Not a Groupie For Loopy

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.”