Joe Barbera once told UPI’s Jack Gaver: “Any similarity [in the names] was pure accident.”
Mr. Berra once told UPI’s Vernon Scott: “I was going to sue the Yogi Bear program for using my name, until somebody reminded me Yogi isn’t my real name—it’s Lawrence.”
It would seem highly improbable that Mr. Bear and Mr. Berra would meet, one of them being a cartoon and all. But they did—in the punch-line of a Sunday newspaper comic 50 years ago this month.
The almost raison d’être for the Yogi (Bear) comics in the middle part of 1964 was to give a free plug for the movie “Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear,” which was released on June 3rd. The comics didn’t have a continuing story line per se, but they featured stories about Yogi going to, and traipsing around, Hollywood. The Hollywood series ended in August, and one of the comics included a gag about Mr. Berra—who appeared in cartoon form (one wonders if H-B caricaturist Ben Shenkman handled the design).
So here are the comics for the month.
August 2, 1964
August 9, 1964
August 16, 1964
August 23, 1964
August 30, 1964
If you want to see the Yogis (Bear and Berra) in full colour, Mark Kausler has posted them on his blog from his personal collection, clipped from newspapers way-back-when. Please go HERE.
This post will conclude our regular monthly reprints of the Yogi comics. They have simply become impossible to find in complete (three-row) form on-line. My access to some newspapers has been paywalled. In other cases, Google has dropped some old papers as their owner has elected to go elsewhere and paywall them. In still other cases, the newspapers themselves dropped the comic. And in still still other cases, even the two-row versions available have been scanned so poorly that they’re black and unviewable.
Mark offered to send me his two-row colour comics but I don’t want to put him to the trouble. And, as I have indicated for some time, I am trying to wind down this blog due to a lack of time to post. I have banked posts until the end of the year.
We've all understood what you've had to go through to bring us something which we might've known of before, but've never contemplated seriously - until now.
ReplyDeleteI say this on behalf of myself / all the other Baby Busters who've read these strips, but whose names you'll never know:
"Thanks very much for what you've unearthed and posted."
And thanks for completing the Hollywood storyline. I'm particularly grateful for the 3-tiered versions of the August 16th and August 30th strips. I was really wondering if the top three panels on the latter wound up the Hollywood sequence, and they did. I can just "hear" Jean Van der Pyl's southern voice for the stewardess.
ReplyDeleteAs you know, there actually were two more Yogi-in-Hollywood comics that were shared on this blog over the past year--apparently after having earlier done a couple of quickies, the comic strip writer decided in 1964 to elaborate on the theme and go all-out for a few weeks. It's worth tracking them down in the blog archives. They can both be plugged into this sequence, except that the title of the feature as you noted in your comments was originally "Whistle Your Way Back Home" (so the title cards in the opening panels don't match), but aside from that little inconsistency, if they are all put together they tell the complete story of Yogi's Hollywood adventures as shown in the comic strip.
Again, thank you, thank you, for all these years of posting these comic strips (and all the other goodies, too!). I understand you have to wind down, but just know that your great effort is and has been greatly appreciated.
I discovered your site while searching for info about Mike Road about a year ago. Since then I have been a daily follower of this blog, as well as your other site, Tralfaz. I’ve been a fan of H-B cartoons all the way back to Ruff & Ready. Huck, Yogi and Quick Draw were all weekly shows I never wanted to miss. And when The Flintstones premiered, I practically worshiped Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, even though I didn’t really know who they were. (I began drawing at a very young age and the first actual cartoon character I ever drew was Fred Flintstone.) My love for H-B shows continued through the mid-60s with Space Ghost and The Herculoids, but faded after Scooby-Doo and its clones began to appear. Thanks to this blog, I have learned a lot about the people behind the cartoons I loved so much as a kid. I’m in my early 60s now and still get excited when any of the old H-B shows appear on TV or I run across one of their commercials or “lost” animated TV show opening on YouTube. The comic strips of Yogi and The Flintstones were a part of my Sunday reading 50 years ago and your posts have brought back some great memories. Thank you very much, Yomp, for sharing all of this fascinating information.
ReplyDeleteYowp:
ReplyDeleteThank you for extending the YOGI comics this far! I really wanted to see the “Yogi Berra strip” so, if you must discontinue them, at least you gave us all that long-awaited moment!
More work by the great Harvey Eisenberg, who would be gone in another year or so.
Of course, your focus is the animated shorts, but it’s always nice to see something about the comics (strips or books) here.
Just in case you’re interested, I have a post on Dutch Flintstones comic book covers -- with some amazing parallels / repurposing / and outright swipes of prior USA Hanna-Barbera comic book covers! With some lively readers’ comments, to boot.
Even I couldn’t believe some of this stuff! If you’re interested, you can find it HERE.
Thanks for all that you do. I’ll really miss this, once (as Yogi Berra might say) “It’s over!”