A Real Yogi Christmas

You’ve heard me complain about unentertaining H-B Christmas specials with characters wearing skunk hats and on and on. But the Yuletide season is supposed to be about caring and giving. So allow me to give you a real Hanna-Barbera Christmas adventure.

Okay, this is kind of like re-gifting. I’d rather say that than “pilfering.” This comes from the nice blog “Golden Gems” which was posting scans of Little Golden Books. A year ago, we reposted pages from one of the Yogi Christmas books uploaded there. This is from another, “Yogi Bear Helps Santa”, copyright 1962. It was drawn by Lee Branscome, who provided background art for the original Jetsons and Jonny Quest shows. Read along or just enjoy the drawings.


















If you’re interested in old Little Golden Books, check out Barbie’s site HERE. It’s a shame family matters have forced her to stop blogging but it’s nice of her to leave up her old posts.

The folks at Golden Books brought you Golden Records, and here’s where we go from the sublime to the you-know-what.

This time, I’m re-gifting from myself. I posted this a year ago. Golden came out with a Yogi Bear Christmas record in 1961, with both sides written by Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera and Sylvia Parnes. Faithful readers know Daws Butler and Don Messick had an exclusive record contract with Colpix, so someone else had to be found to voice Yogi and Boo Boo, someone in New York where the Golden Records were pressed. The city had plenty of voice actors doing commercials, Allen Swift was probably the busiest. Golden had its own little stock company of actors and the man assigned to try to replicate the sound Daws’ and Don’s characters was Frank Milano. Unfortunately, doing so was not among Frank’s many gifts. Listen to them at your own peril.

HAVE A HAP-HAP-HAPPY CHRISTMAS



GIVE A GOODIE FOR CHRISTMAS



The last couple of Christmas Days, we’ve posted cartoon music from the Capitol Hi-Q library. I wish I could do the same this year. But I’ve not been able to find any more music from the cartoons. The late Earl Kress and I held out hope that more of Jack Shaindlin’s music from the Langlois Filmusic library would surface somewhere but, unfortunately, that just hasn’t happened. Collectors of stock music tend to go for English and European labels, not American, so copies of Langlois discs are extremely rare. We’ll have to substitute another type of H-B Christmas bonus instead.