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.
One of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s first hires when they (with silent partner George Sidney) opened their own studio in July 1957 was someone who hadn’t worked with them at MGM. It was a writer named Charlie Shows.
Charlie was a former police detective from El Paso who ended up working on, and/or creating, children’s TV shows in Los Angeles, including Time For Beany. He came up with KNBH’s Adventures of Patches, which starred Don Messick as the voice of Patches (Larry Harmon was Wacky Rabbit). In 1951, he was named honorary mayor of Sun Valley, California.
Long-time readers know I’ve been tough on Charlie. He loved rhymes and, to me, too many were really forced or hokey. But he was a good artist and when he worked on Ruff and Reddy, his dialogue comes across better because the series was aimed at younger kids.
(Side note: I give Charlie credit for the immortal words “I hate meeces to pieces.” Whether he came up with it, or Joe Barbera did, I honestly don’t know, but it sounds like something Shows wrote).
Mr. Shows peppers the 12th Ruff and Reddy cartoon, Reddy’s Rocket Rescue, with his (in)famous rhymes. Narrator Messick talks of “Professor Giz, the rocket whiz,” Ruff adds a “Gee whiz, Giz,” and Gizmo observes that “Redd is dead ahead” and to “stand by for a dizzy dive” as he and Ruff make the aforementioned rescue.
As usual, the cartoon starts with a close-to-30-second recap (with re-used animation) from the last episode, when the “whiz” shoots off Reddy’s propeller from his metal beany, and we see the plummeting pooch dropping to his doom.
The adventure continues with Gizmo using a “secret weapon.” It’s an ordinary toilet plunger. “It’s lucky the professor has a bag of tricks, ‘cause Reddy is falling like a bag of bricks,” narrator Messick exclaims. Gizmo proves to be an accurate shot.
Silhouette drawing.
Reddy is his usual belligerent self. “Put me down, you clown!” he gripes. “Oh, gee, Reddy,” responds Ruff, adding “What an attitude! Where’s your gratitude?” It’s no quirk. Reddy’s a jerk (See, Charlie? I can write that way, too).
“What happens to me shouldn’t happen to a dog,” is the episode’s ironic comment.
The troubles aren’t over. The Muni-Mula Air Force, their propellers moving in cycle animation, return. Gizmo uses his “super-secret weapon”—a package that reads “Do not open until Christmas” that has a Fourth of July cracker in it. The “noisy rascals” stare at the package. It explodes. End of Air Force. (Fourth of July? On Muni Mula?).
“You’re a whiz, Gizmo,” says Reddy. “Just call me ‘Giz’,” is the response in more of Shows’ sparkling dialogue.
The three decide to head back to Earth. But look! A mammoth meteor is heading toward them. Will it hit them? We’ll have to wait for the next episode.
Shows left Hanna-Barbera in 1958 to work for Larry Harmon on his Bozo the Clown TV cartoons, but was re-hired in the mid-1960s to craft stories and even lyrics for record albums starring the Hanna-Barbera characters in various tales. He certainly contributed to the studio’s legacy.
Two cues from Bill Loose and John Seely are heard in the background of this episode.
0:00 – No music – Title card.
0:06 – TC-219A CHASE MEDIUM (Loose-Seely) – Recap, Reddy pulled into spacecraft.
1:51 – No music – Reddy in the capsule complains about his treatment.
2:01 – TC-217A CHASE MEDIUM (Loose-Seely) – Muni Mulas fly in formation, end of cartoon.
There’s a generation out there that gets wistful for afternoon blocks of syndicated cartoons, or an American cable channel that pumped out nothing but animation.
Your yowping reporter pre-dates that. I go further back, back to a time when you got more than cartoons on pre- and after-school shows on TV. You got live hosts, introducing cartoons and kibitzing with others in front of the camera. Their routines could be silly and funny and, if I may editorialise, more entertaining than the cartoons (A sign of a successful show was hearing cameramen break up in the background).
These shows were all over the United States, and they were the ones that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had in mind when they developed the Lippy the Lion, Touché Turtle and Wally Gator cartoons. The five-minute comedies could be dropped into kids shows, or even run on their own if a station was too cheap to hire live talent.
This is a bit of a long-winded way to get into this picture I snagged off the internet.
This is from The Pappy Show on WICU-TV in Erie, Pennsylvania.
There were people dressed up as Yogi Bear who toured North America in the late ’50s and early ‘60s, putting on shows at fairs and department stores. This version of Yogi isn’t one of them. He's a little emaciated. I don’t have the background behind the photo, so I don’t know if this Yogi appeared with Pappy regularly.
(Pappy was a chap named Skip Letcher. He had been a disc jockey CHVC in Niagara Falls, Ontario. On-camera cohort Bernard Abbey died in 1964 at the age of 39).
Since I mentioned Lippy, etc., I will use this as an excuse to post this newspaper supplement cover. The characters are on model, so this must have been studio artwork, though I’m not certain why Touché is floating in mid-air. The Lippy, etc. cartoons were viewed in our home, using a special antenna, from KTNT-TV in Tacoma on the Brakeman Bill Show. The best part of the show was a hand puppet named Crazy Donkey. Even my dad would stop and watch Crazy Donkey do or say something ridiculous.
It’s a shame the live host period ended. You can blame those people who watered down cartoons to “protect” children. Hosts on some stations plugged things, and there was a lot of concern about advertising aimed at kids. The hosts vanished. (So did a droll series called Linus the Lionhearted, starring Post cereal spokes-cartoons).
We didn’t need a “Cartoon Network” back then. There was, at least where I grew up, plenty of animated fun after school. I could watch a live kids show that included cartoons, then switch to a half hour of The Flintstones in reruns, then switch to another channel with Warners and Fleischer Popeyes, then switch to another channel that aired Quick Draw McGraw or Huckleberry Hound. That took up a good couple of hours and you could get your cartoon fill for the day.
I’m pretty sure there are readers here who fondly remember the live, ad-lib kid shows on their TV set. The hosts were just as popular as the cartoons they showed. Bravo to them.
We’re not exactly dealing with the brightest characters at times in the Ruff and Reddy cartoons. Witness the events in 11th part of the Muni Mula adventure, Crowds in the Clouds, which first aired on NBC on January 18, 1958 as the first of two R & R segments that morning (it was repeated on July 20, 1958).
Narrator Don Messick recaps the action in the 10th part, followed by brainiac Prof. Gizmo activating a smoke screen around his spaceship to hide from the Muni Mula army.
So far, so good. The camera operator appears to have been given some instruction to put a filter over one scene to make it look like the interior of the spaceship is filled with the smoke screen.
The cloud cover works!
“Meanwhile, back the ranch, uh, planet...” says the narrator as the cartoon switches scene. By the way, was the phrase “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” ever heard in a motion picture? Reddy and the Muni Mulas are animated running past some overlays.
Reddy “ducks into the nearest building” after pointlessly passing it, running back and running in. Maybe Hanna needed extra footage to fill. Note how the legs become wheels.
Reddy discovers he’s a room with flying Muni Mula men, who ascend to try to capture Reddy and the professor. They’re “taking off like a herd of birds.” Someone tell writer Charlie Shows that birds don’t come in herds. Or maybe that’s another of his forced rhymes.
Reddy decides to escape skywards. Still, so far, so good.
Ruff now shows he’s not so bright. He looks out the spaceship window sees Reddy in the stratosphere. “Professor, look! One of the Muni-Mula airmen!” He can’t tell his own buddy from a robot that’s a different shape and colour. Gismo activates his “big gun” and aims it at Reddy. Ruff then realises who it is, tells the professor, who doesn’t pay any attention, and fires. Gizmo was still adjusting his site when Ruff shouted the warning. Some smart guy he is.
“Maybe he’ll be lucky and land on his head,” says the encouraging Mr. Messick, as we’re urged not to miss the next episode.
This is a pretty good cliff-hanger. Can you guess what happens next?
The sound cutter puts three Capitol Hi-Q “D” series cues behind the action.
0:00 – No music – Title Card
0:05 – TC-15 CHASE-MEDIUM (Bill Loose-John Seely) – Start of recap, Muni Mula air force, Ruff and Gizmo at window.
0:53 – L-1203 EERIE HEAVY ECHO (Spencer Moore) – Rocket stops.
1:25 – TC-15 CHASE-MEDIUM (Loose-Seely) – Robots fly past cloud, Reddy chased, knocking.
1:57 – L-653 EERIE DRAMATIC (Moore) – Robots outside door, Reddy flies up, rocket, end of cartoon.
