Saturday 30 June 2018

The Hanna-Barbera Tricks

Hanna-Barbera was given X amount of time and X amount of money to make TV cartoons. “X” in TV cartoons didn’t equal “X” in theatrical cartoons. There was less time and less money. Chuck Jones could sneer at “illustrated radio” all he wanted, but if someone handed him $300 and told him to buy a car, he wouldn’t be getting a new Cadillac. He’d get the best he could for $300.

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera didn’t invent held drawings, background pans and walk cycles. You could find them in theatrical cartoons, too. But the H-B studio had to rely on them more than the old theatrical cartoon factories because it didn’t have the time or money to do it any other way.

Here are some examples from the Yogi Bear cartoon “Big Brave Bear” (1958).

The cartoon opens with the camera fixed on of one of Monty’s well-composed background drawings; the same kind of establishing shot you’d find in some Bob McKimson cartoons at Warners. No cels to ink and paint, no time-consuming movement by the cameraman. Frank Paiker, or whoever was operating the camera, simply clicked the number of times indicated on the exposure sheet and then cross-faded into the next scene.

Here’s a recreation of the second scene. The camera panned slowly left to right over a background drawing and came across Boo Boo and Yogi. The only animation is a cycle of Yogi’s right lower leg lazily going up and down. There’s just enough movement to keep the scene from being static. This stock cue from Geordie Hormel plays in the background.


Opening dialogue? It’s as simple as it can be. No wild gestures. No body movement. There’s no time or money. Yogi and Boo Boo remain stuck on a cel as the mouth changes shape to reflect vowels in Daws Butler’s and Don Messick’s voices. If you look closely, though, you will see the backgrounds are not the same as in the pan shot.



Carlo Vinci animated this cartoon. At least for the first few years at Hanna-Barbera, Carlo tried to avoid stiff walk cycles. Here’s a loping little walk in eight drawings, each exposed on two frames, with the background moved slightly. I’m sorry I can’t isolate Boo Boo so you can see it better; the jerking background may be distracting. But you can see Boo Boo changes in every drawing; it’s full animation.



Hanna-Barbera cartoons appear rife with repeating backgrounds, where Pixie and Dixie would run past the same light socket six times, or Huckleberry Hound would stroll in front of the same trees five times. Pixie, Dixie and Huck would all move in cycle animation. But there were times in the first number of cartoons on the Huck half-hour where there would be no movement at all; something would slide across a background until the background ran out and had to start again. Here is an example where the gangster’s car doesn’t move; not even the wheels. It takes 32 frames (16 frames per second) for the car to reach one end of the background to the other before repeating. What you see below been slowed down. I admire the early Hanna-Barbera background work. The trees are outlines, the colours are sponged over top. (Dick Bickenbach seems to have loved cars with no doors in medium-long shot).



Though the animation isn’t exactly lush in TV cartoons, Carlo fitted in some nice expressions in some of the early Huck shows, including “The Buzzin’ Bear” and “Hookey Daze.” I like this realisation/shock take from Boo Boo below in this cartoon. It’s a shame things got tamer as the years went on.



Overall, the animation short-cuts the H-B staff had to go with in the early cartoons were used pretty well. Combined with good voice work, pleasing art and (though not in every short) solid stories, the studio got a lot of mileage for their “X.” Certainly the cartoons pleased kids 60 years ago and, I’d hope, do so today.

15 comments:

  1. Hans Christian Brando30 June 2018 at 11:52

    Mid-century limited animation TV cartoons (pre-Scooby Doo era, that is) somehow manage to have more personality than 3D CGI features. It's easy to be graphically impressive at $200 million and a five-year production schedule. Give today's geniuses a $7K (okay, $40K adjusted for inflation) budget and a two-week turnaround and let's see what they come up with.

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  2. Aside from the greater expression in the takes, there also was a greater variety of expressions in the characters in Season 1, before the key personality traits got cemented into place (i.e. -- Yogi was allowed at times to be a lot more grouchy while Huck was more laconic, borrowing some of the body positioning from the Avery/Lah southern wolf cartoons). The wider range of expressions -- even if they were held expressions with very limited animation -- also helped keep the cartoons from feeling static.

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  3. What expressed me most about the repeating backgrounds, aside from their artistic and esthetic appearance, was how you could rarely see a seam. The artists matched the left side with the right side perfectly. Often, especially during the slower walking cycles it is difficult, if not impossible, to see where the one side of the background ends and the other begins.

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  4. The science is simple in theory: do the most with the least. The execution can be harder than people appreciate, because you're trying to add one extra, key factor: do it WELL. Anyone could be given a limited budget, stick to it, and turn in something lousy. But a lot of thinking had to go into making good cartoons on the cheap. It's more than using what you're given- it's HOW you use it. Those cartoons worked for me as a kid, and I saw them all first run.

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  5. Love this post and your focus on the streamlined HB animation process.

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    1. Thanks, Tom. I do not work in the industry and would hope if any information is incorrect, they would let me know.

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  6. Considering the budget H-B had to work with in those early years, the whole team made it work. The voice work, stories, art, and music worked together to knock the ball right out of the park. That's the kind of " illustrated radio " I can live with.

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  7. With money and economy being such a factor at H-B, I’ve always wondered why things like the Main Gate at Jellystone Park, and the interior of The Flintstones’ house, and the like were redesigned, seemingly from scratch, for every cartoon.

    Wouldn’t consistent reused stock backgrounds have saved still more?

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    1. Yes, reused backgrounds would have been more economical...but they wouldn't have been as much fun for the viewers!

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    2. While someone like Lou Scheimer had no qualms about having the same artwork in every cartoon, I wonder if whoever handled the direction (Bill Hanna at first) wanted a fresh look for each cartoon. A pan over the same Jellystone BG to open each Yogi cartoon would be pretty monotonous.
      There were a few Snooper and Blabber cartoons that reused a city street scene, and the gate above showed up in one more cartoon.

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    3. Of course, I didn't say I'd *like* stock or reused backgrounds, as the BGs were often a highlight of the cartoons. Just that it would have seemed consistent with the philosophy of economy.

      In fact, as you note, that's one of the main differences between H-B and Filmation… especially later, as the number of those differences became smaller and smaller.

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    4. I have always wondered this myself. Maybe it was a way for the background artist to always have a job? Imagine, if they re-used the BGs, the artists would be out of job in no time. Maybe a Bill & Joe decision to keep them employed?

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  8. It always astounded me that the earliest Hanna-Barbera cartoons were the most brightly colorful. Note how sharp the colors, including skin tones, were in early seasons of "THE FLINTSTONES", as opposed to how yellowish the skin tones were in the later season. This might have been due to xeroxing as opposed to the extra effort put in by animators on those earliest episodes. They were amazing to look at, and this is no doubt also true of the earlier H/B characters like Huck and Yogi. Yuo are also right to compare those earliest H/B cartoons to the last days of Tex Avery at MGM, toward the cinemascope era. You can see this in Huck's reaction to a lifesize train coming at him in "HOOKY DAYS"; just add, in your mind, the usual MGM yelps and screams when those wild facial takes happen. Those kinds of visuals were why I enjoyed watching those toons again and again.

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    1. There are times when Ken Muse gives Jinks an expression with eyes closed and mouth turned up that he gave Tom at MGM. The same with some of Mike Lah's poses; they remind me of work he did in the Avery unit.

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