The Huckleberry Hound Show was incredibly popular upon its debut, not only in the U.S. where Kellogg’s placed it on nearly 200 stations, but in other countries as well.
The Huck show got write-ups in England. This one is from the Dec. 14, 1962 issue of the Leicester Illustrated Chronicle
Boo-Boo And All That
HAVE you re-christened your cat Jinks? Do you feel your home is haunted by two "meeces" called Pixie and Dixie?
Does your wife call you "Boo-boo?"
And have your children adopted speech horribly like that of rural America?
If any of these things have happened, I'd diagnose a familiar T.V. ailment, and I'm not sure about treatment. You might try taking up Yoga, or rubbing with bear's grease!
As you hardly need telling, the Huckleberry Hound cartoons have a powerfully hypnotic effect. And you'll just have to hope that your children will grow out of talking Yogi bear talk.
Although I deplore their influence on youngsters, I must sneakingly admit that these cartoons can be very funny indeed. In spite of the bear-cat-hound-and mouse talk, the humour is often adult, and I would have thought, a bit beyond many children.
Violent
Some mothers may be appalled by infelicities like slamming of a door which Huck's face—which he then peels off and replaces! [From Little Red Riding Huck]. But this kind of “sick” is familiar in the “Tom and Jerry” (cat and mouse) cartoons with which the creators of Huck were formerly associated.
We see Tom the cat fur-less as the result of explosions, he takes the shape of objects against which he is violently hurled, he goes green after drinking some noxious liquid, and since he is a grey cat is it possible to draw for him beautiful black eyes which develop to the accompaniment of comets, lightning flashes and the twittering of birds!
THE simpler drawing of the Huckleberry Hound cartoons and the fact that we see them in black and white removes some of the horror when the characters suffer assault and battery.
The character voices are high in comic potential, but how to muzzle the little darlings who enjoy demonstrating their gift of mimicry is a bear-size problem.
Perhaps the only way to exorcise the "clinks" that is afflicting your household is to insist that A.T.V. screens these cartoons at half past eleven at night. A letter to your M.P. might do the trick.
Even then, your children might creep, "meece"-like, out of bed for a keyhole view of the programme!
Some Canadians could view Huck from American channels, but on January 7, 1959, he began appearing Wednesday afternoons at 5:30 on the CBC stations in Toronto and Ottawa, as well as Sudbury, Timmins, Wingham, London, Kingston and Peterborough, and at 7 p.m. Thursday on CKLW Windsor.
A Vancouver Sun story of Dec. 1, 1958 revealed the show was being re-voiced for the CBC French network.
There were other countries, too. The Lancaster Sunday News of Jan. 11, 1959 noted the show was being produced for Spanish-speaking countries with dubbed-in dialects. Perhaps along the internet, you've caught Jinksie or Iggy and Ziggy speaking in Italian or some other tongue.
We haven't checked, but one character shouldn't need anyone else's voice than Don Messick's original. After all, what's German for "yowp?"
Meanwhile, Huck continued to be a fad in the U.S.A. during his first season. The Lakeland Ledger’s College column of April 5, 1959 noted:
Thursday, the men of Phi Sigma Kappa and their dates will watch television for an hour at their weekly “Huckleberry Hound Party.”
The frat house was only able to view the show from 6 to 6:30 p.m. on WFLA-TV Tampa. We can only guess what they did in the second half hour.
Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, I’m sure, didn’t mind it when writer Warren Foster opened a cartoon with a slow pan over a background painting. No animation was required, which saved a buck or two.
Show Biz Bear (1959) starts with Don Messick’s narration over two backgrounds, one dissolving into another. The camera movement takes up the first 14 seconds of the cartoon.
Here’s the first background of Jellystone Park snipped together.
The background is by Dick Thomas, perhaps best-known for his work with the Bob McKimson unit at Warner Bros. He had been Bob Clampett's background artist when Clampett was still making black-and-white Looney Tunes.
The plot of the star-struck civilian being suddenly put in front of film cameras and getting physically abused was a little shopworn, but Show Biz Bear is still a fun cartoon. No Boo Boo, no Ranger Smith, no pic-a-nic baskets.
Here are the frames of Yogi taking a long step and zipping into the scene. The director has those isosceles-triangle closed eyes Patterson liked to draw.
The animation in this cartoon is by Don Patterson, who directed some cartoons for Walter Lantz in the early '50s, then was demoted to animator when Tex Avery was brought in. When Tex left, Patterson directed Flea For Two (released in 1955) which, judging by the production number, was doubtlessly started by Avery. Lantz then hired Alex Lovy and Patterson never directed again for Lantz again. Too bad. Both Patterson and Lovy ended up at H-B Enterprises in 1959.
Patterson settled in for a long career at Hanna-Barbera, animating on The Flintstones, Top Cat, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest and then into the Saturday morning TV era.
We’ve talked about how the early Hanna-Barbera characters went from one pose to the next without in-betweens. We’ve also mentioned in a previous post that Mike Lah animated movement in his cartoons at the studio that way, and with in-betweens when necessary.
Here are a couple of examples from the debut cartoon of that loveable character, Yowp, Foxy Hound-Dog.
Below are two consecutive frames of Yogi Bear and the little fox. The positions are quite different but action doesn’t look abrupt on the TV screen.
Lah had Yogi run in place in a little cycle of two drawings, shot for two frames (see the first drawing above)
Here’s an in-between as Yogi leaves the scene. Just having him disappear in the next frame would look odd. Some animators, including Lew Marshall earlier in this cartoon, take out the characters in the following frame but have drybrush lines or swirls instead.
Here’s another example from the same cartoon. The first two frames are consecutive, there’s a two-drawing run-in-place cycle, followed by some in-betweens, also animated on twos.
I like this scrambly Yogi.
You’ll notice Lah will draw Yogi in profile or close to it. This enables him to animate various mouth shapes on the face and hold the rest of a character on a separate cel.
To get Yowp to yowp, Lah animates the head. (The legs are on a separate cel and are animated when Yowp walks into the log).
Fernando Montealegre is responsible for the backgrounds. The one with the trees and hills gets a lot of use in this cartoon, and there are several shades of green to avoid monotony. His backgrounds never overshadow the characters, and are simple yet stylish.
This is from Yogi’s first season on the Huckleberry Hound Show. I like these early Yogis before he got yoked to the Boo-Boo/Ranger Smith/Talk-in-Rhyme-All-the-Time format in the show’s second season.
The first Ruff and Reddy adventure may not have featured an awful lot of animation, but the uncredited background artist was pretty busy.
In the final cartoon in the Muni Mula adventure, from the time the S.S. Gizmo II is hit by a meteor (which we never actually see) to the end of the cartoon 2½ minutes later, there are at least 20 pieces of background art. Only a few of them are reused from earlier cartoons.
My guess is Fernando Montealegre is responsible, at least judging by the flat living room scene toward the end of this cartoon.
The story-line is simple. After the meteor hits the spacecraft, and Reddy breaks its brake, the automatic pilot sends it toward Earth, and it smashes into Mount Cucamonga after warnings are sent around the world about a UFO.
Space orb overlay in the first background, just like a theatrical.
Director Bill Hanna simulates animation by turning this background counter-clockwise while the camera pulls in. I keep waiting for the Randy Horne Singers to chirp "Meet George Jetson."
Inside gag on the microphone.
“And our boys made the headlines,” says narrator Don Messick, who reads what we can see on the screen.
Cut to the newscaster explaining these were not Martians, “but nothing but an ordinary dog and cat...and a wacky little professor,” as the camera pans over to the three battered protagonists.
“So, you see,” intones the announcer, “there is no such thing as flying saucers.” How that is determined from one UFO that is identified is unclear. An animated slap at government denials, perhaps?
“Poor Ruff, Reddy and Gizmo,” says narrator Messick, as they trudge away from Hard Sell O’Dell’s car lot. “No one believes they’ve ever been to Muni Mula.”
Director Hanna engages in a diagonal wipe.
There’s a shot of the battered rocket on the lot and a cut to a close-up of the sign in front of it, which Messick reads.
This cuts to the background drawing of Mt. Cucamonga with its launch pad on a wooden platform on top. The camera trucks in to provide movement in the scene. There’s another cut the camera moving in quickly on silhouetted animation of Gizmo building a third rocket.
The camera pans upward as the narrator explains the professor is being helped by Ruff, who stops to look at the audience watching home, then cuts to snoring Reddy, before panning up to the stratosphere. Messick happily adds “Who knows? In the not-to-distant future, the space spaceketeers may again be exploring the mysteries of space. I hope we can all go along with Gizmo. And Ruff. And Reddy.”
End theme out.
I didn’t intend on reviewing any Ruff and Reddy cartoons, but after I posted on the first two episodes, decided to see if I could finish it. Will there be others? Not that I’ve planned. But as a narrator might say, “Who knows?”
Readers have asked me about the state of these cartoons and if the series will, or can, be restored. I am not plugged in to people who know about these things; I’m just an aging person who happens to like old cartoons. Of course, tweaking this series into pristine home-video format would delight those who like it. And, Crusader Rabbit notwithstanding, Ruff and Reddy does have some historical value in my estimation, and is worth restoration for this reason. We’ll have to wait and see.
The music used in this final, first-adventure cartoon, is credited to Bill Loose and John Seely.
0:00 – no music – title card
0:06 – TC-219A CHASE MEDIUM (Loose-Seely) – recap, meteor hit spaceship, Reddy snaps break.
1:27 – TC-221A HEAVY AGITATO (Loose-Seely) – “Broke the brake,” warnings flashed, crashes into Mt. Cucamonga, headlines.
2:26 – no music – TV newscaster.
2:36 – TC 304A FOX TROT (Loose-Seely) – “Ordinary?” car lot, new rocket built, cartoon ends.
Hanna-Barbera needed some outside help to get the Huckleberry Hound Show on the air. Three animators were on staff, but Hanna brought in Mike Lah (their wives were sisters) on a freelance basis to pick up some scenes and a couple of full cartoons.
Lah was employed at Quartet Films at the time; he was the “other” director at MGM when Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were told the studio was closing, and had worked in various units after his arrival from Disney.
We’ve pointed out a number of early Huck show cartoons where the animation switches for maybe 90 seconds to Lah’s drawings. He’s never credited in those cartoons.
The other day, I was re-watching Scaredycat Dog (Production E-12), and spotted what sure looks like (to me) Lah’s animation; Lew Marshall gets the animation credit on it.
When Jinks tip-toes from behind a house, he has jagged teeth. Lah drew Spike that way in cartoons for Tex Avery at MGM.
Jinks going “boo” looks like Lah, too.
There’s a good deal of pose-to-pose movement by Marshall in this cartoon. In this scene, Lah draws two in-betweens before the dog zooms into the sky. The first lasts three frames, the next is on two frames.
A favourite Lah animation-saver is by holding a character on a cel and moving the mouth in a variety of shapes. You can see it in Pie-Pirates, the first Yogi cartoon; Lah animated it solo.
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The cartoon ends with the twin-brother, cat-hating dog chasing Mr. Jinks in an endless, four-drawing cycle that takes 24 frames to go past the same point of the background. Here's what it looks like. This is Lew Marshall's work.
Lah’s uncredited animation can be found in other Pixie-Dixie-Jinks cartoons: Pistol Packin' Pirate, Judo Jack, Little Bird Mouse, Cousin Tex, Jinks' Mice Device, The Ace of Space and Jinks Junior.
Some mothers may be appalled by infelicities like slamming of a door which Huck's face—which he then peels off and replaces! [From Little Red Riding Huck]. But this kind of “sick” is familiar in the “Tom and Jerry” (cat and mouse) cartoons with which the creators of Huck were formerly associated. 
