On the Road With Huck and Yogi

Thanks to the folks at the Leo Burnett ad agency, fans of Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear got to see them in the...

Well, we can’t say “in the flesh” because the flesh was buried under furry suits designed like the cartoon characters.

For a number of years, Huck, Yogi and others toured across North America, appearing at fairs with a special show.

One of the stops was Tampa, Florida. (Somehow, I expect, if anyone could come up with a rhyme for “Florida orange” it would be Yogi).

Columnists in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s loved the early syndicated Hanna-Barbera characters. Charles Robins of the Tribune was one. He didn’t cover the stage show, but got out his pad and pencil when the characters did a walk-through of the newspaper’s offices as they plugged the debut of Yogi’s show on local TV.

Rare Bear Wins Admiration of Tampa’s ‘Kidaults’
Yogi Proves He Is Better Than the Average Bear As He Captures the Fancy of Fans Young and Old
By CHARLES ROBINS
Tribune Entertainment Editor
Now that it's all over, I'm beginning to wonder if Tampa fell to Jose Gaspar or Yogi Bear last week.
That better-than-average bear, who normally resides in Jellystone National Park, visited the Cigar City for the Gasparilla festivities and turned out to be one of the big attractions of the parade.
Youngsters lining the parade route rushed out to shake his paw and the successful ones probably won't wash their hands for years.
Pretty girls gathered around him.
An enthusiastic crowd turned out at Lowry Park the following day to see the furry hero.
And, to top this moment of glory, WFLA-TV announced that Yogi Bear will be seen as star of his own program on that station beginning Wednesday, March 1.
OF COURSE, Yogi is really a cartoon character from the popular Huckleberry Hound series. Wearing the shaggy costume, and doing an excellent job impersonating Yogi's magnificent bear-i-tone voice was Bill Peck, a local performer.
But trying to tell a youngster that Yogi isn't real is about as difficult as trying to convince Virginia that there isn't a Santa Claus.
Fame, of course, is not new to this admirable bear or his popular companions, Huck Hound and Quick Draw McGraw, the slowest horse in the west.
Fred Wilson, a representative of the advertising agency which handles the Huckleberry Hound show, said Huck and his friends were greeted by 10,000 enthusiastic fans on their arrival in Hawaii last year. This crowd, Wilson contends, was larger than that which greeted such non-cartoon personalities as Eisenhower and Jack Benny.
* * *
IN TOLEDO last summer, some 45,000 youngsters turned out to see the troupe at the Toledo Zoo.
"Huckleberry Hound" was chosen as the theme of Ohio State University's homecoming in 1959.
And, also according to Wilson, Yellowstone National Park officials are considering setting aside an area to be known as Jellystone Park, a mythical national park inhabited by Yogi in his TV shows.
In fact, Wilson said, the crew of the U.S.S. Glacier named an uncharted ice island in the Antarctic Huckleberry Hound Island.
For anyone not familiar with the popular cartoon series, Huckleberry Hound is a dog with a drawl somewhat like that of Andy Griffith. The character created by the talent team of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, went on the air in 1958 and was an almost immediate success with the youngsters and quite a few adults.
* * *
QUICK DRAW McGRAW was added in 1959 and Yogi, last year, became the real star of the series. As the remarkable bear's fan mail mounted, Hanna and Barbera decided to give him his own show.
Daws Buster [sic] does the voice of all three characters.
The program, which is carried in some 200 television markets throughout the nation, is aimed at a "kidault" audience, Wilson said.
In fact, it became so popular with the adults that a TV editor in Seattle, Wash., organized the first adult Huck Hound fan club three years ago and more have since popped up throughout the country.
When the characters came up to The Tribune newsroom last week, the more aggressive Yogi immediately made himself at home. He pounded on a desk and screamed "copyboy" in a manner better than the average editor.
* * *
HE CARRIED on his arm a picnic basket, an item which is somewhat of a Yogi Bear trademark. (On the show, he is forever dreaming up new ways of stealing picnic baskets from visitors at Jellystone Park.)
As a Yogi Bear fan myself, I was too wise to this creature not to suspect he was up to something no good.
I suddenly got a horrible thought:
"Had Yogi stolen our city editor's lunch?"
Cautiously I peeked into the basket and immediately felt ashamed of myself.
Inside were several Valentines which had been given to Yogi by some of the young believers who turned out to see him at Lowry Park.
He's more popular than the average bear.

The 1961-62 TV season was the last with new Huck and Yogi cartoons. Hanna-Barbera worked out a new touring stage show. Campbell Titchener’s column in the Rockford Morning Star on Aug. 18, 1963 talked about it, and the reaction kids had when they saw Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear “in person.”

When historians get around to chalking up the important events of the mid-20th century, one of the items for the record must be the advent of the television cartoon show. Not the one where old movie shorts are thrown together for the kiddies, but the one where a talented, high-priced group of artists create a product for an all-age audience. A man who has been involved in much of this is Edwin Alberian, a personable, dark-haired easterner who spent much of Saturday at the Winnebago County Fair under an explorer's helmet with his current companion, Fred Flintstone. Alberian's job is traveling across the country, and farther, with cartoon characters and presenting shows at fairs, rodeos, and other places where kids gather. At our county fair Ed put on a pair of shows Saturday [17] and was on hand at the grandstand Saturday night, where he'll also be tonight.
Ed started out to be a doctor. He got as far as a master's degree in chemistry before deciding that there were enough physicians in his family. He had sung and acted in high school and college, and found himself auditioning for, and winning, roles in Broadway musicals. His flair for song, dance and mime got him an audition for the "Howdy Doody" TV show, and for ten years he was Clarabelle the Clown on the series. So it seemed natural, when the then new production company of Hanna-Barbara found a gold mine in the TV cartoon business, that Ed Alberian should join the gang.
For the past four years Ed has toured with several shows. One is the Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear Show, another the Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey Show, and now he's got the Fred Flintstone Show. Fred is currently the most popular of the cartoon characters, Ed says. What he does is to use prerecorded dialogue and his own comments during a show. The Hollywood actors who are the voices of the cartoon characters to this recording. Then, controlling the timing of the recordings, Ed "talks" to his audience and the cartoons, which are people wearing Huck, Yogi, Quick Draw or Fred costumes. Its [sic] a gimmick that has proven highly successful. Recently Ed and Fred flew New York to Honolulu and back for a one-day show. This July Ed and Quick Draw appeared at the Calgary Stampede in Canada and drew 40,000 people to the stadium.
Ed says the secret to success in this kind of venture is "keeping the kids in the act. Make the audience part of the entertainment." He says at first the children think they're just seeing someone dressed in a Fred Flintstone costume, but as the show progresses they become convinced they're actually seeing Fred. Ed explains that the people who wear the costumes, usually dancers, are highly trained for their parts in the show.
"Kids are always trying to help," Ed says. "They want to help Fred and Huck up and down off the stage, but the funniest thing is they keep bringing Yogi Bear food. Mainly bananas, for some reason." I asked if the food was declined with thanks. "Oh, no," Ed says. "Huck has an insatiable appetite. But that's how we know the kids think he's real."
After 14 years in the children's entertainment business, Ed is convinced he's found a home. "And when I take my two-year-old boy to the cartoon studios," he says, "he really goes wild."

Considering we now have the entire Huckleberry Hound Show restored on Blu-Ray, perhaps it’s time again to dig out the costumes, and get the blue Southerner and the pic-a-bic basket purloiner out on the promotional trail again.

Creepy Creature Feature

Ruff and Reddy may have had a low budget but there were attempts at making them visually interesting. Unlike later series where every cartoon was laid out like it was taking place on a stage, Ruff and Reddy had angle shots and characters in silhouette.

In “Creepy Creature Feature,” a shot was tried that I don’t recall in any other Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Professor Gismo is asleep at the controls of his rocket ship. When he suddenly wakes up, not only does the camera move in on the artwork, it changes angles clockwise.



Whether this came from Dan Gordon’s storyboard, the layout artist (I presume it’s Dick Bickenbach), or director Bill Hanna, is your guess.

The cartoon starts with the usual 30-second recap with re-used animation. While Daws Butler repeats the final line from the previous episode, it is not the same recording; the inflections are different.

The episode revolves around the little man who emerges from The Big Thinker’s metallic head. In flashback, we learn he is an inventor atop Mount Cucamonga who has built an interplanetary rocket ship. However, the ship is pulled into a strange planet (in animation re-used from earlier episodes), where it crashes.



I’d love to paste together the pan shot of the crashed S.S. (“Space ship” not “Steam ship”) Gismo, but the on-line copies out there are 25-year-old recordings from a cable TV feed and the colour is too poor. Here are the start and end of the pan. Look at the number of different colours.



Silhouette shot as the professor explains.



The professor is locked inside a metal monster, which turns out not to be The Big Thinker at all. It would appear to be a robot TBK uses to communicate. The professor points to the actual Big Thinker on a throne. Again, we can’t paste together the right-to-left pan shot, but the background artist (likely Fernando Montrelegre) uses lots of metal arches you can see in the drawings below.



It turns out the real Big Thinker is asleep (maybe that’s how Gismo could escape; it’s never explained). Headstrong Reddy, even after a warning, destroys The Big Thinker with a little hammer that, somehow, he happened to be carrying.

Reddy does this even after Prof. Gismo warns him The Big Thinker is guarded by the Creepy Creature. And here he comes now! Reddy’s conjoined eyes look like something Mike Lah would draw, but this episode is handled by Ken Muse.



We’ll have to wait to see what the creature looks like.

The professor’s name is usually spelled “Gizmo.” It’s not in this episode.

Three Geordie Hormel cues make up the background music.

0:00 – No music.
0:06 – ZR-91B WEIRD EERIE (Hormel) – Start of cartoon, Gismo explains his space trip.
1:55 – No music – Planet swallows S.S. Gismo, camera shakes.
2:09 – ZR-91C WEIRD EERIE (Hormel) – Pan over rocket, “But what.”
2:35 – No music – Pan shot.
2:37 – ZR-53 COMEDY MYSTERIOSO (Hormel) – Big Thinker on throne, end of cartoon.

Adults and Quick Draw McGraw

TV critics managed to find ways to watch The Quick Draw McGraw Show even when they didn’t have to.

Larry Thompson of the Miami Herald outlined his subterfuge in his column of December 6, 1960. At least one of his kids didn’t appear to be too happy about it.

Psychology in Action
THIS WOMAN was company for dinner, and we sat around in the front room making small talk until I looked at my watch.
I called to my wife: "Don't forget, this is Quick Draw McGraw night. We'd better start dinner soon or the children won't have time to see it."
"And what," asked the lady, "is Quick Draw McGraw?"
"That," I explained, "is a cartoon character on TV. He's on every Tuesday night. So are Doggie Daddy, and Snooper, the cat detective. Our kids love the program."
"It is very considerate of you to try to arrange the dinner schedule so they can see it," the lady said.
"Oh, yes," I said. "I believe in letting the children see the programs they enjoy, as long as they are uplifting, amusing, or wholesome. A parent can't be too careful about the TV programs his children watch."
We were called to dinner, and, as usual, the children dawdled over the food.
* * *
“IF YOU DON'T HURRY," I said, "you'll miss Quick Draw McGraw. Remember, the champion gets to turn on the TV.”
"Aw, you're always the champion on Quick Draw night," said Carl.
I turned to the company.
"That is part of my child psychology," I explained. "I try to cultivate the competitive spirit — in a sportsmanlike, mannerly way, of course — by pretending that I'm in the contest with them. That way they feel that I am sharing their interests."
"Very commendable," said the lady.
“I’m the champ!" I shouted, as I swallowed the last bit of my milk. "I'll go turn on TV. Nobody else can come until they've finished."
I give the lady a knowing glance and she nodded approval at my applied psychology. It was only a few minutes before the children joined me in front of the TV:
* * *
LATER, after the children were in bed, our company commented on my excellent behavior as a father.
"Mrs. Thompson," she said, "you are most fortunate to have a husband who takes such an interest in his children. I have never seen a better example of child psychology in action."
"You mean about Quick Draw McGraw?" asked my wife, and the lady nodded.
"He does that every Tuesday night," my good wife said. "Only child psychology has nothing to do with it. He likes Quick Draw McGraw. He acts the same way when Huckleberry Hound is on."
* * *
AND I REALLY do feel sorry for grown-ups who don't have children to give them an excuse to look at those funny cartoon programs.

Thompson never really explained the “contest” or “champion” part. Maybe someone had to finish their dinner first.

Perhaps the story was in conjunction with a visit to Miami by costumed Hanna-Barbera characters. The Herald published the photo shoot below on Dec. 11.



Quick Draw was featured on the front page of the TV section of the Vallejo Times-Herald of December 31, 1960. Looking at the gopher, I wonder if this publicity art was drawn by Gene Hazelton. The story on the next page is short but explains Quick Draw’s appeal.

Quick Draw Held Funniest Cowboy
This TV fast gun is a horse.
Television watchers have grown to love this western hero with the four legs. His name is Quick Draw McGraw, at 6:30 p. m., Thursday, Channel 2. There's affection, too, for his fearless but slightly dumb sidekick named Bobba Looey. Mr. Looey is a Mexican burro.
Quick Draw and his pal are the animated cartoon creations of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, whose success on TV was already assured when they introduced such stars as Ruff and Ready [sic], Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear.
The creators feel an important reason for their success is the good taste in their productions. Parents and PTA groups have yowled long and loud over the sadism, violence and sex innuendos permeating most of the ancient theatrical cartoons rerun on TV the past several years.
HURT PRIDE
When "Quick Draw McGraw" shoots a bad man, usually just his pride is hurt, or the seat of his pants is singed. It's doubtful either that you'll ever find him casting lecherous glances at some Betty Boop saloon hostess. In spite of such distillation, Hanna and Barbera have injected enough western satire into "McGraw" to make him palatable to adults, who make up 60 per cent of their audience.
This season the boys got away from their exclusive diet of talking animals to take on “The Flintstones," a talented bunch of cave dwellers of the Stone Age. But that's another story.

Indeed. The Flintstones’ success all but killed feature stories on the Emmy-nomimated Quick Draw. Prime time is prime time, after all.

Still, the Kelloggs affiliate in St. Louis took out a two-page ad in the Post-Dispatch for a Quick Draw contest.


The Oregonian’s Harold Hughes fit in Quick Draw in part of his column of December 26, 1960. After talking about how former Portlander Bill Selleck set up a really low-budget commercial animation studio (25 frames a minute for $900 a minute), Hughes has some thoughts on Hanna-Barbera. Story missing conjunctions, other words.

BEST WAY to watch old Huckleberry Hound is to stretch out on the floor with the kids. The wind-up Yogi Bear strip is a riot. Maybe Forest Service should recruit army of wind-up Smokey Bears, put them to work fighting forest fires.
BILL HANNA AND JOE BARBERA are the heads behind Huck Hound, The Flintstones, Ruff 'N' Ready [sic], Quick Draw McGraw and the like. They plan series next year built around Yogi Bear, and there is report of full length movie on Yogi.
HANNA AND BARBERA were unemployed three years ago, like Selleck, came up with a cheaper way of producing cartoons by cutting the number of frames per minute, thus reducing the vast amount of drawing that Disney does. But both Bill and Joe worked 20 years doing cartoons for MGM, gave birth to cat-and-mouse team known as Tom and Jerry.
JOE ATTENDED banking school, took up doodling, became "cartooner." Bill studied engineering and journalism in college, worked as a structural engineer before joining Leon Schlessinger's [sic] cartoon company. Both are doggie daddies, trapped in the suburbs.

Since we’re looking at December 1960, there was merchandise just in time for Christmas, with Knickerbocker plush dolls of Quick Draw, Baba Looey, Snooper, Blabber (and, of course, Huck and Yogi).

But the one I kind of like is the Quick Draw McGraw Private Eye game, with 4 player tokens on plastic stands, 48 cards, a spinner and a 15¾ by 18½ inch folding board. One store was selling it for $1.98. Quite a while ago, I posted pictures of various H-B games. I decided to check eBay to see if one of these private eye games was for sale. I found several.

Yuletide Yogi, Holly Jolly Jetsons and Twisting Tom Cat

Yogi Bear got into the spirit of Christmas (the secular, not religious version), though not on his TV show. A couple of storybooks with Yuletide Yogi were published in the early ‘60s. One was a Little Golden Book which we reprinted in an old post. The other was “Yogi Bear Helps Santa,” a 1962 publication by Whitman Press. The artist was Lee Branscome, who later animated Jonny Quest. It seems to me he had been an in-betweener at Warners; correct me if that’s wrong.

Instead of posting all the pages here, I shall be as lazy as someone who has just feasted on a Christmas turkey and link to a copy at archive.org.

Christmas is not something I celebrate but in the past I’ve posted music and other things as my gifts to you for coming here and reading what I, rather unacademically, have to say. The blog actually ended regular posts in mid-2019 but, as you can see, I have continued with occasional entries here and there. So it is that you’re getting another music post out of me.

This music is courtesy of the late Earl Kress. He dubbed these (judging by the hiss, onto cassette) when he was working on various Hanna-Barbera music projects. It’s a little tough keeping track of what’s been posted on this blog before, but I don’t believe these have been, or appeared in commercial H-B music releases.

Before we get there, let us ask the musical question: have you bought Greg Ehrbar’s book on Hanna-Barbera’s music? You must read this. It has all kinds of information you didn’t know, starting with Scott Bradley’s scores for Bill and Joe at MGM, to the Capitol and Langlois stock music in the first TV cartoons, to Hoyt Curtin and Ted Nichols, to Colgems/Golden Records, to the studio’s decision to get into the rock music business. You can get it right from the publisher, the University Press of Mississippi. It is worth the money.

I don’t have cue sheets, so I cannot tell you if Curtin gave all these cues names. However, a few of them had names when slated.


J-112


J-128


J-200 BOSS'S THEME


J-202


J-205 ROCK AND ROLL


J-206


J-210 ROSEY THE ROBOT ALTERNATE


J-220 JUDY IS SAD


J-220 GEORGE'S THEME


J-228


J-231


J-257


J-258


J-261


JW-10

Now, here’s a piece of music I’d love to post but I have never seen it. A saxophonist named Dave Ede was inspired by Mr. Jinks and the Twist craze popularized by Chubber Checker to come up with “Twistin’ Those Meeces To Pieces”. Ede was the host of the BBC radio’s Go Man Go show. He got together the Rabin Band and together they played a David Wilkinson-composed twist version of “Three Blind Mice.” It was released in mid-1962. Has anyone heard it?

This has been a mixed year for early Hanna-Barbera fans. We have fortunately seen the Blu-ray release of all cartoons in the Huckleberry Hound Show. Seasons two and three had been partly hung up for years because of clearing music composed by Bill Loose and Jack Shaindlin. Unfortunately, we lost writer Tony Benedict and layout artist Jerry Eisenberg this year to failing health.

This blog is still considered finished, but there will be a few posts into the new year.

Hocus Pocus Focus/Muni-Mula Mix-Up

Don Messick had an odd voice that I first heard on The Herculoids. I don’t know exactly how he did it; probably by wiggling his tongue inside his mouth.

Gloop and Gleep weren’t the first Hanna-Barbera characters to have this weird, wavy voice. He gave it to the Muni-Mula robots in the first adventure of Ruff and Reddy.

Here’s one of the robots in “Hocus Pocus Focus.”

After a recap of the previous episode, where Reddy is turned into a mindless robot, just like his mechanical duplicates, Ruff chases after him. Ken Muse draws a cycle of three Ruffs, animated on twos. The Ruffs are slid over a roller-painted background (possibly by Fernando Montealegre).



Ruff chases after Reddy, who has gone with the duplicate Ruffs and Reddys into The Big Thinker’s room. After about four animation-saving seconds of a static shot, with camera shakes to simulate a fight, a robot tosses him out.



Please don’t be one of those people who asks why the garbage can is labelled in English, but the robots don’t speak it. Okay, if you’re one of those people, the answer is The Big Thinker speaks to the robots in English, so they understand it. Let’s move on.

Real Ruff pretends to be a robot Ruff to get past the guard. We know it’s the real Ruff because he winks at the audience.



Once inside, Ruff has a dilemma: which one is the real Reddy? (Yeah, I know, “Ten Little Flintstones.” Let’s move on).



The way to find out: the real Reddy won’t sound metallic when hit with a hammer. It sounds like Greg Watson or whoever handled the sound struck the side of a cowbell to make the noise.



Ruff escapes with Reddy only to be followed by a cleverly-designed (by Ed Benedict?) flying camera for which this episode is named. It transmits what it sees back to The Big Thinker, who issues a command to bring the Earthlings back to him. Reddy, still under robot control, grabs Ruff and the cartoon ends with them heading toward TBT.



Two Spencer Moore cues from the Capitol Hi-Q “D” series are heard in this one, along with something that sounds like a work part (ie., a musical effect, like a stab, a sting or a button) from the “S” series (to be honest, I’m too lazy to hunt around to see if I have it). Science fictions films of the day loved these Moore cues. L-1203 is heard in the immortal Teenagers From Outer Space.

0:00 – No music.
0:06 – L-657 EERIE DRAMATIC (Moore) – Start of cartoon.
1:52 – No music – “Don’t you know me, Reddy?...
1:58 – Musical stab (Unknown) – Camera pans down line of robots.
2:02 – L-1203 EERIE HEAVY ECHO (Moore) – “Which one of these Reddys…” to end of cartoon.

The next episode is “Muni-Mula Mix-Up.” A recap segues into Ruff demanding Reddy put him down. Remarkably, he does. Narrator Messick explains that because Reddy has a peanut brain and a thick skull “the cosmic rays [that put him under The Big Thinker’s control] bounced off like water off a duck.” Yeah, that’s the best comic analogy Charlie Shows could come up with.

Anyway. Reddy’s eyes swirl as he comes out of the spell.



What now? “Let’s get out of this creepy place,” says Reddy, though you have to wonder where he thinks he can go. There’s lots of pose-to-pose movement here without in-betweens. They try to get past a robot guard (who scratches his head in reused animation) by pretending to be Ruff and Reddy mechanical duplicates (who walk in reused cycle animation), but are again watched by the Hocus Pocus Focus.



Reddy ignores Ruff’s advice to ignore the camera and tries to swat it away. Ruff tries to “ground this contraption.” There are three seconds of a shot of Ruff with the only animation being eye blinks. Some metallic sound effects are heard, then after ten frames of Ruff in a stretch shock take, he ducks and Reddy enters the scene. There are 28 frames of Ruff, with Reddy riding the Hocus Pocus Focus on a cel pulled across the background from left to right. The only animation is three drawings of the propeller of the camera in a cycle.



Ruff tries to stop Reddy by holding onto him. Cut to a scene of the doors of The Big Thinker’s chamber. They open. But, for some reason, they don’t go into the chamber. They go past it. There’s no reason for the doors to open. Maybe that’s the Muni-Mula Mix-Up.



“Once again, Ruff and Reddy are face-to-face with The Big Thinker,” says the narrator. “Once again” gives Bill Hanna an excuse to reused some limited animation and even a dialogue track from Daws Butler.

Cut to The Big Thinker who, unexpectedly, isn’t The Big Thinker. As we hear the sound of a ceramic lid clamping down on a teapot, TBT’s head opens and closes, with a wimpy voice saying “Get me out of here." A little man with a voice like Bill Thompson’s Droopy (it’s Don Messick here) emerges and pleads with Ruff and Reddy to get him off Muni-Mula. That’s where the episode ends.



The cues:

0:00 – No music – Title card.
0:06 – TC-221A HEAVY AGITATO (Bill Loose-John Seely) – Starts of cartoon to skull explanation.
1:09 – No music – Reddy’s eyes swirl.
1:14 - L-653 EERIE DRAMATIC (Spencer Moore) – “Sometimes, it pays...” to end of cartoon.

What’s that, fans? Today is Ruff and Reddy’s birthday? The pair got mentioned in Faye “My-eyes-are-up-here” Emerson’s column of Dec. 9, 1957:

The Russians stole thunder from cartoonists Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera when they shot their dog into space. The animators had already started working on what they though was a “fantasy,” a TV serial about a dog and cat who venture into outer space. The cartoon show, “Ruff and Reddy,” debuts Dec. 14 on NBC.

This business about the Soviet Space-Pooch was raised in a news release the previous month. This was in the Miami Herald.

Cartoon Animal In Outer Space
NEW YORK, Nov. 13—NBC-TV is preparing to send a cat and a dog into outer space the latter part of December via a new cartoon program just purchased from Screen Gems. These plans were revealed immediately following the Russians' announcement of the launching of Muttnik.
"Ruff and Reddy" are the names of the two NBC space travelers. Their adventures will be depicted in a new four-minute animated serial produced in color by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, creators of the famous "Tom and Jerry" cartoons.
NBC plans to program the "Ruff and Reddy" show Saturday mornings. Each half-hour installment will consist of two episodes from the "Ruff and Reddy" adventure serial and two first-run cartoons from the Columbia Pictures library. The show will he emceed either by a human host or by Ruff and Reddy themselves.

NBC decided to go with a human host. Cartoon hosts would have to wait a year for The Huckleberry Hound Show.