Rolling Through Jellystone

One thing kids couldn’t appreciate when they first saw The Huckleberry Hound Show in 1958 was the colours in the cartoons. The show was aired in black and white in its original run sponsored by Kellogg’s but Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera wisely had the artwork in colour. The NBC peacock had debuted a couple of years earlier, so Hanna and Barbera must have known colour would soon take over the small screen.

The use of colour is really good in these early cartoons. There wasn’t just one shade of green or brown or whatever in background paintings. There were a number of dues and its makes the artwork more attractive.

Here’s an example from Yogi Bear’s Big Break, the first Yogi cartoon to air. See how the insides of the fir trees are a different shade of green than the outer area. I like the nice shades of browns, reds and orange in this background, too. The trees and plateau in the foreground are on a cel overlay.



Hanna found ways to cut corners in the earliest cartoons. In-betweens were deemed unnecessary; characters jump from position to another. They don’t really move a great deal so it doesn’t look abrupt. Also in this cartoon, there are several times where cars are immobile on a cel. It stays put while the background moves slightly.

We all know how Pixie and Dixie run past the same light socket or lamp over and over and over. It happens in Yogi Bear’s Big Break. It takes 48 frames for the drawing with the cars on it to reach the end of the background and start over again in an endless loop.

You’ll notice to the right an inside joke from a piece of background art (by Frank Tipper). The exterminator in the Yellow Pages is named Montealegre. Fernando Montealegre was an assistant animator for Hanna and Barbera at MGM before he was moved to the background department. His name is on the credits of this cartoon, though the artwork reminds me more of Bob Gentle. Monty loved stylised art—you can see it in his cartoons for Mike Lah at Metro—but he toned it down at H-B.

Perhaps my favourite piece of his work on the Huck show is the establishing shot in the Pixie and Dixie cartoon Little Bird Mouse.



We posted a bit about him in this post and Kevin Langley’s site still has a nice collection of his H-B and MGM art if you click here.