Wednesday 9 April 2014

3-D House of Huck

It was the 1960s. We had a View-Master. Who didn’t?

There were slides depicting the Taj Mahal and other sites around the world. But there were cartoons, too. Only they weren’t really cartoons because they had a weird 3-D effect. Okay, it seems that’s what animated cartoons are today, but let’s not get into that here.

We’ve posted a couple of these pictures here before. A nice guy named Dom Giansante has collected a bunch of Hanna-Barbera View-Master slides, some from his own collection I gather, and we pass them on as a public service. The Yogi ones are really neat.



Seeing them now reminds me of the old George Pal Puppetoons. It might have been interesting to make a little Huck film in stop-motion, but it would have felt an awful lot different. No run cycles in front of a repeating background, for one thing. And then there’s that thing called “cost” that Bill Hanna used to go on about a lot. Ah, well. We have a few old View-Master frames—and our imaginations—to give us a bit of an idea of what it might have been like.

6 comments:

  1. I've got the Yogi ones and, as you say, they're 'neat'. I'd have loved to have seen the TV show done this way - same as Wallace & Gromit.

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    1. You might dig this Kid, a TV documentary that covered the very place that made these!
      https://vimeo.com/20696900

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  2. Do we know who created these pieces: could they have been someone from the HB studio? As complex as they are, they still keep with the immediacy/quickly-drawn-style nature of the cartoons: that takes a lot of skill. I saw a Fred Flintstone toy from the 80's and the whole character of Fred was off. When I think of Barney Rubble, I hear the nasally voice Mel Blanc created for him in the first handful of cartoons: I can hear that voice when I see him in one of the frames...

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  3. View-Master. This was a mania in the 60s and 70s.

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