Flintstones, Sunday, February 1962

Comics, at least at one time, were drawn with the idea that the top row of panels could be lopped off without affecting the plot if a newspaper had space limitations. That’s sure the case in a couple of the Flintstones Sunday comics in February 50 years ago. The first row’s kind of a mini-strip.

Mastodons make appearances in the first two Sunday pages. February 4, 1962 also has Fred saying “Abba Dabba Doo” in this one, dropping the “Y” in “Yabba” for some reason. It’s also one time when a toy mouse doesn’t cause an elephant to land on someone or pick up someone with their trunk and use him to bash the mouse.



February 11th has some nice animal drawings. I love the dropping mastodon.



Ah, the know-it-all, jerk Fred we all loved before Pebbles domesticated him shows up on February 18th. I guess someone at the studio figured “Joe” and “Bill” weren’t suitable names for the ancillary bird characters in this one, considering they crashed the plane. And is this the earliest mention of Pterodactyl Airlines?



Very attractive characters in the February 25th comic. Dino in love would be explored in the great third-season opener featuring Sassie. Short doctors have to grow those bristle moustaches in Hanna-Barbera cartoons, it seems.



Alas, no Baby Puss this month.

Click on any of the comics to enlarge them.

Pixie and Dixie — Goldfish Fever

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Dick Lundy; Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Bob Gentle; Story – Mike Maltese; Story Direction – Alex Lovy; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Mr. Jinks, Dixie, Bulldog, Man – Daws Butler; Pixie, Woman – Don Messick.
Music: Jack Shaindlin, Spence Moore, Bill Loose.
Production: Huckleberry Hound Show K-37.
First Aired: week of January 25, 1960 (rerun, week of July 18, 1960)
Plot: Pixie and Dixie try to stop Jinks from eating the goldfish in the neighbours’ pond.

Two of Jinks’ 13 cartoons in the 1959-60 season involved him going uncontrollably gooney over something he had to catch and eat—a canary (“Bird Brained Cat”) and goldfish (this cartoon).

You might wonder why he just doesn’t catch and eat Pixie and Dixie. But it doesn’t appear Mr. Jinks has any desire to eat mice. He just doesn’t like them and wants to bash them. Sometimes. In this cartoon, they’re friends, much like they are in “Bird Brained Cat” as they tried to stop Jinks from going after the fish next door because they know he’ll get clobbered by the dog he teased at the start of the cartoon. It turns out in the surprise ending he does not.

The ending’s pretty much the highlight. There’s plenty of rambling dialogue about “golden fish” that allows Daws Butler (as Jinks) to get excitable, but no words he can bend around like we’re used to hearing. Still, Daws gets several different emotions out of ol’ Jinksie. Dick Lundy is the animator. He plunks out some angular drawings and a couple of cross-eyed looks, but there’s nothing all that distinctive with his takes. There are a couple of re-used cycles, eg. one with Jinks running right to left with his arms straight out, and six seconds of nothing but Pixie and Dixie nodding their heads while Jinks talks off camera. I guess Joe Barbera told Alex Lovy to save some money on this one by getting Lundy to draw less.

There’s also a perspective problem in the first scene. Jinks is atop a stone wall, dangling his tail as bait for the dog on the other side to chomp on. It’s on a cycle. Dog leaps up, Jinks moves tail before dog chomps. Happens again. Then the third time, the dog chomps but Jinks doesn’t move the tail. Why isn’t it bitten off?

Lundy comes up with a stiff-legged walk cycle, eight drawings on twos, as Jinks goes to mice to gloat to them about how he made a chump out of the bulldog next door. Dixie warns that the bulldog will catch him eventually. Jinks ignores the warning and strolls toward the front door. Lundy uses an entirely different, and bland, walk cycle. Jinks’ plan to tease the dog is stopped when he sees the neighbour pouring a bucket of goldfish into a pond. Don Messick does the wife’s voice in falsetto and, though you can’t see it because part of the frame below is cut off, her lips never move when Messick reads the line.



Sadly, Jinks first reaction to seeing the delicious goldfish is having his pupils shrink. That’s the take. And Jinks is talking, which would distract from any real take anyway. Jinks tells the meece he’s struck “golden fish” next door and is going to stake his claim. He climbs the wall of the living room in cycle animation. Daws is giving his best excited, rambling read but the sound cutter has elected to use the quiet Jack Shaindlin tune ‘Pixie Pranks,’ which doesn’t fit the scene at all. Writer Warren Foster now pads for time as Pixie and Dixie head to an encyclopaedia to discuss the meaning of goldfish fever. The meece try keeping Jinks away from the fish by holding his tail. He gets away, giggling crazily. “Gee, if this keeps up,” Dixie says, looking at cat hairs in his hands, “Jinksie’ll have a bald-headed tail.”

Foster extends the gold-claim analogy by having Jinks pan for fish in the pond. Best gag in the cartoon. As Dixie warned, the dog wakes up, punches the delirious cat (prattling on about being “Klondike rich”) in the face, then sending him over the stone wall back into his own yard. The meece look up and follow his flight path to the ground with an explosion sound.



The meece try to get Jinks mind off goldfish. Unfortunately, they pick the tale of King Midas. Before Dixie can get to the word “gold,” Jinks fills in the blank with “golden fish.” Jinks gets excited in his basket. Cue the running-with-arms-out animation. Cue the Jinks-panning animation. Cue the meece-following-flight-of-Jinks animation. Cue the stars-from-beat-up-Jinks animation. Jinks is right. It’s a “Banana-za” of savings on the budget by reusing animation.

Next scene: Jinks has a rope tied to his tail. It won’t let him reach the whatcha-ma-call-its. “You mean the goldfish?” Pixie asks. That sets Jinks off in heel-clicking joy. Cue the running-with-arms-out animation. But the rope does its job. It stops Jinks in mid-air on the other side of the fence. The dog drops the unconscious cat back on the other side.



Jinks wakes up in his basket. He imagines Pixie and Dixie to be goldfish. Nice little popping sound effect and bursting star drawing during the transformation scene. Jinks snaps out of it and rushes off when Pixie says “goldfish” (Lundy has the meeces somersaulting in the air when Jinks drops them, a bit of throwaway animation that would be superfluous in later years). Cue the running-with-arms-out animation.

Jinks peers into the fish pond. The dog confronts him. Note the anticipation drawing as Jinks dips up and into the dog’s face. Next shot is of the stone fence, we hear a clunk sound and the dog flies against it. Then a close-up of the dog. “I can’t understand what that cat wants with Siamese fightin’ goldfish,” he says to the viewer. “They’ll tear ‘im apart.” Jinks dives into the pond. Bubbles rise to the surface. There are yapping sounds. Jinks shoots upward in pain. Then the goldfish leap above the water, barking like dogs. Seems to me H-B used this concept again in future cartoons. Or was it in a Chuck Jones Tom and Jerry? It’s familiar anyway.



The final shot has Jinks unrolling the top of a sardine can, informing the meece that these fish never fight back. “We cowards must stick together,” Jinks tells us. I guess “sticking together” means “eating them.”

Jack Shaindlin’s cues fill most of the cartoon. The cutter uses lots of little snippets. There’s one cue I can’t identify with symphonic-sounding strings. It sounds like a Sam Fox library cue, maybe by Lou De Francesco. It was used in Snooper and Blabber’s “Cloudy Rowdy,” the Augie Doggie short “Skunk You Very Much” and at least one other cartoon.

0:00 - Pixie and Dixie Main Title theme (Curtin, Hanna, Barbera, Shows).
0:13 - medium circus march (Shaindlin) – Jinks bashes bulldog with garbage can lid.
0:28 - LAF-21-3 RECESS (Shaindlin) – Pixie and Dixie at window, Jinks talks to meeces, looks over stone wall, fish poured into pond.
1:35 - LAF-4-6 PIXIE PRANKS (Shaindlin) – Jinks at stone wall, talks to meece, climbs wall, meece read encyclopaedia.
2:30 - LICKETY SPLIT (Shaindlin) – Pixie and Dixie can’t hold Jinks.
2:37 - L-1139 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – Meece with clumps of fur.
2:43 - LAF-72-2 RODEO DAY (Shaindlin) – Sleeping dog, Jinks pans for fish, crash.
3:05 - L-78 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Meece talk to each other, “...wish by a fairy queen.”
3:37 - L-80 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – “The King, whose name...,”
3:50 - light symphonic music with strings (unknown) – Jinks runs, pans for fish, crash.
4:08 - LAF-4-6 PIXIE PRANKS (Shaindlin) – Pixie and Dixie talk, rope on Jinks.
4:35 - rising scale circus music (Shaindlin) – Sound of Jinks running, rope stops Jinks.
4:57 - variation on Boxing Greats No 2 (Shaindlin) – Jinks crashes, dog drops him over wall.
5:13 - LAF-1-1 FISHY STORY (Shaindlin) – Meece drag Jinks on floor, Jinks wakes up.
5:26 - C-14 DOMESTIC LITE (Loose) – Meece turn into goldfish and back again, Jinks runs to pond, clobbers dog, dog talks to camera.
6:23 - LAF-72-2 RODEO DAY (Shaindlin) – “They’ll tear ‘im apart,” Jinks flies from pond.
6:37 - medium circus march (Shaindlin) – Dog talks to camera, Jinks opens sardine can.
6:56 - Pixie and Dixie End Title theme (Curtin).

Flintstones Valentines

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

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

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

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.