Hanna-Barbera debuted two cartoon series in 1959. One is my favourite—the Quick Draw McGraw Show.
The other is Loopy de Loop.
I’m afraid I’m not a fan of Loopy. He’s a French-Canadian wolf who’s not one of those Disney-type bad wolves. He’s a good wolf. And . . . well, that’s it. Hanna-Barbera managed to stretch this one-dimensional idea into 48 cartoons from 1959 to 1965. He starred in a theatrical cartoon series with a TV animation budget.
The reason I’ve broken my Loopy silence, all the more remarkable because this blog is more or less inactive, is I somehow stumbled onto the first Loopy cartoon. It opened so full of promise. I really like the background at the start.
The artwork is from Fernando Montealegre. I like this because he’s incorporated flatness with some perspective. This, by the way, would have been the first cartoon from Hanna-Barbera Productions seen in colour, as the TV series were aired (in 1959) in black-and-white.
Poor Mike Maltese. In 1959, he wrote 78 cartoons for television (the entire Quick Draw series, one Huckleberry Hound and one Yogi Bear), and then had to write this one, Wolf Hounded. He cobbled together a story with some familiar situations. The sexually-aroused grandma in Red Hot Riding Hood. The jerkish pigs from The Turn Tale Wolf (thanks to Jonathan Wilson for the correction). The “helpless” girl who can beat up someone in self-defence from The Dover Boys. Oh, and Loopy’s aspiration to be a lady-charmer comes from any number of Pepé LePew cartoons (also written by le guesse who?). I’m not saying these are the sources, but they have plot similarities with this cartoon.
Another Monty background.
Something the cartoon has in its favour is the casting of June Foray. It seems odd that Joe Barbera didn’t get Jean Vander Pyl, whom he started employing in 1959. I can’t help but wonder if she voiced Betty in the Flagstones reel about the time she did this. June Foray is a national treasure.
Columbia Pictures had been distributing cartoons made by UPA. Someone at Columbia must have realised this was a silly idea. After all, Columbia had a piece of Hanna-Barbera. Why not have them make theatrical cartoons instead? That’s what happened, although Columbia evidently had a deal permitting them to re-issue UPA shorts it had already put in theatres.
Here’s a full-page ad taken out in several trades.
The most hilarious thing in the ad isn’t the sell-job on Loopy, but the utterly inept drawings in the box for the old Screen Gems Columbia Favorites with the duck and hunter from Wacky Quacky, and the Indian and moose from Topsy Turkey. (Maybe even funnier is advertising “Another Travelark.” Yeah, theatre owners, we haven’t figured out what it is, but get the film anyway).
Maybe you’re one of those people who likes Loopy de Loop. Someone at Motion Picture Magazine guffawed over him. Here’s a review from the December 16, 1959 issue.
WOLF HOUNDED. Columbia Loopy de Loop Cartoon. 7m. This introduces a new cartoon character, a French wolf, who gets his fairy tales all mixed up and meets his match in Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, who much to his distraction, falls for him and causes him to flee. EXCELLENT.
This is the same publication which gave an “excellent” rating to the insufferable UPA short Picnics Are Fun (reviewed somewhere on the Tralfaz blog). Meanwhile, it only gave a “good” to Drag-Along Droopy, my favourite of all the Droopy cartoons, and dismissed Friz Freleng’s High Diving Hare and the Maltese-written Real Gone Woody as “fair.” But it also gave an “excellent” to Avery’s Billy Boy and Three Little Pups as well as Gene Deitch’s stylish The Juggler of Our Lady. These strike me as accurate ratings but, of course, taste in cartoons is subjective.
One other thing the Loopy cartoons did was eliminate the Capital Hi-Q and Langlois Filmusic background music at Hanna-Barbera. Hoyt Curtin was brought in to write a library of cues for Loopy. I love the stock music, but in-house compositions became the policy at H-B and resulted in excellent scores for The Jetsons, Jonny Quest and other series.
And now, you’re in for a treat (?)
Here’s a version of the Loopy theme song with lyrics. No doubt the intended kiddie audience would have said “Loopy who?” so to increase saleability, the 78 is “Yogi Bear Introduces Loopy De Loop.” Everyone knew who Yogi was.
Kids would have been unhappy to find Yogi was an imposter. As this is a Golden Record, Daws Butler is nowhere to be heard. I originally thought it was Gil Mack, a fine New York radio actor, but it seems to me it’s Frank Milano, who provided some voices in Total TeleVision cartoons and who recorded an LP as Yogi, his final album before his death, actually. I will allow you to determine how he performs as “Yogi The Bear.”
Daws Butler once told interviewer Larry King that he did not do “voices.” He did “characters.”
If anyone was the glue that held the Hanna-Barbera cartoons together in the early years, it was Daws Butler. He voiced almost all the starring characters before The Flintstones came along in 1960. Even then he auditioned for Fred Flintstone and, the following year, was briefly picked as the voice of Top Cat.
Whatever he picked up about acting with one’s voice, starting on the stage in Chicago in the mid-‘30s, he passed on to anyone who asked for his help. His cartoon career began after the war; he gave credit to MGM director Tex Avery for picking him (though it is understood he narrated a cartoon for Columbia/Screen Gems before that).
Through the 1950s, when he wasn’t performing in theatrical cartoons, he and Stan Freberg were almost a pair, working on the puppet show A Time For Beany, a bunch of records for Capitol and two radio shows. He deserved a writing credit on Freberg’s 1957 variety show but never got one. Then there were numerous animated commercials on TV that Daws also wrote and lent some voices that would be familiar to Hanna-Barbera and Jay Ward fans not too much later.
Daws talked about the Hanna-Barbera characters in a number of interviews over the years. Here’s one from the Evansville Press of Oct. 30, 1966. By then, others had taken over the lead roles as H-B moved into Saturday morning programming.
Virtually Living the Part Is Key to Success Says ‘Voice’ of 10 Weekly TV Cartoon Shows
By BILL LYON Tri-State Editor
MADISONVILLE, Ky.—You’ve heard Yogi Bear boast of being “better than the average bear.” [sic]
And Mr. Jinks vowing “I hate meeces to pieces.”
And Snagglepuss with his “Exit, stage right.”
Now meet the man behind those voices and expressions, as well as those of a dozen other TV cartoon characters. His name is Daws Butler. He’s a short, barrel-chested man with shaggy eyebrows and a face as elastically expressive as his amazing voice.
Chances are you’ve never heard of Mr. Butler before.
But you, and especially your children, hear him five hours a week on television. He does the voices for 10 different half-hour cartoon shows—Quick-Draw McGraw, Dixie, Hokey Wolf, Blabber-Mouse, Super Snooper, Baba-Looey, Snuffles, Huckleberry Hound, Augie Doggie, Fibber Fox and a few others in addition to the three mentioned previously.
Butler also handles the voices for Cap’n Crunch and Mr. Wiggle in the cereal and Jello commercials. He was in Madisonville the last week with his wife visiting his sister-in-law and her husband, Dr. and Mrs. Selby Coffman.
Butler estimates that since broke in the cartoon field in 1951 with Walter Lantz strips he has provided the voices for over 600 cartoons.
The secret to all those different voice characterizations?
“Virtually living the character," Butler said. ”If I had to act them out physically, I could. When I do Yogi Bear I almost walk like he does. Mr. Jinks the cat talks very slowly. So when I do him my whole body relaxes and goes limp.”
Yogi Bear is probably the most famous of Butler’s voices—he’s been translated into 19 languages in 32 countries, and for a time was the only American show seen on TV in Cuba. But Butler’s personal favorite seems to be Mr. Jinks, the cat who spends his time in a frustrating chase after those two mice, Pixie and Dixie.
“He’s the most elastic character. I talk around his lines and have made him exceptionally verbose . . . while occasionally butchering the English language," Butler said.
Contrary to popular belief, voices of cartoon characters are not dubbed in after the animated strips have been made.
“Most people think that the way it’s done, but it would be too confining. Most of the personality a cartoon character has comes from his voice and his attitude of expression,” Butler pointed out.
“So we read the script and the sound track is made first. The writers and animators watch us read, and pick up some additional ideas for illustrations and lines from our facial expressions. That’s why early radio was such great training because you were acting out the lines to put more feeling in them," Butler continued.
Butler’s next project will be the voices of the scarecrow, tin woodman and the wizzard [sic] in an MGM adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz." It will be released in January. Mel Blanc will do the voice of the cowardly lion.
"The big advantage to doing voices is that, unlike an actor, you don't get stereotyped. I can play a prince in shows like Aesop and Son or Fractured Fables then to Yogi Bear or Quick-Draw McGraw," Butler pointed out.
Daws and his wife live in Beverly Hills. They have four sons—David, Don, Paul and Charles.
“They’ve grown up now, but they’ll be having kids who can watch cartoons on TV, and maybe listen to their grandfather," Butler smiled.
Now, for your listening pleasure, here’s Daws in one of his early West Coast projects. Belda Records were 78s that came with a comic book to read along with the dialogue on the record. The comics were drawn by Tubby Millar, a writer of Warner Bros. cartoons in the ‘30s You can see one page of the artwork to the right. And we have the sound from “Chirpy Cricket,” copyrighted on April 20, 1947. The story is by Frank Bonham.
Here’s an interesting bit from Chuck Cecil’s The Swingin’ Years, a big band show that aired, among a number of places, on Armed Forces Radio. Listen to the minute-long drop-in at 17:05. You’ll recognise the voice. I don’t know the context behind the routine.
And from the late Earl Kress comes this 1986 walk around Daws' studio behind his home.
