Wednesday 4 August 2010

Hanna Barbera’s Pete and Repete

You know doubt know about the change of moniker from Flagstones to Gladstones to Flintstones, and you may have seen a Quick Draw McGraw model sheet here with his burro companion’s name as “Loco.” But it seems another couple of characters may have been through a name change before reaching the air. Witness this short blurb by Mike Connolly in his ‘Mr. Hollywood’ column in the Pasadena Independent Star-News, January 25, 1959:

Screen Gems, flipping over the success of its Huckleberry Hound and Ruff & Reddy tele-cartoons, has three more on the drawing boards: Quick-Draw McGraw, Snooper & Blabbermouse, and Pete and Repete.

Of course we all know Quick Draw and Snooper appeared on the same show and the third element was Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy. Could it be Hanna-Barbera had an earlier name for their Spike and Tyke-like characters? After all, Augie does look like a mini-Doggie Daddy. Or did the studio have a completely different two-some in mind and scrap the idea?

This is the only newspaper note I can find about Pete and Repete. I don’t know anything more about them than that. However, I do know three months after the little piece in the suburban paper, Bick Bickenbach came out with an Augie and Doggie Daddy model sheet which is the way we know the characters today.


If anyone has any knowledge about Pete and Repete, please leave a comment. Don’t comment on the really cheesy phoney title card (Augie and Daddy are by Ken Muse).

9 comments:

  1. Thats neat. And maybe a little clever. I can't say I know much more than anyone else though, so I'll just stand aside.

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  2. The sound of "Pete and Repete" is vaguely familar to me and I like it, but "Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy" is really pleasing to me in a wordplay sense. Augie is such a great name.

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  3. Thinking more about this topic, I'm of the mind that my mother used to say the phrase, "Pete and Repete" on occasion, while observing fathers and sons or two siblings in action. Maybe I don't recall the H-B connotation after all.

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  4. Very interesting history behind the Augie Doggie cartoons. I had no idea that even they had a different name before they had a final model sheet. Are there other alternative names for the H-B characters, besides the ones you mentioned in this post?

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  5. Somewhere on the blog, I think I quoted from Bill Hanna's book about Yogi's proposed names. I'd have to go through it again to see if there were others.

    I don't know if these were originally Augie and Daddy's names, but I'm assuming from the story they were going to be the third component of the Quick Draw Show. What's odd is I can't find any other mention of it.

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  6. "Pete and Repete" were names used in a Chuck Jones-directed Warner cartoon [of course, the Mike Maltese conneciton] made for the US army [Post WWWII], "Drafty isn't It" [which was the first time, though not in a civillian theatre, that someone other than Mel Blanc got onscreen credit, in fact in place of Mel, Daws Butler], or was it "90 Day Wondering"? in the mid 50s.

    Steve

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  7. Just thought I'd add that I'd heard of the "Pete and Repete" names before,I can't really remember the source. Also, I have an old stat of an early Jinks the cat model drawing with his name shown as "Snooper" pre-dating "Snooper" from the "Quick Draw McGraw" show.

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  8. Sheesh, where do you FIND this stuff? Pretty cool!

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  9. Don, thanks for the info. I don't have Jerry Beck's book to see if it has any reference to those names.
    Rob, I find some of it by accident. I was looking through papers for something else when I stumbled on that clipping.
    Steve, I completely forgot about that one. Did Maltese write it?

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