A Chuckle For Huckle

How fortunate were some Canadian fans of Huckleberry Hound! Not only could they watch the Huckleberry Hound Show on a local station, if they lived close enough to the U.S. border, they could see it on an American channel as well. Thus it was in early 1959, kids in Vancouver and Victoria could see Huck, Jinks, Yogi (and Yowp) via the CBC on Wednesdays, AND they could tune in to a station in Seattle the next afternoon and watch the cartoons all over again. In Toronto, viewers could watch Huck on those same Wednesdays via the Mother Corp (the show also aired on the Peterborough station that day) and Thursdays from Buffalo.

(Vancouver kids were especially lucky, for they could also eventually watch Huck on the Bellingham station. That, combined with the Quick Draw McGraw Show broadcast from Vancouver, Victoria and Seattle and the Yogi Bear Show from Seattle, made for a Hanna-Barbera overdose).

One might think in the Land which Begat the National Film Board and its eclectic mix of animation, a place where the arts community seems chock-full of people with very English last names as first names, the simple adventures of the limited-movement Huck cartoons would be pooh-poohed. Ah, but you’d be wrong.

Huck and his coterie were praised by no less a figure as novelist Mordecai Richler, who must be considered one of Canada’s esteemed writers of the 20th century. He wrote about them in the August 26, 1961 edition of Maclean’s, a national magazine which occasionally commented on things outside of Toronto. His monikering of television’s blue hound as “Huckle” is more annoying than wistful to me, but I’m not exactly in Mordecai Richler’s league when it comes to prose.

His reference to Joel Aldred may be a little confusing. Aldred was a commercial announcer based in Toronto. I don’t recall him on Kellogg’s commercials but I do remember hearing his smooth voice for many years on national ads for Household Finance Corporation and Rothman’s cigarettes. Funny the stuff that sticks in your head after five decades.

THE CASE FOR Huckleberry Hound as Mordecai Richler sees it
Television, the largest of borrowers, has cribbed from, and diminished in the process, the theatre, the novel, and the cinema. Only in making the inevitable trip to the comic strip has it actually enlarged and improved on another medium. Naturally, I speak here of Huckleberry Hound. Huckle, the incomparable. He is, to my mind, one of the most full rounded, outspoken, and lovable characters on television. Huckle, it’s true, is only an animated character, but there is more flesh and blood in him than there is to, say, Ed Sullivan.

I also think that Huckleberry is a first-rate salesman. He couldn’t, for instance, make the switch from Mercury to Kodak as easily as Ed Sullivan. He believes in Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. I think he may feel even more deeply about it that Joel Aldred ever did, and that’s going some. Speaking viewer-wise I can dig Perry Mason with identifying with Kleenex, but as long as Huckle sticks with Kellogg’s there will be no competing brands in our house.
Huckleberry and his sophisticated community of friends, including those crazy, mixed-up meeces, Trixie and Dixie [sic]; Mr. Jinks, the beat cat; and Yogi Bear, of Jellystone Park, are true inventions. They make the comic-strip characters of my own day—Goofy, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse—seem paper-thin. As James Joyce extended the uses of the novel, so the creators of Huckleberry & Co. have added a new dimension of the animated cartoon.
The first of the “intelligent” strips was, I think, Barnaby, in the now defunct PM. There is also Pogo and Mr. Magoo. But, in my opinion, all these forebears of Huckleberry were (or still are) self-consciously bright. Huckleberry is an effortless rebel and intellectual. Even Yogi Bear is sometimes alarmingly up-to-date in his asides. He recently remarked to the guard at Jellystone Park that, if so much money was being spent on nuclear weapons, soon obsolete, why not more and better food for the bears at Jellystone? Altogether subversive, this, I doubt, if it could get by on our own GM Presents.
In fact, in passing, one is including to think that Huckleberry ‘s sponsor, unlike some I could name, is completely enlightened.
And Huckle himself, as I said earlier, is incomparable. I know, because every Wednesday afternoon at five-thirty I gather with my children round the TV set, they with their Huckleberry cutouts, Kellogg’s box tops, and Yogi Bear punching bags, me with my gin and tonic, to watch. Intrepid, witty, and humble, Huckleberry is superb, whether satirizing the unrehearsed TV interview (he reads shamelessly from the teleprompter), the Western myth, Ed Sullivan, or the lion hunt.
Perry Mason will never lose a case, dammit, and nobody this side of Forest Hill will ever outgun Lorne Greene, but Huckleberry is entirely human. Like you and me, he has his frailties. And television being what it is, this is something to celebrate.