Yogi Bear, Weekend Comics, June 1962

You’d think that the people at Hanna-Barbera would know their own characters’ names, especially when they have their own cartoon series. But someone slipped up when writing the weekend Yogi Bear comics 50 years ago this month. Somehow, Doggie Daddy became “Augie Daddy.” Ah, well. We’ll get there in a moment.



Ranger Smith takes a break in the June 3rd comic. But Yogi has a food con going on with some incidental characters. You think Snoop Dogg was influenced by Yogi rhyming “fizzle” and “chisel”?



The same artist (Harvey Eisenberg?) is back on June 10th, judging by the trees. Partying high school students return to the comic, these one from Glendale, California. I wonder if Leonard and Julie are named after real people. I don’t know if the near-sighted ranger (can you hear Don Messick doing him?) appeared again; it’s his first time in the weekend comic. A couple of silhouette drawings add some variety.



The Father’s Day comic with Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy isn’t too readable, but you can see the characters match the way they looked on the TV show. You can’t see it too well, but there’s a little bird sticking out of the hole in the ‘r’ in “Bear.” There’s snow on the peaks of Jellystone on June 17th. The park’s got to be pretty high up.



The June 24th comic has a small resemblance to the short “Bears and Bees” (1961), where Ranger Smith gives Yogi crap for becoming soft and eating “man’s food.” Yogi unhappily heads to the woods to forage but brightens when he sees a bee and some honey. He doesn’t eat the honey, he trades it in for man-type goodies from tourists. This comic takes the “man’s food” and bees in another direction for a solo gag.

As usual, you can click on them to make them larger. I’ve snipped these together from two papers so you can see the top row this month. The scan quality isn’t very good due to bad settings when these were originally photocopied. With luck, Mark Kausler will have them in his collection and you can see what they looked like in the paper in colour on his blog. Click on any to enlarge.