Wednesday 7 June 2017

Yogi Bear Weekend Comics, June 1967

“How nice,” I thought. “This Yogi Bear comic has a tie-in with the 1966 Hanna-Barbera Alice special by featuring Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee.” Then I thought some more. Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee weren’t in the Alice special, were they? I admit it’s been 51 years since I saw it but I don’t remember them.

Oh, well. They appear in a Yogi comic that appeared in newspapers 50 years ago this month.

This month also included Yogi being followed in two consecutive weekends.



The Alice characters appear in the June 4th comic. For whatever reason, the date doesn’t appear on the colour version of the comic that’s been posted, but I have a black-and-white version with the date in the frame with the saluting psychiatrist. The full page versions of these comics were always missing a panel found in the half-pagers (three rows), so I’ve added the missing panel in black-and-white. The composition’s really well thought out in the final panel. I really like the stylised trees, too, which add a storybook touch. I still don’t understand why a national park is run by a general.



Normally, the “Indians” are friendly toward Yogi in these newspaper comics (it is presumed there is a reservation at Jellystone Park with residents that dress and talk like movie clichés). But it seems they don’t like being shown up, even by accident. Or maybe they’re fed up with all those Yogi rhymes. Whatever the situation, they aren’t heap-big courteous to our hero at the end of the June 11th comic.



Lots of nice-looking action in the June 18th comic. One again, the park ranger system is just like the military, in that rangers don’t get holidays—they get passes. I guess the blue tinting of the “photos” is more attractive than plain old black and white.


Boo Boo has cheek ruffs that look like Mr. Jinks in the June 25th comic. I can hear Doug Young as the nasty ranger; probably a throw-back to Iron Hand Jones in the Yogi TV series. Apparently the jerk ranger has never heard of patching a tire. “Destruction” indeed. And do marlins live in fresh-water lakes?

Richard Holliss has again supplied the colour comics from his archive. Click on any of them to make them bigger.

5 comments:

  1. "I still don’t understand why a national park is run by a general."

    That's nothing. What I'd like to know is why Jellystone has a park psychiatrist!

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  2. Boo Boo had cheek ruffs in a lot of the Yogi Bear comic books from that era too. I think they were the Gold Key comics but I got all my issues when Harvey reprinted them in the 90's.

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  3. All these materials were drawn by Iwao Takamoto and Jerry Eisenberg.

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  4. Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee did have a mid-60's Hanna-Barbera connection. They were featured on the HBR record album "Magilla Gorilla Tells Ogee the Story of Alice in Wonderland." While the framing story about Magilla's adoption by the little girl is fairly good, the story-within-a-story where Magilla tells the Alice story to Ogee is one of the poorest scripts ever done for one of the HBR records. However, the Tweedle Brothers provide some double-talk humor, courtesy of Allan Melvin's hilarious narration. It's worth listening to the record for AM's voice work, but any resemblance to the original Alice story is apparently pure coincidence.

    There were apparently two designs for Boo Boo--the most familiar was his profile, but when he turned full face to the audience he had those curious ruffs on his cheek. It made him look like a different character. Later, his design was revised so that his face-on appearance matched his profile. You can see this in some of the later Yogi Bear cartoons.

    It must have been the ranger uniforms that made the writers think Jellystone Park was run like a military operation.

    How about Mel Blanc's Sigmund Freud voice for the psychiatrist?

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    Replies
    1. Mel Blanc would've sounded great as the psychiatrist. Me I heard Paul Frees in my head, like in his Ludwig Von Drake and that professor von Gimmick on Atom Ant voice.

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