It was produced in the first year (1958-59) when Charlie Shows was entrusted to write dialogue for the cartoons. There are some shorts where whole stretches go without it. When Warren Foster was hired to replace him, Foster not only got a writer credit, he filled cartoons with words.
In Scooter Looter, large portions of the cartoon feature nothing but Yogi riding a scooter, at times pushing a button on a horn, as he moves in cycle animation through Jellystone Park. He’s not saying a thing.
One of Carlo Vinci’s cycles is in three drawings, animated on two frames each, as Yogi and the scooter zip past Art Lozzi’s trees in the background. It takes 12 frames to get back to the start of the trees creating an endless cycle. Yogi’s head is on a separate cel.
There are several head-shake cycles in the cartoon; one is used at least twice. Another one involving Ranger Mack uses four drawings, one per frame. Carlo only animates the head. (Ranger Smith had not been invented yet).
And there are other scenes where the camera focuses on a background drawing for about two seconds of film with no animation; just the music of Jack Shaindlin or Geordie Hormel playing. H-B saved cash on that kind of easy footage. Lozzi’s background art is quite enjoyable; you can see it in our review of the cartoon in this post.
I wonder if this cartoon inspired Marx Toys to issue their Yogi on a friction-drive scooter back in the early '60s?
ReplyDeleteThere is a tad too much footage of Yogi riding around among the tree branches here, but overall, the tone of the cartoon gets you past that, especially the annoyed, and eventually resigned-to-disaster scooter rental guy (it's one of the examples of the early H-B cartoons being geared to adult as much as to kids. A couple of years later the guy would have have been loud and hyperbolic, while here he's for the most part quiet and cynically pessimistic).
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