Pixie and Dixie — Pistol Packin’ Pirate

Produced and Directed by Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna.
Credits: Animation – Ken Muse (Mike Lah uncredited); Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Frank Tipper; Dialogue and Story Sketches – Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Pixie – Don Messick; Dixie, Jinks, Pirate – Daws Butler.
Music: Spencer Moore, Bill Loose/John Seely, unknown.
First Aired: week of October 27, 1958.
Production E-4; Huckleberry Hound Show K-005.
Plot: A pirate orders ship’s cat Mr. Jinks to catch Pixie and Dixie.

The Hanna-Barbera studio was never known for its fluid animation but some of the cartoons in the first season of The Huckleberry Hound Show snapped from one pose to the next and the effect was pretty jerky. These were among the earliest-made cartoons when the budgets must have been a little smaller. Some really good examples are ‘Yogi Bear’s Big Break,’ ‘Pie-Pirates’ and this cartoon, which was the first Pixie and Dixie cartoon put into production.

Check out these pairs of consecutive frames. It’s impossible to animate from one to the other without in-betweens—unless you have really limited cash and just have to get the stuff on the screen.




I love how the pirate goes from walking to a sudden run in back-to-back frames. Bill Hanna saves cash.







Another clue this is possibly a really early cartoon is the presence of Frank Tipper as a background artist. Whether Tipper worked on Ruff and Reddy, I don’t know, but his name shows up in only three cartoons on the Huck show. It may have been that he was freelancing. It’s odd seeing Tipper’s name as a background artist. He was a character animator at Walter Lantz and worked on the debut cartoon of Woody Woodpecker in 1940. Not only did he and Alex Lovy both work at Lantz, their wives were sisters. Tipper was working as a cartoonist at least eight years earlier. Frank George Tipper was born on the Isle of Man (England) and his family arrived in the U.S. on April 1, 1921. He spent his teen years in Los Angeles; his father (also named Frank) had a home on Griffith Park Boulevard and was a chauffeur, then worked as mechanic at a Richfield Oil station. Actually, Frank’s father outlived him. Tipper was only 54 when he died in 1963.

Mike Lah steps in with some uncredited animation, something he did on a freelance basis in a number of early cartoons in Huck’s first season. Yet another clue is Daws Butler has pitched Dixie’s voice a little lower than we’re used to, the same as in ‘Little Bird-Mouse.’



The cartoon has a couple of things in common with the Ruff and Reddy cartoons of the year before. The title character in this one has the exact same design (and voice) as Crossbones Jones in the second R & R serial. And, like the R & R adventures, the cartoon makes liberal use of the Bill Loose/John Seely cues from the Capitol Hi-Q library ‘D’ series. They weren’t used all that often on the Huck show because they didn’t always fit the comedy.

Unfortunately, this is a fairly average cartoon. Lots of running, lots of gunfire/explosions, too much contrived rhyming dialogue. And anyone who has seen Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam knows there’ll be a gag about a cannonball sinking the ship. Pixie and Dixie are pretty appealingly drawn in Ken Muse’s scenes, with bandanas (and a piratesque t-shirt on Pixie). And Jinks gets his own cute striped shirt and an eye-patch, which conveniently lifts up on its own whenever he doesn’t need it.

But there’s also some real sloppiness, uncharacteristically in the paint department. Part of Pixie’s bandana becomes transparent in the opening scene and the colour on part of the pirate’s moustache hangs in mid-air in another. There’s also another scene where other blotches of red show up on cells as if ink and paint got the wrong cell numbers.



And there’s at least one animation error, where part of the pirate’s cutlass disappears when the scene cuts away from cycle animation of snoring to the pirate showing the audience he’s not really asleep.



Joe Barbera’s story is pretty basic. The meece want the pirate’s cheese. The pirate orders the sleeping ship’s cat, Jinks, to stop them. Jinks, still being formative, mulls over in his head the correct plural form of “mouse” in response to the pirate (he doesn’t remember if it’s “meeces” or “mooses”). We get two patented Charlie Shows rhymes before Jinks is scared by gunfire in performing his task. Jinks: “But I can’t swim, slim.” Pirate: “Ya lazy sittin’ kitten.”

First, the pirate tries to capture the meece on his own. Jinks gets into the act, trying to slice them with his sabre when they try to escape from the pirate’s quarters. He misses them. But clang! The pirate sticks his head out of the doorway and Jinks conks it (Shows time: “Where’s that fat cat at?”).

Next gag, the meece peer though a knothole into the pirate’s quarters and spot the cheese. They zip in. Jinks rushes into the scene and fires his pistol several times into the hole. Guess who he shoots? The pirate responds by sticking a rifle out the hole at Jinks. The cat makes a quick exit; Muse just draws him as an outline, then brush strokes of colour where he was, all on twos (Shows again: “Look at that crazy cat scat”).



Jinks chases after Pixie and Dixie, right to left. But wait a minute. They look more streamlined. Mike Lah has picked up the scene where Jinks uses a cannon ball as a bowling ball and squashes the meece. You can easily tell its Lah because the drawings are cruder than Muse’s and the characters talk with their mouths moving on the side of their faces. It’s very similar to the way he drew characters at MGM, even in the Tom and Jerry cartoons he worked on in the mid-‘40s. Lah’s characters always looks a little goofier, too.



Lah carries the animation through when the cannon ball starts rolling after the pirate (“A lulu of a boo-boo”) and bounces off the gang plank. The force causes the pirate to bounce along the deck into the hold. Cut to a cycle of the meece running, then we’re back with Muse as Jinks runs after them. The meece light a cannon and push it. It fires on the pirate. The pirate pushes the cannon at the meece (“They’ll get a big bang out of this” is the best Shows can come up with). Dixie flips the barrel toward the pirate, who points it straight up. Up goes the cannon ball. “I don’t fear, captain dear,” says Jinks, grabbing a baseball glove. Naturally, he doesn’t catch the cannon ball, and naturally, the ship goes down.

The finish has Jinks and the pirate in a rowboat. “Well, um, I got rid of the mice, didn’t I?” asks Jinks. No, he didn’t. The camera pans along a string attached to the boat. The other end is held by Dixie. He and Pixie are on a plate, along with the cheese they’re eating. “There’s more’n one way to skin a cat,” says Dixie. Skin a cat? What skinning? Unfortunately, we’ll never find out what Charlie Shows had in mind as the animated adventure is at an end.

The cartoon opens with a medley of oceanic tunes compiled into one cue by Jack Shaindlin. I have not been able to find it or its title. There’s also a short portion of the cartoon with no music, something that was tried in several cartoons during the first season of the Huck show.

0:00 - Pixie and Dixie (Hanna-Barbera-Shows-Curtin) - Main titles.
0:26 - LAF-65-7 seagoing medley (Shaindlin) – sleeping pirate, pan to mouse hole, “Cheesy cheese thieves!”, sleeping Jinks, Jinks threatened, shot of meece.
2:11 - L-81 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Jinks protests, pirate fires gun, Jinks mimics, pirate chases meece, Jinks hits pirate with cutlass, pan to shot of cheese.
3:34 – no music – Pixie and Dixie talk, zip into hole, Jinks skids into scene.
3:44 - L-78 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Jinks shoots in hole, rifle pokes out of hole.
4:00 - TC-219A CHASE-MEDIUM (Loose-Seely) – rifle fires at Jinks, “fancy bowling,” pirate bounces along deck.
5:18 - TC-215A CHASE-MEDIUM (Loose-Seely) – Pirate bounces into hold, meece push cannon, cannon ball goes up, comes down.
6:25 - TC-221A HEAVY AGITATO (Loose-Seely) – Pirate backpedals, Jinks with catcher’s glove, ship sinks.
6:52 - L-1121 ANIMATION NAUTICAL (Moore) – Rowboat scene.
7:10 - Pixie and Dixie (Hanna, Barbera, Curtin, Shows) - End titles.