Thursday 9 May 2013

Smoking Yogi and and Yoga Yogi

Cigarette smoking was deemed fashionable and sophisticated at one time. Millions upon millions of dollars were spent telling you it was. As Hanna-Barbera fans well know, even Fred, Wilma and Barney chatted, in ungrammatical terms, about the wonders of Winstons.

There was never the temptation to put candy cigarettes in the mouth of baby Pebbles Flintstone, though you could buy them at the corner store when I grew up and they may still be sold somewhere. About the closest thing Hanna-Barbera came up with to make kids emulate their smoking moms and dads was this Cartoon Smoking kit by Elvin.



Something tells me this isn’t the kind of product the company would license today.

My thanks to Bryan Lord, once the proud owner of a nice music blog, for passing this on to me. This gives me a chance to pass on more image files that have been sent to me or I’ve grabbed from some place or another. My apologies as I didn’t note the source of most of these.



Awhile ago, we posted pictures of Huckleberry Hound rugs. Rich Graham of Twining, Michigan sent a note saying his father-in-law was going through the basement and found one. He’s sent this picture along with an ad. Anyone interested in buying the rug?



Hanna-Barbera tried marketing all kinds of concepts to the networks. Not all of them sold. Scott Shaw, I believe, posted these drawings of “Space Cat.” I don’t know anything else about the proposal or if the character was an Iwao Takamoto design. I can hear Howie Morris as the mouse.



Tim Hollis sent this note about the above picture:

In one of the early Jellystone franchise booklets was this stunning shot of the merchandise they offered in their souvenir shops. As you can see, some was produced especially for them (like the green plastic ranger hats), while others were items that had first been available a decade earlier (the Kellogg's mugs, the Yogi/Magilla coloring books, etc). If I'm not mistaken, that Day-Glo pink Yogi poster is the same one that was a major plot element in the Brady Bunch episode that was filmed at King's Island.



The caricatures are a bit spotty in places, but here’s a great TV section cover, no doubt from 1961, promoting “Top Cat” and its actors. The drawing of Maurice Gosfield is pretty good. Like many actors, people’s recognition twigged when they heard his character’s name (Doberman) instead of his own. Marvin Kaplan looks a little too jowly here. Sorry, but I don’t remember who posted this.



Another T.C. cover; this one was purloined from Jerry Beck’s collection.



Tim Tipton put this one up on Facebook. I suspect the studio promotional drawings are by Dick Bickenbach. The Captain ran on the NBC station in Amarillo; the ad is probably from mid-1962.



It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a bear! Here’s Yogi at, I think, one of his Jellystone Park camps posing behind one-time Superman Brandon Routh. Other than working out his forearms, is Brandon doing anything else these days?



This is cute. Someone decided to come up with a drawing based on the similarity between the words “Yogi” and “Yoga.”

And several people want to direct your attention to this Italian car commercial, featuring real-life versions of the Wacky Racers. Well, almost all real life. Is Muttley computer-generated?

My thanks to the generous people who have passed on these things to pass on to you.


5 comments:

  1. Then around 1968 Yogi and Boo Boo got anti-smoking in a television advertisement in the USA with a smoker in Jellystone National Park smokin' "his boob head" (Yogi).Steve

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  2. That day-glo pink Yogi poster was part of a series of blacklight posters featuring different cartoon characters put out by Artko Studios (I had the Bugs Bunny one for longer than I can remember). They're definitely collector's items nowadays.

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  3. I know this commercial!
    It's a Peugeot commercial (produced in Italy), which involves real-life versions of the Wacky Races (Hanna-Barbera, 1968) characters.
    This commercial is carried here in Brazil by the Internet and televised media.

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  4. This Peugeot commercial was filmed in Valencia (Spain).

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  5. A yogi is a practitioner of yoga. ;-)

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