The Hanna-Barbera Story, 1960

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera spent several decades polishing the tale of how their studio rose to fame. The story sounded a lot better over time as details got a bit of a make-over.

Here’s a feature piece by Larry Wolters of the Chicago Tribune of November 13, 1960. That was still in the “Wonderful Huck” period of the studio. Hanna-Barbera cartoons were lauded everywhere. They weren’t the old theatricals that critics were tired of (ironically, those were the cartoons where Hanna and Barbera got a lot of their gags and situations). And they compared pretty well, humour-wise, to live-action comedy shows on TV at the time (can anyone really sit through ‘I Married Joan?’).

Anyway, here’s the article with some poor photocopies of two of the four pictures that went with it. I’ll make a couple of observations below.

YOGI BEAR and HUCKLEBERRY
Channel 9's Cartoon Rascals Are the Rage at Yale, the South Pole, and at Home
RECENTLY a telephone conversation between a grandfather and his 5 year old grandson ended abruptly with these words: “I can't talk anymore now, gramps, Huckleberry Hound is on.”
Huckleberry Hound and his friend Yogi Bear and another TV cartoon show Quick Draw McGraw are causing parents to race their offspring to the best viewing spot in front of the set to follow the adventures of these amusing channel 9 characters.
A poll at Yale university last season proved them to be the most popular TV characters at this Ivy league institution. A learned society at Pasadena asked that the shows be shifted to a later hour so the membership could watch.
In two short years Huck and Quick Draw have become famous in far-flung outposts of the world. Down in the Antarctic’s Bellinghausen sea sits a tiny island that bears the name of Huckleberry Hound. It was named by the crew of the United States coast guard icebreaker Glacier who love the noble hearted pooch with the look of a bloodhound and a voice not unlike that of the drawling Andy Griffith.
The show is also a hit in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Syndicated on some 180 American stations, these creations of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera have become just about the most beloved cartoon characters since Disney invented Mickey Mouse.
Huck’s friends include Mr. Jinks, a method acting cat; Yogi, a porkpie wearing bruin who reminds you of Art Carney. Huck is a sort of canine Robin Hood. Once he took out after a tyrant who refused to permit his subjects to pay their taxes with credit cards. This and other good works so endeared him to the Hull (England) Jazz and Cycling society that it changed its name to the Huckleberry Hound club.
Huck’s friends don’t go in for such complicated social reforms as he does. Yogi Bear and his small bear buddy, Boo-Boo, live in Jellystone park, a national preserve, where they try to cadge food from tourists. Mr. Jinx [sic], a masochistic cat, has a lot of misadventures with Pixie and Dixie, two roguish mice.
Quick Draw McGraw, just as popular as Huck, is the hero of another western but no ordinary western. He’s a horse. And his adventures are not child’s play. He’s more adult than any adult western.
Others who help enliven his adventures are Bobba Looey [sic], a Mexican burro with a heart of gold who sounds like Desi Arnaz; Shagglepuss [sic], a playful lion with a Bert Lahr inflection; Snooper, a cat duplicate of Ed (Archie) Gardner; Blabber, probably the first mouse to work in cahoots with a pussy; Augie Doggie, a potential juvenile delinquent dog; Augie’s dad with a voice like Jimmy Durante’s, and a goat whose voice and romantic outlook are similar to those of Maurice Chevalier.
Hanna and Barbera used to do the Tom and Jerry animated cartoon series at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. They lost their jobs after a 20 year stint. They turned out more than 125 cartoons while in the movies and won seven academy awards for the studio. Hanna works as the idea man, Barbera as the cartoonist.
In three years Hanna and Barbera Productions has become the nation’s largest cartoon factory. Besides Huck and Quick Draw they have Ruff and Reddy, and a new one called The Flintstones, a TV cartoon series for adults. It’s a gentle satire on a stone age couple forced to live in current times with Paleolithic problems.
Oddly enough, neither Hanna nor Barbera began their careers as artists. Bill, born in Melrose N. M., spent his school years studying engineering and journalism. After college he joined a firm in California and acted as a structural engineer for the building of the Pantages theater in Hollywood where he later was to receive those Academy awards.
Hanna’s engineering efforts did not last long and he joined Leon Schlessinger’s [sic] cartoon company.
Joe Barbera was born in New York City and attended the American Institute of Banking. After graduation he went to work for a trust company as an accountant. He did more doodling and dreaming, however, then checking up on accounts and started submitting cartoons to leading magazines.
Some of them were accepted so he left the world of finance. In 1937 he joined M-G-M as a story man. Hanna became an animator.
Leaving M-G-M proved the biggest break in their lives. The motion picture business was at an all-time low in 1957 so they asked for and got a release from their contracts. Shortly thereafter M-G-M discontinued cartoon production.
Armed with some new ideas and revolutionary techniques for producing animated cartoons for TV they made the rounds of various ad agencies and production companies. They were met with the same answers everywhere: “It can’t be done. Good animation is too expensive, limited animation too shoddy.”
But on July 7, 1957, Screen Gems decided to take a chance on them. Their new concepts caught on quickly. Their first one was Ruff and Reddy, a story about a frisky cat and a dimwitted dog. Huck arrived a year later and Quick Draw in 1959.
Perhaps one reason why Hanna and Barbera’s shows are so successful is that they’ve gone back to the primary objective of cartooning—to caricature and satire. However, they don’t labor the satire. As one intellectual put it: “You can almost hate children for liking Huckleberry so much. He’s too good for them.” That was the case, too, with Burr Tillstrom and Kukla and Ollie.

It’s interesting that Bill and/or Joe claim they got let out of their contracts before the studio closed. In later years, both made it appear they were callously tossed out on the street and used their last pennies to save their career and create an entire industry—which makes for a better story.

The article mentions a whole list of characters and ends with a no-name goat. He appeared as a gag toward the end of the Quick Draw McGraw cartoon ‘Lamb Chopped.’ Perhaps significant is the mention of Snagglepuss (Wolters really should have checked his spelling), who didn’t have his own cartoon series and wasn’t even a regular character. But, obviously, he made an impression—the early Snagglepuss was arguably a better character than the later version—and no doubt Bill and Joe kept that in mind when looking for two other stars to round out the Yogi Bear Show that debuted only two months later.

Perhaps it’s because the story dealt with television, there’s no mention of the Loopy De Loop theatrical cartoons being made by Hanna-Barbera.

The brief mention of The Flintstones is a foreshadowing of a real change at the studio. In a way, The Flintstones were Hanna-Barbera’s equivalent of Snow White for Disney. Before Snow, all the attention was paid to Disney’s shorts, which were endlessly praised. After, they became the poor step-sister to feature production. So, too, at Hanna-Barbera, that after the debut of The Flintstones, attention was shifted to the studio’s prime-time efforts. No one talked about Huck and Quick Draw, who were relegated to reruns. They deserved a lot better. That’s why this blog is here.

Pixie and Dixie — King-Size Surprise

Produced and Directed by Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna.
Credits: Animation – Lew Marshall; Layout – Walt Clinton; Backgrounds – Bob Gentle; Dialogue and Story Sketches – Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voices: Pixie – Don Messick; Dixie, Mr. Jinks, King-Size – Daws Butler.
Music: Bill Loose/John Seely, Jack Shaindlin, Spencer Moore, Geordie Hormel.
Episode: Huckleberry Hound Show K-023, Production E-56.
First Aired: week of March 2, 1959.
Plot: A dog agrees to protect Pixie and Dixie from Jinks after they help him.

When he and Bill Hanna opened their own studio, Joe Barbera had spent 17 years at MGM writing almost nothing but cat-vs.-mouse cartoons. So it’s not too shocking that when his studio needed instant ideas for 22 cat-vs.-mice cartoons, he’d borrow a bit from his old Metro shorts. And it’s no more apparently than in this cartoon, which owes an awful lot to 1944’s The Bodyguard.

Of course, the idea of ‘I’ll-help-you-because-you-really-helped-me’ goes back to Androcles and the Lion, and Tex Avery took into ridiculousness in the great Bad Luck Blackie (1949). But this cartoon even lifts gags wholesale from the MGM original. One thing this cartoon doesn’t have in common with The Bodyguard is animator Lew Marshall. He wasn’t at MGM when it was made.

It starts the same. In spirit, anyway. Pixie and Dixie are running away from Jinks, who has been chasing them.



Jinks has hidden himself behind the garbage can where the exhausted Pixie and Dixie are vowing to fight the cat “two against one.” Afraid not. Jinks clobbers them with the garbage can lid (do they make metal garbage cans any more?). The vibrating take is the gag. It’s on two drawings on twos.



Charlie Shows works in a rare-for-him pop culture reference. Jinks asks “Are you, like, all shook up?” It’s still early in Jinks’ career so he doesn’t consistently call them “meeces.” In this scene, he calls them “mousies.”

Next scene finds Pixie and Dixie on a sidewalk curb forlornly remarking that Jinks has pushed them too far. Their state of resignation is interrupted by a dog who wants help. In The Bodyguard, the dog has been caught by dog catcher but in this one, he’s only worried about being caught because his dog license tag has fallen through a drainage grate. Shows rhyme time: “Calm down, hound,” says Dixie. Doesn’t Marshall’s dog look like something from a late ‘50s MGM cartoon in this shot? The meece rescue the dog tag or, as Dixie puts it “Operation Dog Tag in the bag.” The dog pledges eternal loyalty to the mice. Unlike The Bodyguard, where the bulldog tells Jerry to whistle if he needs help, this dog tells Pixie and Dixie to “yelp for help.”

The mice now decide to be vengeful and smug. Poor Jinks is merely resting his weary self (can he look any uglier in Marshall’s snore cycle?). Pixie collapses the lawn chair which crashes loudly on the lawn (An explosion sound? On a lawn?). Exclaims the surprised Jinks, “Wow, now!” Good lord, can someone please burn Charlie Shows’ rhyming dictionary? “What’s the matter? All shook up?” says the facetious Dixie. Bitter doesn’t become you, meece.

Jinks grabs the mice who yell for help. Sure enough, just like in The Bodyguard, the cat gets a fist in the face from the dog.



The blog’s revealed before that Marshall has an odd way of animation punches or hits without any contact. This time, he uses four drawings on ones. Here they are slowed down.



“So that’s the scoop-arooni, eh?” exclaims Jinks. How can you not love a cat that uses the word ‘scoop-arooni?’ Anyway, the cartoon emulates The Bodyguard some more as Jinks gets punched every time the meeces call for the dog. First “behind-st” a closed front door. Then in a closet (Dixie: “We have just begun to have fun, son.” Charlie, go away). Then Barbera lifts a gag right out of his old cartoon with a garbage can lid clobbering.



Marshall gives us a Jinks run cycle. It’s six drawings on twos. I’ve slowed it down.



The cat darts under the front steps with the evil mice right behind. Yet another really ugly Jinks drawing from Marshall; the three have turned to zip under the steps. Pixie and Dixie drag Jinks out so he can get clobbered again.

The plot carries on with Barbera digging up more gags from a 15-year-old MGM cartoon as the meeces scream for help. Here they are. First, Jinks fills out his will.






Jinks prays.



But the dog doesn’t come. The dog catcher has him.



King Size lost his dog tag again. So the cartoon ends much the way it started, with the cat chasing the mice. See, meeces? If you had only been forgiving to Jinks, this never would have happened.



Only seven cues are used by the sound cutter (possibly Greg Watson) but, surprisingly, Jack Shaindin’s chase cue ‘Toboggan Run’ isn’t among them as it doesn’t seem to fit the story.

0:00 - PIXIE AND DIXIE (inst.) (Hanna-Barbera-Shows-Curtin) – Opening titles.
0:26 - LAF-4-6 PIXIE PRANKS (Shaindlin) – Jink clobbers mice, dog wants help.
1:39 - TC 202 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Mice get dog license, dog promises help.
2:34 - TC 303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Jinks sleeping, King Size punches him, punches cat through door, “Just keep comin’...”
4:31 - TC 300 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – “You keep hollerin’,” closet scene, Jinks hides in garbage can.
5:34 - L 81 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Jinks sees mice, dragged out by mice, King Size in net.
6:35 - LAF-4-1 FISHY STORY (Shaindlin) – King Size apologies, Jinks has “another suggestion.”
6:50 - ZR 48 FAST MOVEMENT (Hormel) – “You’d better really start yelpin’...” Jinks chases mice.
7:10 - PIXIE AND DIXIE (Hanna-Barbera-Shows-Curtin) – Closing titles.

Yowp note: The unfortunately now-dead Alberto’s page at immaginariofiorentino.com stated Lew Marshall started at MGM in 1947. Former MGMer Martha Sigall says he was an assistant animator—there’s been speculation on the web he was Ray Patterson’s—before becoming a full animator in the studio’s last few years. He did some work on the side; a book called ‘All About Our Dog’ (1949) was illustrated by him and he worked on at least one ‘Flip ‘n’ Dip’ cartoons in Tom and Jerry comics for Western Publishing in 1953. Marshall was born in 1922 in El Paso and moved to the Los Angeles area as a child. Before the war, he was electrician and then served in France as a sheet metal worker in a unit maintaining aircraft flying cover. a The 1950 census does not list an occupation for him. He died in 2002.

Dancing Girls and Storyboards

Pebbles was the beginning of the ruination of The Flintstones, but there are some episodes where she appears that are enjoyable. Daddies Anonymous immediately comes to mind. And I’ve always liked the running gag in Pebbles’ Birthday Party where the Boulderettes high-step their way through the cartoon. There’s a pretty funny scene—it looks like Carlo Vinci’s work—where Fred just can’t get rid of the dancers while trying to restore some kind of normality to the party at his home.

An auction house has some storyboard drawings from the cartoon for sale and you know I’ll use any excuse to post story panels. This isn’t the complete board but you can get an idea of the basics of how the scenes were set up. Fred looks a little overweight in some of these drawings, doesn’t he?









The story was by Tony Benedict. Tony was a more-than-capable and funny artist, but I was surprised when he told me he didn’t draw these. They were done by Alex Lovy, who was the story director on the cartoon. Tony was kind enough to e-mail me an explanation of what happened.

I asked Alex why he re drew my board. Staging for minimum production cost was something he excelled at I had to learn. My boards began sailing through with minimum changes after my chat with Alex.

Lovy had been around since the ‘30s and had directed at Lantz during World War Two, while Tony’s animation career was in its relatively early stages at this time.

A nice gag in the cartoon is where Fred tries to get the kids to play games and they start a round of poker. One of the kids is named Harvey and I note one of the layout artists is the kid of Harvey Eisenberg named Jerry.

The cartoon revolves around a standard plot where a caterer gets Fred’s order for the Water Buffalo Lodge party (where the dancing girls are supposed to be) with his order for his little series-wrecker’s birthday party. The caterer is a sarcastic lippy type, just like the floorwalker Jack Benny used to meet up with on his radio and TV show. I asked Tony about that.

...you are quite correct about the Frank Nelson character. I often wondered why we didn’t use the actors we had in mind when we wrote their parts. They in effect helped to create the characters. Perhaps labor agreements permitted one actor to do additional voices with no additional compensation. But I can't quite imagine money playing such a role.

What it may have boiled down to was versatility. Frank Nelson was a good dramatic actor, but when it came to comedy, he really could only do one voice. Doug Young was doing supporting voices in this cartoon so it was easy to add another character to his list, though Nelson did appear in the show’s first season.

Huck and Yogi by Warren Foster

Warren Foster took over the writing and storyboarding of the Huckleberry Hound show in 1959 when he arrived from Warner Bros (after a brief stop at the John Sutherland studio). Hanna-Barbera had two good storyboard artists in Dan Gordon and Alex Lovy but Foster was no chicken-scratch sketcher. He had drawn his own boards at Warners and did it when he moved to H-B. His panels are attractive and expressive, and a good starting point for the layout artist.



The Animation Guild Blog has posted a nine-panel sheet from one of those cartoons-between-the-cartoons from the Huck show. It’s a shame the cartoonette itself isn’t around but Foster’s drawings should give you a good idea what it was like.

You can see all nine of them by going HERE. Stephen Worth has identified them as Foster’s. Compare them to Foster’s panels from Ice Box Raider (1961) we posted here before.



It’s nice to see some drawings have survived and we hope a few more surface on the internet for today’s fans to enjoy.

Quick Draw McGraw — Locomotive Loco

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Animation – Carlo Vinci; Layout – Walt Clinton; Backgrounds – Joe Montell; Story – Mike Maltese; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson (no credits available).
Voice Cast: Quick Draw, Baba Looey, Narrator, Eastern Engineer, Western Official, ‘There It Goes’ Man, Ronald Roundhouse – Daws Butler; Western Engineer, Eastern Official, Moose Caboose – Don Messick.
Music: Jack Shaindlin; Phil Green; Hoyt Curtin; Bill Loose/John Seely; J. Louis Merkur.
First aired: week of February 15, 1960 (rerun, week of August 15, 1960).
Episode: Quick Draw McGraw Show M-021, Production J-56.
Plot: Quick Draw is hired to find the Golden Spike stolen by Moose Caboose.

Cartoons can teach you more than you can learn in a classroom. Cartoons can teach you the lyrics to “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.” They can teach you there was once an actress named Greta Garbo who had really big feet. They can even teach you that books come to life at night then sing and dance. But they don’t teach history all that well.

A good example is this cartoon. It’s about that event which actually had people hovering around telegraph offices eagerly awaiting the first news via dots and dashes—the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Oh, the cartoon starts out accurately alright. Construction of the first coast-to-coast railroad started on both ends of the country and crews worked toward each other. Trains chugged along the tracks from both directions and finally touched cowcatchers (in Promontory, Utah in the U.S. and Craigellachie, B.C. in Canada). The two lines of track were joined together, with the final spike being a golden one (in the U.S., at least), in a ceremony crammed full of watch-chained dignitaries.



However, don’t believe the rest of this cartoon, kids. Moose Caboose did not steal the golden spike and was not hunted down by Quick Draw McGraw in Abilene. Real history teaches us the last spike was quickly removed and replaced lest any Moose Caboose-like thieves made a stealthy appearance. In fact, real history is completely silent about whether there was someone named ‘Moose Caboose’ but it does tell us there is, in fact, a place named Abilene. And a song, too. Probably sung on Karaoke Night at a pub named the ‘Moose Caboose’. But I digress.

Real history isn’t silent when it comes to the delight this specific cartoon brought, and not just to happy kids in Abilene watching this cartoon when it first aired on KPAR Channel 12 in Sweetwater. Vince Leonard of The Pittsburgh Press had this to say about my favourite bit of dialogue in the cartoon in his column of October 12, 1965:

Cartoons continue to hook the adults with the lines. Liked Quick Draw McGraw’s segment on the railroad’s golden spike, stolen by Moose Caboose. “Why don’t you just get another spike?,” he asked. “Because we railroad men have one-track minds,” came the answer. The theme was carried out and it was enjoyable.

It’s a fairly typical Quick Draw cartoon. Our hero does some idiotic things, Mike Maltese comes up with more overly-descriptive dialogue, and Carlo Vinci’s here with a thinner line around the characters, less jerky animation than earlier in the year but his familiar ticks ticking away.

There’s a clever effect at the beginning that I like when the trains are chugging toward each other. They jerk a little forward and backward on the track when travelling across the moving background. It looks each train was on a different place on each cel in a little cycle of halting movement. You’ll notice the trains aren’t quite identical, though their numbers (and presumably their railroad names) are mirror images of each other. I’m surprised they’re not cars from the ‘H and B Railroad.’ Who knows if ‘C and R’ means anything, though designer in this cartoon was Walt Clinton.



A narrator sets up the plot over the initial action, then we get some of Maltese’s contrived dialogue:

Narrator: Officials met to drive in the golden spike.
Western Official: Drive in that terribly expensive golden spike, Eastern Official.

Notice how the spike shines. The glow is on four drawings on twos. No effects animators; Carlo did this all on his own as far as I know.

The spike is grabbed. The Eastern Official engages in one of Carlo’s two-drawing stunned takes. I’ve slowed it down. I presume Walt put camera instructions on his layout. I wonder why he wanted the camera so tight on Carlo’s drawings.



Moose Caboose is spotted on a hand-car holding the spike. He indulges in a little Yogi Bear-type rhyming.

Moose: When I cash in this golden spike, Moose Caboose will live fast and loose.

At least Maltese didn’t put “vamoose” in there.

The next scene is in the office of railroad president Ronald Roundhouse, who must be an Old West relative of Mr. Cogswell from The Jetsons, judging by his voice. This is where we get Vince Leonard’s favourite line. Quick Draw agrees “by Casey Jones!” to track down the golden spike in exchange for a life-time choo-choo pass. Only one. Poor Baba will have to pay.

So Quick Draw sets out. I’d love to have the animation drawings for this loose-limbed walk cycle. The hands and feet are in eight drawings on twos, while the snout goes up and down in four drawings on twos (the second and fourth positions are the same). This is Quick Draw’s idiot scene. He puts his ear on the tracks to hear Moose Caboose’s rail car vibrate on the tracks. But that means he’s not looking when a train chugs toward and over him (the train chugging along is reused from earlier in the cartoon).

Actually, Quick Draw’s half-right. Moose is on the train. Great contrived dialogue from Maltese:

Quick Draw: Return that terribly expensive golden spike, Moose Caboose!
Moose: If you want it, I’ll be in Abilene, a typical, wide-open, rip-roarin’ lawless Western town that was prevalent at the turn of the century.

This line provides an example of Carlo’s way of handling dialogue. Lew Marshall made a nose go up and down like a hamster smelling something. Ed Love used up to seven different head positions, varying the number of frames for each drawing. Mike Lah had the head still and the mouth moving around on the side of the face. Carlo likes the head tilt. When he started at Hanna-Barbera he was doing it in two head drawings and it looked jerky. He later did it in three head positions, changing when he felt the need. He always seems to have used the same angle. You can get idea of it in these drawings.



There’s the big row of upper teeth Carlo liked drawing.

The next scene has Quick Draw and Baba in Abilene (the repeating background consists of six buildings) where they spy a stranger. Catchphrase 1: “Hold on thar!” Quick Draw says to a stranger.

Quick Draw: Have you seen anything of a bad guy hereabouts?
Stranger: Which one? We’re all bad guys in Abilene.
Quick Draw: This here ‘un had a stolen golden spike.
Stranger: You mean Moose Caboose. Well, bein’ a bad guy myself, I don’t mind snitchin’. He’s getting’ purdied-up at the Polecat Barber Shop.

Quick Draw disguises himself as a barber. His scheme: to spin the bad guy around in the chair and let centrifugal force (Quick Draw pronounces it correctly) anything loose from Caboose’s body. And the plan actually works. Baba makes a checklist of everything that goes flying—and that includes the golden spike. But something’s bound to go wrong. It does. The crook has a gun and starts firing at our heroes. Carlo’s standard stretch-dive exit follows (for Baba anyway; Quick Draw leads with the lower part of his body) and Quick Draw runs smack into a post on the porch of the barber shop (Maltese fits in another rhyme: “It’s the calaboose for you, Moose Caboose.”




Caboose grabs the spike from the prone Quick Draw. Now we’ve reached the big scene. Caboose jumps on his handcar with Quick Draw in a locomotive after him. There’s a static shot of a background with two cliffs and three trestles connecting them. Quick Draw and Caboose zip back and forth from side to side, using tunnels like doors in a French bedroom farce. I don’t know whether Bill Hanna handled the timing in this cartoon, or the story director did, but there’s real speed going on here. The trains appear and disappear in nine frames once and ten frames twice. Then after the two screech to a head-on stop, they leave the trestles, there’s a cut, 32 frames go by, and there’s another cut. At Hanna-Barbera, you think of a medium shot with a bunch of chatter, followed by a close-up to break up the monotony, then back to the same medium shot. Quick cutting like this simply isn’t seen in an H-B cartoon.

It’s a shame the cutting doesn’t become faster and faster and then BAM! After the 32-frame footage, the pace slows so Maltese can fit in a dialogue gag. Baba and Quick Draw are now in separate trains heading head-on, chatting to each other like they’re standing next to each other (forget the distance and the noise of the trains). They’ve got Moose Caboose on the tracks in between them.

Baba: Hey, Quickstraw, I thin’ we got him between second and third.
Quick Draw: (to audience) You gotta admit, the li’l feller knows his baseball.

Nope, no “I’ll do the thinnin’ around here” in this cartoon.

The two engines crash into each other. Remarkably, they’re just fine. And they trap Moose Caboose between them. He gives up.



So Quick Draw brings in the golden spike. But you know something’s got to go wrong. It does. The Eastern Official goes to drive in the spike—but misses and clobbers Quick Draw’s foot instead. Catchphrase 2: “Oh, that smarts!” Quick Draw leaps around in pain. Incidentally, you’ll notice the Eastern Official lost the pinstripes on his pants and the rail line looks different in the final shot.



The sound cutter drops in a honky-tonkish piano version of the Quick Draw theme in the middle of the cartoon. It was used in the background of those cartoons-between-the-cartoons on the Quick Draw show.

0:00 - Quick Draw McGraw Sub Main Title theme (Curtin).
0:15 - PG-181F LIGHT MECHANICAL BRIDGE (Green) – Trains pull toward each other and stop, greetings from eastern engineer.
0:31 - GR-333 BUSTLING BRIDGE (Green) – Greetings from western engineer, “I’ll be glad to.”
0:52 - GR-248 STREETS OF THE CITY (Green) – “One for the money,” Moose Caboose on train.
1:14 - GR-472 HICKSVILLE (Green) – Ronald Roundhouse scene.
2:10 - TC-205 LIGHT MOVEMENT (Loose-Seely) – Quick Draw and Baba walk on tracks, ear to track.
2:38 - ZR-94 CHASE (Hormel) – Shot of train, train runs over Quick Draw, shouts at Moose Caboose.
3:10 - GR-334 LIGHT AGITATED BRIDGE (Green) – Moose Caboose going to Abilene.
3:26 - THAT’S QUICK DRAW McGRAW (Curtin) – “I shall track him down,” Quick Draw talks to stranger.
4:03 - GR-87 SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD (Green) – Quick Draw soaps Caboose, confides in Baba.
4:45 - GR-248 STREETS OF THE CITY (Green) – “Get going, barber!”, stuff flies out, Quick Draw runs into post, trains crash.
6:13 - GR-98 BY JIMINY! IT’S JUMBO BRIDGE No 2 (Green) – Caboose in between trains, gives up.
6:19 - SF-11 LIGHT MOVEMENT/MOUNTAINEERS HOEDOWN (Merkur) – Spike ceremony, “Oooch, ouch!”
6:43 - Quick Draw McGraw Sub End Title theme (Curtin).