Sorry, the quality of the scans is not all that great. You can click on them to make them bigger.
Oddly, there are no silhouette character drawings in any of these. Perhaps they were used in the missing first row.
Gene Hazelton, or whoever handled stories for these, borrows a bit of business from George Nicholas’ best Yogi cartoon, Lullabye-Bye Bear for the May 7, 1961 cartoon. The premise of the cartoon is Yogi is trying to stay awake through winter and not hibernate but keeps falling asleep. Can someone explain why people/bears hold their arms out when they sleep-walk?
In Runaway Bear, Yogi is a roller-skating bear in a circus. He adopts an arms-behind-bar/leg-up pose in that cartoon like he does in one of the panels in the May 14 cartoon.
The kid in the May 21 cartoon has the “low ear” that Walt Clinton favoured in his layouts but doesn’t look like any character ever used in any animated cartoon.
Yogi played a goody-stealing Robin Hood in a first season cartoon and Ranger Smith went undercover in at least one later cartoon. The two ideas get married as the plot for the May 28 cartoon. The curious bystanding fish is a nice touch; very Warner Bros.
Yogi’s really stretching his rhymes at times in some of the panels, but I suppose that’s what the studio wanted, so that’s what it got.
It's interesting the way the writer(s) of the strip played out variations of the cartoons without outright copying them. Circa late 1960s-early 1970s Gold Key Comics, who was the main adapter of H-B properties of the time, would lift entire episodes of WACKY RACES, SCOOBY-DOO, HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS and the like, for their stories. Granted, the titles were changed and the stories were often heavily condensed. But anyone who wacthed the actual cartoons would make the connection very quickly.
ReplyDeleteAt least Gold Key stayed on model with most characters- unlike Charlton, which produced a horribly drawn Flintstones comic book beginning in 1972.
The general rule at Gold Key (not always followed) was that the first issue or two of a Hanna-Barbera comic would adapt episodes from the show and thereafter, they wouldn't. The reason was that the studio had approval rights but rarely paid much attention after the first issue or two. So to have those issues adapted from episodes would mean that the studio wouldn't say, "Your writer doesn't understand the show." I did the first issue of THE AMAZING CHAN AND CHAN CLAN and was handed a storyboard to adapt.
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