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.