort, as his caricature once appeared as Captain Schmideo in a Warners cartoon.

Animating this short is Dick Lundy, who arrived at Hanna-Barbera in March 1959. Don Duckwall worked under Lundy at Disney and told author Don Peri “He knew a lot of good short cuts that you could take that would save you time but not endanger the product.” That, of course, is a helpful talent for anyone employed in limited animation. I’m lousy at picking out animators but Lundy does something in this cartoon he did in Million-Dollar Robbery. Lundy’s Augie and Daddy look wired. You’ll see them with huge grins or angular, open, happy mouths even when they’re not talking. Occasionally he did this with the other characters that had snouty head constructions like the Daddy clan—Quick Draw in the jeep at the start of the third scene of Bull-Leave Me, for example.

An innocuous statement by Doggie Daddy sets up the cartoon. It’s Augie’s birthday and he’s looking at a cake. “Make a wish, Augie, and if you blow out the candles, your wish will come true.” But Daddy thinks Augie’s wished for skates, a scout bugle and a super-jet model. He’s not even close. Augie wished that Captain Zoom Zoom would be his guest of honour. So now Daddy’s stuck. He promises Augie he’ll go out and flag down Captain Zoom Zoom. Note the hyper expression on Daddy. Where’s he going to find Captain Zoom Zoom? Aha! The TV station. Art Lozzi has painted the streetscape in pastel colours; you’ll find the same effect in some Snooper and Blabber cartoons, like Laughing Guess.

Daddy tells Captain Zoom Zoom that Augie wants him as a birthday guest-of-honour. “Are you kidding? With my spilitting headache? And my dizzy spells? Out, out, out! Out at once,” is the response from the jerk TV star. Daddy’s apparently so upset, he’s forgotten about his nice 1960 Clinton convertible and is walking home. But aha again! He sees a Hallowe’en display in a store window where you can rent a Captain Zoom Zoom costume. So that’s what he does. “How coincidentally can you get?” Daddy asks the audience.

Wait a minute. Space hero of a little boy. Sick and can’t visit his home. Dad gets a costume and fills in. Say, isn’t that the plot of Elroy’s Pal (December 1962)? Yes, I believe it is. How coincidentally can you get?

Cut back to the disappointed Augie. But hark! From atop of telephone/telegraph pole comes the cry of “fweep, fweep” etc. It’s Doggie Daddy in a Captain Zoom Zoom outfit as he crashes through the living room window and lands, butt up, in Augie’s birthday cake.

Augie (talking to Daddy’s butt): I knew you’d come, Captain Zoom Zoom.
Daddy (with head through the table bottom): I’m down here, boy.
Augie (talking to Daddy’s head): I knew you’d come, Captain Zoom Zoom.

Uh, oh. Now Augie wants Daddy to meet Captain Zoom Zoom. The rush-and-change-identities bit works better in live action because the actors are obviously struggling to quickly change to continue the ruse. Cartoon characters can zip at any speed so you lose the sense of effort and, therefore, the comedy. Maltese tries to make up for it by having the re-emerged Daddy pop up into the broken window and call out “Hello, Captain Zoom Zoom, you ol’ son of a sea cook.” People haven’t used that one since they were saying “consarn it.”

Uh, oh, again. We now suddenly learn from Augie Captain Zoom Zoom can zoom through walls and asks Daddy in his Zoom Zoom guise to go through the side of his brick home. Daddy’s plan to stop short of the house gets foiled by that skate he got Augie for his birthday. Daddy trips on it. You can guess what happens next. Actually, it’s kind of cool. He rides the skate through the wall, lands on a tea dolly (“Anybody for tea?” Daddy asks the viewers), which stops at an open window, through which Daddy flies, springs up from a hammock between two trees, crashes through the roof, then rolls out toward Augie on a chair while reading a book. It’s almost as elaborate as some of Maltese’s gags got in Roadrunner cartoons but, unlike Wile E. Coyote, Daddy isn’t beat up at all. “Read any good books lately,” he casually says when the chair stops.

Daddy Zoom Zoom bids farewell to Augie, but there’s a minute, 45 seconds left in the cartoon, so something’s got to happen. A heretofore unheard radio suddenly pipes up and news is intoned that a dangerous escaped gorilla is out there. Daddy boasts he’ll capture the gorilla one his way “to the outer spaces.” Augie asks how he’ll do it. At moment, the gorilla grabs Daddy around the neck. But Daddy’s so engrossed in acting out his tale of derring-do he doesn’t notice until he promises he’ll look the gorilla in the eye, and realises he’s actually doing it. Now Daddy sounds more like William Bendix than Jimmy Durante, as he surmises to the audience “What a revoltin’ development dis is!”

The gorilla chases Daddy, who dives into a manhole to get away. The gorilla grabs the Zoom Zoom cape and the costume comes off Daddy.

A tired Daddy drags himself home in the final scene, where Augie is sitting on the couch with the gorilla, happily wearing the Captain Zoom Zoom costume. They’re watching you-know-who on TV and letting out with a “fweep, fweep.” Daddy ends the cartoon with some fweeps as he resigns himself to watching the show, too.

No surprises in the musical score. We get a couple of snatches of Hecky Krasnow’s ‘The Happy Cobbler’, probably the only piece of music in the early H-B cartoons to have an electric guitar. As you can see, copies of most of the music aren’t available.

0:00 - Augie Doggie Main Title theme (Curtin).
0:25 - CB-89A ROMANTIC JAUNT (Cadkin-Bluestone) – Augie blows out candles, wants Captain Zoom-Zoom, Daddy will flag him down.
2:08 - PG-181F MECHANICAL BRIDGE (Green) – Daddy “fweep, fweep”, decides to go to TV station.
2:22 - PG-177C LIGHT COMEDY MOVEMENT (Green) – Daddy in car, arrives at station.
2:31 - tick tock/flute music (Shaindlin) – Daddy knocks on door, Captain Zoom Zoom has headache, Daddy decides to buy costume.
3:17 - jaunty bassoon and skipping strings (Shaindlin) – Daddy flies in as Captain Zoom Zoom, Augie wants him to go through brick wall, Daddy zips out of scene.
4:42 - SIX DAY BICYCLE RACE (Shaindlin) – Daddy runs, crashes through house, rolls in on chair.
5:14 - THE HAPPY COBBLER (Krasnow) – “Have you read any good books?”, newscast, gorilla grabs Daddy, Daddy realises gorilla has him.
6:20 - related to Suspense Under Dialogue (Shaindlin) – “What a revoltin’ development...”, dives in sewer.
6:43 - THE HAPPY COBBLER (Krasnow) – Everyone watches Captain Zoom Zoom on TV.
7:09 - Augie Doggie End Title theme (Curtin).

Playing Cereal Games

2011-11-09T14:05:00.001-08:00

Cartoons were more than just something on TV. They were something that were part of your part your play-time, too. Especially in 1961.

Those wily folks at Kellogg’s used their sponsorship of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons to get people to buy cereal. And, as an extra incentive, they put contests and games on the back of cereal boxes. In June 1961, they were offering a decoder. See how cleverly it tied in to Huck’s TV show? And in May, there were flip-up cards. (click on the picture to make it larger)

But more involved than all this was a contest where Kellogg’s crunchers could mail in an entry for a contest to help Yogi Bear. Once winners were picked, and of course there was more than one “first prize winner,” news releases were sent their hometown newspapers for added Kellogg’s publicity. Young kids winning contests! A good news story! You’ve got to admire the promotional acumen of the folks at Leo Burnett advertising.

The local paper in Elyria, Ohio gave its readers this tidbit on May 10, 1961:

Janet’s Yogi Plan Better Than Most
Better than the average-type contestant!
That’s eight-year-old Janet Brownstein, 320 Denison Ave., who has saved TV star Yogi Bear from a dilemma on the back of a Kellogg’s cereal package.
Janet, a third grader at McKinley School, was a national first prize winner in the cereal manufacturer’s “Rescue Yogi: contest, in which children of the nation were asked to devise a means of rescuing the “Jellystone Park” bruin from a dangerous situation.
For her winning solution, Janet will receive an 18-inch stuffed toy, made in the image of the popular porkpie-wearing bear. She was notified by letter from the Battle Creek, Mich., company.
Janet is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Brownstein.

This is probably the same kind of letter that young Janet Brownstein got:

Pennsylvania’s New Castle News of June 7, 1961 had this announcement.

YOGI RESCUED
ELLWOOD CITY — Seven-year-old local boy rescued Yogi Bear.
Yogi Bear was being chased by a swarm of bees and John Kimmel Jr. from here rescued him.
His reward—an 18-inch Huckleberry Hound plush toy.
John, who will be a third grader at North Side School when it opens again next fall, pulled a neat trick in bringing the rescue about.
“Huckleberry Hound tripped Yogi Bear with a net and the hive of honey he was holding went out of his hands and the bees went after it.”
That’s what saved Yogi Bear from the bees in the jingle written by John which won first place in a national “Rescue Yogi Bear contest.”
It was the first time he ever entered a contest. John is the son of Mr. and Mrs. John Kimmel Sr., 628 Wampum Ave.

What may have been the coolest Yogi cereal stuff came a few years later. Judging by the drawing, this looks like when the Batman TV show was in its prime in 1966. Yes, it’s Yogi Bear and Batman! Kind of. And for only sixty cents.

After the “rescue” contest, Yogi’s promotional people didn’t take any time off. They got together something to plug his birthday in the fall (tying it in with a cartoon special). More on that in a future post.

Yogi Bear — Brainy Bear

2011-11-05T10:13:00.000-07:00

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Animation – Ken Muse; Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre; Dialogue and Story Sketches – Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Yogi, Ranger, Chicken – Daws Butler; Boo Boo, Prof. Dingaling – Don Messick.
Music: Jack Shaindlin; Bill Loose/John Seely.
First aired: week of February 23, 1959.
Plot: Yogi Bear is lured by a crazy scientist into a brain experiment.

What can I tell you about this cartoon? A mad scientist switches Yogi’s mind with a chicken’s, then switches his with the Yogi-in-a-chicken’s and... well, it’s over.

Yeah, Boo Boo, I’m looking as dumbfounded as you about the whole thing. The cartoon just rolls along and then it stops. That’s what creeped me out about this cartoon when I was a kid. It’s not scary or anything. It just ends. Yogi’s mind is in the professor, the chicken’s is in Yogi and the professor’s is in the chicken. So how do they all get back to normal? I mean, this is a crazy scientist. He simply wouldn’t say “Well, my experiment’s done. Let’s put everything back the way it was and I’ll be on my way.” Mind you, that is kind of a crazy idea.

This cartoon had a chance to be somewhat as silly as its possible inspiration, the original brain-switching horror/comedy Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein (1948). After all, the studio got some silliness out of Huckleberry Hound’s encounter with a mad scientist (and giant wiener schnitzel) two years later in Science Fiction. But that was written by Warren Foster, one of the cleverest cartoon writers in history. This one’s the product of Joe Barbera and Charlie Shows. They came up with one joke. Yogi acts like a chicken.

Hmmm. We’ve only got two paragraphs here. A review has to be longer than that. So let’s emulate Charlie Shows and pad for time by presenting some odds and ends.

● Monty has enhanced the flip-up branch evergreens you see in almost all of Bick’s early Yogis. There’s foliage on the branches. The bushes in the front of the scene are on a separate cell; you can see where the edge has been cut out on the Boo Boo drawings and that Ken Muse has tried to mask it with a black line where Yogi’s body meets it (only the head moves in the scene).

● Here’s the new 1959 Bickenbach No-Door (with trailer) driven by the nutso scientist.
● Ranger Smith still hasn’t been invented so we get a generic ranger. Bick has designed the scientist with his eyes taking up the entirety of his legless glasses.

● “You are one of the good ones.” Charlie Shows loved that line and used it in several Yogi cartoons; Warren Foster picked it up the following year.
● Shows Rhyme Time. “How selfish can you get, yet?” Yogi asks himself when the ranger tells the scientist not to feed the bears.
● Shows Ironic Dialogue Alert. “You’re a brain, Yogi.” “Brainier than the a-verage tourist, Boo Boo.” Hey, the cartoon’s about brains! Get it?
● Do chickens sit on a perch like this? Maybe the professor switched its mind with a parrot before the cartoon started.
● Shows Ironic Dialogue Alert No 2. “You’re all brains, Yogi.” Yeah, we got it, Boo Boo.
● Muse brush strokes effect on the scientist (with whooshing sound effect) for speed.
● Shows Rhyme Time. “As a host, you’re the most.”
● Did you know the cartoon is now half over?

● The minds are transferred through the metal helmets. Hey, wait a minute. Yogi isn’t wearing one. The only way he can wear it is by turning that crank so the helmet can roll down onto his head. But never happens. How did the minds get transferred?
● Why heighten the effect of what should be a dramatic mind-transfer scene by stopping the stock music or changing it to something dramatic? It whistles away, ignoring anything on the screen. The music also serves to semi-mask the sound effects, including the standard Hanna-Barbera short-circuit-zapping noise used at least into the ‘70s. The electricity lines, Yogi and the chicken are on three drawings on ones.

● Shows Rhyme Time Again. “Oh, no. It ain’t so,” says Boo Boo when Yogi’s voice comes out of a chicken.
● Why doesn’t Yogi-in-the-chicken notice that his body is going past him? Twice.
● The chicken-in-Yogi turns out to be a rooster. And he cock-a-doodle-doos like a certain rooster that’s known and loved by the show’s sponsor.

● “I, like the scientists in the movies, volunteer for the test,” the scientist tells us. He sits where Yogi was. Hey, there’s no crank handle on the wall, the helmet just falls on top of the scientist. I guess that’s what happened before. The scientist made the crank handle disappear with electricity. Or something.
● Professor Dingaling-as-a-chicken declares he’s famous. Wouldn’t someone have to find out about it first? And if he changes everyone back after the cartoon, how would anyone know what happened?
● Why would Yogi-in-the-scientist say “I am a creature of the forest”? Wouldn’t he say he’s Yogi Bear? And while we’re on the subject, how come a mind switch also results in a vocal chord switch?

I guess we’ll never know. The iris now closes with everyone gathered in Yogi’s cave.

A mere five pieces of music are used in this cartoon, four by Jack Shaindlin. The sound-cutter tends to place it there without any compulsion to time it out to end with a scene, except at the very end; a couple of times, the music runs out in mid-dialogue.

0:00 - Yogi Bear Sub Main Title theme (Curtin).
0:14 - LAF-7-12 FUN ON ICE (Shaindlin) – Yogi and Boo Boo in bushes, scientist talks to ranger, car pulls over.
1:48 - LAF-25-3 bassoon and zig-zag string march (Shaindlin) – Scientist gets into trailer, walks to chicken, “That, I, Professor Dingaling...”
2:14 - LAF-10-7 GROTESQUE No 2 (Shaindlin) – “...can transfer the brain of one...”, Yogi invited in, mind transfer, Boo Boo faints, scientist wants to transfer animal brain into human.
4:48 - TC-432 HOLLY DAY (Loose-Seely) – “But, first, I must get that chicken...”, Boo Boo leads chicken-in-Yogi to bed, “All right, all right!”
5:48 - LAF-21-3 RECESS (Shaindlin) – “How come I gotta wear this tin hat?”, Yogi-as-chicken and scientist switch minds, everyone in Yogi’s cave.
6:59 - Yogi Bear Sub End Title theme (Curtin).

Yogi Bear, Sunday, November 1961

2011-11-02T05:46:00.001-07:00

What’s with the geyser obsession at Hanna-Barbera, anyway? It seems to have started when Yogi captured a couple of crooks by driving their getaway car onto a waterspout in Big Brave Bear in the first season. Of course, you’ll recall Yogi trying to make a getaway with some picnic baskets in the opening of his half-hour show, only to be lifted skyward by a geyser. And isn’t there an ‘Old Faceful’ at some of the Jellystone Park tourist resorts?

There was a geyser in the Sunday comic of the first week of August 1961 and there are two of them in November. The first one, on November 5, features a play on geyser with the word “geezer.” And we get a bratty kid. I wonder if someone connected with the comic had a daughter named Pamela.

A guest shot by Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy highlights the November 12 comic. The rhymes are a bit much but the end gag is clever play on words. You’ll recall Augie playing baseball in Talk It Up Pup (1959).

Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker did animated cartoons where they’d talk about the accomplishments of their relatives (who could forget “Wyatt Earp-pecker”?). Yogi’s done it in the comics on November 19. But couldn’t they have come up with a better name than “Hogi Bear”? Another cute ending.

And it’s geyser-catches-crook-as-Yogi-ineptly-drives-car time once again on November 26. The way cars are portrayed in the cartoons and comics is interesting. They look like a car that would have been on the streets but the design doesn’t quite copy any particular make or model. The one in this cartoon reminds me of a Cortina or maybe an Envoy, though I don’t think either were sold in the U.S.

As usual, you can click on any of these to get a bigger view, though Blogger is using a ridiculous new viewer (the Facebook ‘can’t-leave-well-enough-alone’ syndrome has spread).