Saturday 28 February 2015

Pixie and Dixie's Unmade Uncle Egghead

Remember the cartoon where Pixie and Dixie called on their Uncle Egghead, who gives them an electromagnet that Jinks swallows (thinking it’s candy) and then all kinds of metal becomes attracted to him? You don’t? It’s probably because the cartoon never aired or copyrighted.

But a storyboard was made for it. You won’t see these small story sketches very well because that’s the size they were on a web site. I imagine the story is by Warren Foster; the sketches certainly aren’t Dan Gordon’s from the first season.

“I’m having a nightmare—only in the daytime,” says the cat, reminiscent of “Light-Headed Cat,” which has a similar plot, with an anti-gravity machine lifting Jinks airborne every time a button is pushed. Daws Butler uses the term “night-time mare” in that one, just like he did in the Pixie and Dixie cartoon “Batty Bat.” Frankly, neither of the aforementioned cartoons were that great. (“Night-time mare” was heard in two other Foster-written cartoons: the much funnier “Snow White Bear,” with Yogi, and the Pixie and Dixie short “Hi Fido”). The magnet-in-the-stomach-attracting-stuff idea was also utilised by Joe Barbera in the Tom and Jerry cartoon “Old Rockin’ Chair Tom.” And there’s a Twilight Zone reference in one of the story panels but really no great one-liners. The Pixie and Dixie cartoons don’t seem to have inspired Foster as much as Yogi or Huck.

Whether Foster drew the board, I don’t know. And when it was drawn, I couldn’t tell you. But it’s always interesting to find unmade cartoons (we posted story panels from Earl Kress’ collection of an unmade El Kabong cartoon here). You can click on them to try to see them but I don’t know how much bigger they’ll be.



We’ve got another full storyboard for an unmade cartoon we’ll endeavour to post some time in the future.

2 comments:

  1. Love your blog! The Yogi stuff is so awesome!

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  2. Thanks Yowp. Great find. I have always been a big fan of pilots that never aired, things that ended up on " the cutting room floor ", or storyboards that didn't make it. Looking forward to the next storyboard.

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