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.
