Yogi Bear, Sunday, October 1961

Well, dear fans of Yowp, we’ll have to see how many more of these Yogi comic strip posts make their way onto the blog. I feel like I’m duplicating material from other blogs, especially Ger Apeldoorn’s wonderful spot on the internet where his scanner has been working overtime to bring you all kinds of old strips. And Mark Kausler has been putting some up on the internet, too. Both of those fine gentlemen have huge colour collections of these comics. I just have photocopies of newspapers in black-and-white.

The October 1st Yogi ends with a variation on the old “crash into painted tunnel” gag you’ll find in a bunch of animated cartoons. Yogi helped catch crooks in several of his TV adventures, like Big Brave Bear, Bare Face Bear (featuring Yowp’s farewell performance) and Disguise and Gals.



Here’s one to get all those people obsessed with continuity in a knot. Ranger Smith’s putting the move on a blonde babe on October 8th. Yes, I know he’s married in the comics. Yes, I know he’s married in at least one cartoon (in Wound Up Bear, he complains about “Mabel and her charge accounts”). No one worried about more than a basic situation back then. So you shouldn’t worry about it now.

I’ll leave it to the experts to suggest whose artwork this is.



Huckleberry Hound makes a visit in the October 15th comic. The end rhyme is really stretching things. Where’s the luck? And is that supposed to be a woodchuck on the mailbox?



Take a flying saucer from Space Bear (and add a tail fin), Yogi accidentally going airborn as in The Buzzin’ Bear and destroying the Ranger’s cabin in Bewitched Bear and build from there. That happened in October 22nd comic where Yogi outsmarts Ranger Smith.



And the Yogi-in-show biz idea which we saw in Show Biz Bear and Droop-a-long Bear gets a workout on October 29th. Kids, that thing Yogi is sitting on in the last panel is a TV antennae. Way back when, the antenna was attached to a flat cable that contained two sets of thin wires that were each wrapped around a screw on the back of a TV set. That’s how the picture was received. It was the latest thing back then. That’s more than I can say for that Bell and Howell-type movie camera that could have come from the silent film days. I like the Barrymore-esque profile of the actor.



There’ll be a bonus newspaper comic post later this month.