Slick City Slicker Storyboard

There was once a place in the U.S. called ‘The Cartoon Network.’ It didn’t have tween-boy shows called “Dude, What Would Happen?” and “Build Destroy Build.” It had nothing but cartoons. Old ones, even. And its web site had great old pictures of people who worked at Hanna-Barbera, like Dick Bickenbach and Carlo Vinci. And it even had cartoons themselves and storyboards from a few of them.

Below is part of the storyboard from “Slick City Slicker,” the cartoon we reviewed yesterday. The size of the pictures is really small, but that’s what was on the site.

I suppose the board was drawn by Alex Lovy elaborating on sketches from Mike Maltese. Many of the character poses were maintained in the cartoon, but the opening pan is quite different. Background artist Bob Gentle used only one side of the street (the distance had islands near the harbour) with a huge house on Nob Hill on the right and the hotel on the left. Homes were in between and streetcar tracks were on the curving road. I suspect the detail in the drawing of the Raindrop Kid walking into the home is in the actual cartoon, if a decent version of it were to be seen.

The big mouth, close-eyed version of Quick Draw in the fourth set of panels is pretty funny. And the word “Kapok” when Raindrop smacks Baba with the racket is pure Maltese.