Saturday 30 July 2016

Matador Huck

I love the little cartoons between the cartoons on the Huck, Yogi and Quick Draw shows. It’s neat seeing the characters interact with each other as actors on a TV cartoon show but still in character. And, at least in the early Huck series, the little cartoons are very attractive. In fact, if you look frame-to-frame, you’ll see parts of them are in full animation. Scenes are drawn on ones in some spots and you’ll find full body movement from frame to frame, not just the eyes or mouth sliding around on top of a cel of a character’s body.

Here are a couple of neat scenes from one where Huck plays a matador. Joe Barbera, or Dan Gordon, or Charlie Shows, or whoever, used the gag where the “bull” (in this case, Mr. Jinks), disappears in the matador’s cape. Huck flaps the cape and Jinks emerges in a little rolling ball before opening up and landing on the ground. The drawings are really nice. These are some of them.



“I’ll grab them mouses yet,” says Jinks, before dashing out of the scene. Check the mouth shapes. And note how Jinks’ body moves. Full animation.



The backgrounds in this mini-cartoon are great, too.

I thought the animator was Ed Love, but Mike Kazaleh tells me Phil Duncan worked on these bumpers. He knows Duncan’s work better than anybody. I presume Duncan wasn’t on the Hanna-Barbera staff, that these were farmed out to wherever Duncan was at the time (Playhouse Pictures?) or he was freelancing.

9 comments:

  1. Since Bill & Joe had used Jinx-like designs before in their later MGM efforts, you can really see the connection here between the linking segments and what Hanna-Barbera had been doing in their final series of CinemaScope cartoons (where background details already had been severely paired down in many cases, especially during close-up scenes, giving movie-goers an advance preview of the made-for-TV cartoons to come).

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  2. I would take exception to Mike on the Jinks close-up, Yowp, that's Ed Love's work, unmistakably.

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    1. Mark, I hope I didn't misunderstand what Mike told me about the colour bumpers on the DVD. He left me with the impression Phil Duncan animated them.

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  3. Phil Duncan's animation style is so similar to Ed Love's style.

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  4. Phil Duncan was also an animator at Screen Gems/Columbia in the early 1940's - his name appears on some of the Color Rhapsodies & Phanatasy cartoons.

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  5. I agree, Yowp. The cartoons between the cartoons are often more entertaining than the ones they are book-ending. Wish more of these had been packaged into the DVD.

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  6. Jinks called them "Mouses"!? Talk about out of character!! I mean, that is still wrong but not in the right way he is normally wrong!!

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    1. Based on my research, it could be said that, in 10/1958, the only fully defined IP on the "Huckleberry Hound Show" was the show's titular star.
      The definitions of Yogi Bear, Boo Boo, Pixie and Dixie and Jinks were, at the most and least, afterthoughts. When "THHS" began, Jinks referred to P & D as "mouses", even also as "mices". As Jinks became refined/better defined, these names ceased to be called, and the name "meeces" (and variants) supplanted them.

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    2. Nick, Doz is right. Early in the cartoon's run, Jinks calls them a number of things, all incorrect pluralisations of "mouse." Dialogue writer Charlie Shows seems to have settled on "meeces" after a while during the first season (I give Charlie credit for the great line "I hate meeces to pieces." Given his love of rhymes, it's logical to assume he came up with it).

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