I always liked the interaction between the stars of the various cartoons on the show. Of course, someone at H-B thought bigger was better, so they came up with specials and series that mashed a whole pile of the studio’s characters together. And now that isn’t big enough, so there’s talk about a “universe” like superhero comic book companies invented when they ran out of ideas for their characters and started mixing and matching anyone and anything. I’ll pass, thanks, and instead take the simple little special combinations that happened exclusively in the Huck, Yogi and Quick Draw bumpers. (No, I have no desire to see the Herculoids with the Banana Splits and that pig sergeant from the Laverne and Shirley monstrosity).
Another sheet. Origin unknown.
While we’re at it, here are some Snagglepuss drawings, presumably from the period when he got his own series. I wonder if they were for a comic book.
The Huckleberry Hound DVD which came out ages ago featured only some of the bumpers used on the Huck show. Whether the studio kept masters of them, I don’t know, but there was clearly some difficulty in assembling them for the disc set as some look like they were from faded 16mm reels and others that had been dubbed onto VHS. I don’t recall the little cartoon from the story panels below being on the set and I don’t remember it well enough to know if there was a second sheet featuring Yogi talking in medium-close shot to the camera at the end. But it’s still lots of fun. Another guess would be the drawings are by Dan Gordon, but I’ll stand corrected. Notice the muzzle dots of the early Yogi and the semi-circular closed eye in the eighth panel, very much in the Ed Benedict vein.
Whoever saved these sheets should be owed a great deal of thanks because they give us a look at these great characters we otherwise wouldn’t see.
The Snagglepuss' references shown here on this topic, were drawn by Pete Alvarado.
ReplyDeleteYes, I thought the Snagglepuss drawings looked like the work of Alvarado. There are some comic books with poses of Snagglepuss that are similar to the ones posted here.
ReplyDeleteThe nine-panel sheet definitely looks like one of the interstitials for the Huckleberry show. I agree that those were part of what made the show so delightful. By showing the characters interacting between shorts, it gives greater depth to the cartoons themselves and gives the characters the aspect of performers. The H-B interstitials were superior to similar ones in the Mr. Magoo show, for one example, because they weren't just gags, but they showed the ensemble spirit behind the cartoons.
What bothers me more about the later team-up shows is not so much the combo of characters as the pro-social messages that they force-fed to their juvenile audiences. Don't most kids already know that littering, air pollution, and selfishness are not good things? If there was going to be a mega-team-up of characters, couldn't there at least have been some humorous and creative writing to support them? I think what kept me watching at the time was the continual hoping for what the shows might have been. And given their antecedents, they could have been infinitely better than they were.
Did you like the interaction between Yakky Doodle and the other stars, YOWP?:D
ReplyDeletevery cool!
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