Emmys and Models

A mere three networks dominated television for several decades, so it’s no surprise they had an almost complete stranglehold on TV’s self-awarded honours—the Emmys. But there was a notable exception during that span. For that, you can credit Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera and their hard-working staff.

Both the Huckleberry Hound Show and the Quick Draw McGraw Show were nominated for Emmys in 1960—and on a Monday night, June 20th, Huck went home with a statue, beating “Watch Mr. Wizard” (NBC), “Lassie” and “Captain Kangaroo” (both CBS) in the Children’s Entertainment category. I haven’t checked to see whether it’s true, but some newspaper stories the following day claimed it was the first time a non-network show had won an Emmy.

The Huck show was nominated again the following year, but lost to “Young People’s Concert” (the good Captain and Shari Lewis were also among the losers). Huck and Yogi Bear actually appeared on the awards show in footage that may be lost; we talked about it in THIS POST.

With all this in mind, here’s a wonderful drawing, possibly by Dick Bickenbach, of Huck and his award.



The drawing was put up for sale at Heritage Auctions recently and this post is giving me a chance to post some of the other Hanna-Barbera artwork that was up for bid. You can click on each one to enlarge it. Several are initialed by Bick.



The Ding-a-Ling model is interesting in that the date on it is pretty close to when the studio announced that Yogi Bear would be spun off into his own show. Yogi wasn’t replaced with Hokey Wolf and Ding-a-Ling until the new year (the first Hokey cartoon I’ve found listed was for the week of March 27, 1961). The Yogi model sheet is for the third season of the Huck show (1960-61); my eye isn’t so adept to be able to tell if there are any design changes. Certainly Yogi went through a couple of designs in his first season (1958-59), although each animator that year had his own way of drawing the character.

Heritage had other drawings for sale as well. One is crying out to me that I should really do a post about some H-B cartoons that have been mentioned only on rare occasion here. Perhaps I’ll be able to get to it next week.