Yakky Doodle in Happy Birthdaze

Produced and Directed by Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna.
No credits.
Voice Cast: Yakky Doodle – Jimmy Weldon; Chopper – Vance Colvig; Finnigan the Guard, Butcher, Bone Carriers – Daws Butler; Museum Boss – Herb Vigran.
Music: Hoyt Curtin.
Episode: Production R-28.
Copyright 1961 by Hanna-Barbera Productions.
Plot: Yakky “buys” a dinosaur bone from a museum for Chopper’s birthday and the museum’s security guard tries to get it back.

You know by now that I’m not a fan of Yakky Doodle, but I have some sympathy for the little duck in this cartoon. He paid 27 cents for a bone. Why should he think it wasn’t a legal transaction? And he wanted to give Chopper a present. So his intentions were good and his actions are quite logical. I think the characterisation is a good one in this short.

That doesn’t mean this is a great cartoon. It’s actually really lacklustre. There’s a lot chasing but not a lot of witty dialogue to punctuate the stops and starts of the chase. And the writer (my guess is this is Tony Benedict’s story) is marking time in spots. “It’s not real money, Chopper,” Yakky says. “It’s candy money. Yum, yum!” What’s Chopper’s brilliant response? “It’s candy money. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Yum, yum. Now ain’t that cute? Ha, ha, ha, haw, haw.”

It’s accompanied by a rigid Yakky (who blinks his eyes), and a rigid-except-for-head Chopper. The animation’s really limited in parts of this short, but the characters are well drawn. There’s lots of dry brushwork, too.



The story is simple. Yakky raids his piggy bank to buy Chopper a birthday present. He has 27 cents. He goes to a meat store. The largest bone there isn’t big enough as far as Yakky’s concerned. “What is your pal, Chopper, a rhino-saucer-us-sus-sus?” says the butcher (Daws adds extra syllables in a German accent).

Yakky sees a dinosaur bone being carried into a museum, which didn’t pay anything for it. Yakky takes it and leaves his 27 cents. A security guard is dispatched to bring it back. Chopper gets into the fray until the guard explains it was from a museum. Chopper tells Yakky it’s against the law. But, no, the guard doesn’t send Yakky to jail for theft. Instead, there’s a happy ending with the duck and the Irish stereotype singing “Happy Birthday” to Chopper to the theme of “Clementine” (I still can’t decipher all the lyrics). Naturally, the cartoon ends with another “Now, ain’t that cute?”



Mismatched shots. These are consecutive frames.



Dick Thomas, the workhorse of the Hanna-Barbera background department, was assigned this cartoon.

Herb Vigran supplies a voice in this cartoon. At least, I think it’s Herb Vigran. My guess is he was recording something on The Flintstones and Joe Barbera had him cut a couple of lines for this one while he was there. (I can’t help but wonder if Vigran was one of the people who auditioned for Fred when Barbera was looking for voices at the start of the series). The possibility has been raised that the museum boss could be Vance Colvig, and I can’t dispute that.

Hoyt Curtin’s version of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” opens the cartoon. In fact, the sound cutter used only two cues from the start to the scene when the guards walk into the museum with the bone, which takes up a minute and 36 seconds. The bulk of the music can be heard in a typical Touché Turtle cartoon.