Wednesday 13 February 2019

Running Ranger

Here’s Carlo Vinci at work in the 1960 Yogi Bear cartoon Gleesome Threesome. Ranger Smith spots Yogi jumping off a diving board and heading straight toward him. Low crotch, high step as the ranger turns.



Carlo doesn’t draw every run cycle in every cartoon the same way. In this scene, he comes up with a high-leg run cycle of four drawings. See how Carlo draws the mouth differently in each drawing and bends a wrist in one of them just to get some variation.



Running in place can look static, even if the cycle lasts for a few seconds. What Bill Hanna or story director Alex Lovy did here was move the cels with the ranger slightly to the right starting at the third frame so it looked like Smith was backing up and not in one place.

Yogi lands on Mr. Ranger in three drawings. Again, this isn’t a case of sliding a cel of Yogi to save animation. If you look at Yogi’s tie in the second drawing, you can see that Carlo made a completely new drawing.



A little later, Carlo gives Yogi one of his head tilts, down, then turns in two drawings, then turns back again. Again, the drawings are not shot the same. Some are a single frame, some of two frames, some on three. It looks less mechanical that way.



Carlo’s drawings were a little cruder and a little more fun two seasons earlier when the Yogi cartoons were brand new. But he is still a big reason why I enjoy the early Hanna-Barbera series.

2 comments:

  1. I still laugh at Daws and Don talking in their proper Southern accents when Yogi and Boo Boo check into the hotel.(Don)" Weren't those last guests a little ..odd ?.(Daws) " They're Yankees, Son, and *all* Yankees are a little odd...the cold..drive them down from the North every year!".

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  2. One of my favorite Yogis, in part because it gets them out of the normal park setting (Ranger Smith's enthusiasm in the hotel until he realized who he's greeting is a highlight, and this was the first place I saw the dump truck gag, before I found out Foster cribbed it from his own bit in "Porky's Naughty Nephew" (limited animation aside, I think it works better here, because it's more fun to see Yogi dumping the sand than to see Porky as the one getting dumped on).

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