The cartoons on the Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw and Yogi Bear shows were, as layout artist Bob Givens recalled, 500 feet (without titles, I presume). He also recalled Ken Muse was the footage king. Muse would animate a whole cartoon in one week, 100 feet a day. Compare that to 35 feet a week at Fleischers, and that was considered a high figure.
Muse had been animating Mickey Mouse at Disney before he went over to MGM. He did some terrific work there; his animation of the hoity-toity Tom approaching and sitting down at the piano in Cat Concerto and the bee attack reaction on Tom in Tee for Two are excellent. Certainly he didn’t dash out that footage. But at Hanna-Barbera, rarely was his posing or animation expressive. For television, he relied on short cuts which began to epitomise the studio.
Here are some examples from the Pixie and Dixie cartoon Mouse Nappers (1959). First, we have a walk cycle animated on twos (each drawing is shot twice). Neither cycles nor animating on twos were unusual in the theatrical days. But in this case, director Bill Hanna has the background move very slightly behind each camera shot, enhancing the feeling of movement when the drawing is actually static. The arm, head and mice are rigid, only the body moves.
There are whole scenes at Hanna-Barbera consisting of several dozen frames where characters that are immobile except for eye blinks and very slight mouth movements. All dialogue is done off camera. This is a good footage eater because nothing is really happening. It’s also why Daws Butler and Don Messick were so important to the early cartoons. Their voices had to carry these scenes.
Here’s a dialogue example. Jinks doesn’t move. The only thing that changes are a few mouth positions that Muse uses over again for various vowels and consonants. You’ll notice the two-part upper lip. Muse drew his characters like that at MGM, too.
To make Jink look less static, our old friend the eye blink returns. Muse has open, half-open and closed positions only. The half-open is shot on twos.
As a side note, animator Mike Lah slid the mouth around a character’s face in odd geometrical shapes. His characters didn’t look as sophisticated as Muse’s but he animated extreme drawings which are far more funny to look at than these.
Here’s a six-drawing run cycle. See the curved greyish lines above the legs? Muse does this because the body shapes are on separate cels from the legs. The three body cels are reused to match how the legs are lifted on the left and right side of the meece bodies. Body position 1 is used in drawings 1 and 4, body position 2 in drawings 2 and 5, and body position 3 in drawings 3 and 6. Something difficult to tell below is the meeces are higher in the frame in some shots than others, enhancing the movement.
It’s an awkward description but I hope you get my point.
When you’re churning out footage, niceties such as having the characters in the same position when a shot changes from close to medium are tossed out. That takes planning. Planning takes time. Time slows down the footage count. Here are two examples. These are consecutive frames. The backgrounds don’t even match.
This is one of 66 cartoons made in the first season of the Huck show. Muse animated 29 of them (with assistance by Lah on some). I understand he was paid by the foot, so you can’t blame him for trying to maximise his footage. But, and it’s an age-old lament, you can’t help but wonder how much better the cartoons might have looked if there had been more time to work on them. On the other hand, kids, teenagers and adults laughed at them anyway and made the Huck show a brief, Emmy-winning, cult favourite through the late ‘50s.
In June 1960, a deal was being firmed up between Kellogg’s and Saperstein’s UPA. Variety reported on August 10th the two had a seven-year pact that would see $3,000,000 spent in the first year to put a half-hour Mr. Magoo show on 150 stations, the same as the cereal maker did with the Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw shows for Hanna-Barbera.
But then Saperstein pulled out. He thought he could get a better financial deal going it alone. And Hanna-Barbera was ready. Both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter told readers in their October 12th editions that Kellogg’s had agreed to sponsor a half-hour Yogi Bear show on 130 stations starting in January 1961, and Snagglepuss and Yakky Doodle would augment the new series.
Yogi’s jump to stardom should not have been a surprise. Yogi was slowly but surely taking the spotlight away from Huck as H-B’s main starring character in syndication. The studio had already decided to make Yogi, not Huck, the star of its first feature film. Yogi was appearing in person (actually, someone in an outfit) at department stores, fairs, and so on. There was plenty of Yogi merchandise in stores and he was on a cereal box. On top of that, Huck didn’t get a syndicated newspaper strip in 1961; Yogi did. And another indicator—in October, Yogi was named chairman of the 1960-61 fund raising drive of the Radio-Television-Recording and Advertising Charities of Hollywood. (What he actually did, I don’t know).
As for Yakky, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had plunked the duck in Tom and Jerry cartoons at MGM, then brought him over to their own studio as an occasional character in more than a half dozen cartoons. He was ready for his own series (the only problem was his voice actor, Red Coffey, was on tour, so Barbera hired Los Angeles kids host Jimmy Weldon). And Snagglepuss had appeared on the Quick Draw McGraw show a number of times as an orange antagonist. He was clever with funny dialogue (George Nicholas did a fine job animating him) so he had real possibilities for his own segment.
The Yogi Bear Show began showing up in syndication on the week of January 30, 1961. Not all the cartoons were ready, so some were borrowed from the Quick Draw show for several weeks. Yogi continued to appear on the Huck show until the replacement Hokey Wolf cartoons were set to air.
Hanna-Barbera’s PR guru Arnie Carr started plugging away, working the media to get some ink. Hal Humphrey wrote a pre-debut column, while UPI’s Fred Danzig and Jack Gaver both banged out reviews. I’ve found another story from the Copley News Service, published January 28, 1961.
Smarter Than Average
Extrovert Yogi Bear Syndicated Across US
BY DONALD FREEMAN
Copley News Service
HOLLYWOOD, Jan. 27— As his loyal followers always knew it would, being smarter than the average bear has at last paid off in tangible rewards for that blustering furry extrovert known to television as Yogi Bear. Forthwith, amid a fanfare from the trumpets, The Yogi Bear Show is syndicated across the land.
This freshly spawned cartoon series evolved logically and inevitably out of Huckleberry Hound the show in which Yogi Bear has played second fiddle for the last 2½ years. Now he has emerged from the wings, a full-fledged bear-type star.
At Hanna-Barbera Productions— headed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbara, two enterprisingly creative talents responsible not only for Yogi Bear and Hucklebery Hound, but Ruff n’ Reddy, Quick Draw McGraw and the Flintstones as well— the feeling had persisted for some time that Yogi Rear was ripe for bigger things.
"Consider this," said Bill Hanna, a stocky onetime engineer now the partner in a booming $10,000,000 cartoon corporation, "Huckleberry Hound" had an island in the Antarctic named for him and he was tapped as mascot of the Marching and Jazz Society in Hull England.
"BUT BRITAIN’S ENTRY in a recent International model plane race was named Yogi Bear. And a wing of our Strategic Air Command picked Yogi for its mascot.
"Also consider this," put in Joe Barbera, the darkly handsome partner who once worked in a bank and despised every minute of it, "when Huckleberry Hound ran for president last year— he didn't do badly in certain animal precincts, by the way— who was his campaign manager? Yogi Bear."
In common with most creative brains in the animated cartoon dodge, Hanna and Barbera are— well, free souls, blithe nose-thumbers at conventional procedure. For example, interoffice memos are expressly forbidden in their studios.
"If a man dreams up an idea he can barge right into our office," explained Barbera, adding pointedly that no such easygoing policy prevailed in their days at M-G-M. "By the time a producer there had got your memo and sent back his memo and you finally were permitted into the hallowed sanctum of his office, you'd forgotten what you wanted to say in the first place. So, no memos."
FOR SOME 20 YEARS, Hanna and Barbera were teamed at M-G M where their fertile imaginations gave birth to the cat and mouse cartoon series, Tom and Jerry, which brought the studio seven Academy Awards. In 1957 they turned to television writing continually expanding success story, with the new Yogi Bear show being the latest chapter.
There are times when Yogi's fans imperturbably criss-cross the thin stand dividing fancy and reality. Not long ago in a gesture of appreciation, Yogi Bear was awarded a certificate by the superintendent of Yellowstone Park— not Ranger Smith, but the actual superintendent in the real Yellowstone Park— for being “an upstanding example for bears all over the world.”
However, in his notation, the superintendent saw fit to add slyly: "But I'm sure glad that Yogi Bear doesn't live fulltime in my park."
Still, the starring Yogi jettisoned the spot gags and sight gags of the earlier Huck show Yogi. Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons were starting to become dialogue heavy, with characters standing around, with mouths moving on rigid bodies while a character being spoken to blinked his/her eyes to break the monotony. How much more interesting visually they would have been if Mike Lah (concentrating on commercials at Quartet) and Carlo Vinci (moved over to The Flintstones) were still animating the cartoons like they did when Yogi was still with Huck.
We all know that H-B characters ran past the same tree or lamp over and over and over again. Here’s an endless loop from the Yogi show. It’s from Whistle-Stop and Go, a Yakky cartoon animated by Columbia and Warner Bros. veteran Art Davis. It takes 16 frames for Dick Thomas’s background to repeat, with Fibber on an eight-frame run cycle. What I didn’t notice until I put this together is Davis slightly animates Fibber’s whiskers and top hair strands. That kind of thing would have been skipped in the later “faster, cheaper” years.
Evidently, the cartoon producers liked her. When they got their own studio, they signed her to be the voice of Cindy Bear.
Now, actress Julie Bennett has been claimed by complications of Covid-19. She died on March 31st at age 88.
Bennett acted in cartoons through the 1980s and then pretty much disappeared. Various sources have revealed what happened. She changed her name to Marianne Daniels and became a personal manager.
Her third cousin has written stating her father was Beverly Hills realtor George Gordon Bennett and her mother’s name was Harriet. Her grandmother was Isabella "Bella" Block Abels. The four of them moved from Lake George, N.Y. to Los Angeles in October 1932 several months after Julie was born on January 24th. Her father changed the family name upon arrival in California. The 1930 U.S. Census reveals Belle Abels living with her daughter Harriet and son-in-law George S(amuel) Israel; the family was in the restaurant business. The ship’s manifest documenting their arrival on the West Coast shows that Julie’s name was Barbera. They returned to the Lake George for several years as that is where the 1940 Census puts them.
Her first voice for the Hanna-Barbera studio was not Cindy, though that was her biggest role for the studio, considering she appeared in the feature film Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear. To the best of my knowledge, the first time she worked for the studio was in the Quick Draw McGraw cartoon Masking For Trouble (1959) as Sagebrush Sal. Prior to that, Daws Butler or Don Messick did almost all the female voices in falsetto. Barbera was looking for new actors when the studio expanded to put Quick Draw on the air, and among the hires were Bennett and Jean Vander Pyl.
Cindy’s voice owed something to Shirley Mitchell’s Leila Ransome on The Great Gildersleeve; I think both characters used the phrase “I do declare!” (Mitchell admitted she borrowed her Southern belle accent from Una Merkel).
Bennett worked for other cartoon studios as well. She provided a few voices for Warner Bros. and filled in for June Foray at the Jay Ward studio on the “Fractured Fairy Tale” cartoons. She turned up at UPA as well.
I hate to do a tally, but it appears Elliot Field is the only voice actor left from the pre-Flintstones days (1960); Jimmy Weldon came on board as Yakky Doodle in cartoons that aired starting in 1961.
She began acting in 1947 at the Oliver Hinsdell Studio of Dramatic Art in Hollywood and quickly went into radio. You can read a few old posts about Miss Bennett by clicking here.
My thanks to reader Luu Hoang for alerting me to the media reports about this, and my sincere sympathies go to her friends.
