Thursday 4 December 2014

If Hanna-Barbera Had Made Posters For TV Shows...

“Yowp” is a fan site. It’s here to yowp about old Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons. It’s not here to sell you anything so it’s rare that I link to a commercial site or crowd-funding campaign (Tony Benedict’s Kickstarter campaign was a notable exception because of its historic importance). But occasionally I’ll lift art from a web site and link back to it.

Today’s one of those days. I stumbled across this quite by accident on the internet. This web site has a bunch of newly-drawn posters “celebrating cartoon classics” from Hanna-Barbera. To the right you see a one-sheet by illustrator Andrew Kolb. I’m usually not one for stylised versions of the H-B characters, but these are pretty nice. I like the Art Lozzi-esque take on Jellystone Park, though the backgrounds in the cartoon in question were by Bob Gentle. And the calligraphy is very much in the Art Goble vein.

Here’s a Jonny Quest poster by Matthew Woodson. The running characters are just perfect. It could have been original publicity art from 1964, it looks so authentic. Oh, if only Race could run over Bandit! Matthew’s perspective in the lab drawing is great; I’d have loved to have seen him try an action scene.



The other posters are meh, as the kids say, at least to me. Check them out if you’d like by clicking on the highlighted link above. I have nothing to do with the site and make nothing from this post.

4 comments:

  1. Looks like Yogi and Boo Boo are dining on that tree with the multiple perfectly straight limbs from "Scooter Looter".

    Disagree about the quality of the other posters, but I'll concur that the Hong Kong Phooey piece is far from fan-riffic.

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  2. Love the Jonny Quest poster. The Yogi one's also nice, but the nose on who I assume is supposed to be Ranger Smith in the car gives me a John K "Boo Boo Runs Wild/Boo Boo and the Man" vibe. I try as hard as I can to wipe out the Ed Benedict-meets-Ralph Bakshi character designs of those as much as possible...

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  3. These are terrific. Love the Jonny Quest. I also like the Tom & Jerry in The Two Mouseketeers over at the site.

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  4. Doug, T&J poster is composed very nicely but I thought it was too dramatic for the cartoon it's about.
    J.L., it's hard me to to explain it in writing but I didn't get that from the Smith drawing. It has a bit of an early 60s children's storybook vibe to me.

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