Bear For Punishment Backgrounds

One way of getting into a Yogi Bear cartoon was a pan over a long background while Don Messick, as narrator, sets up the plot.

One of those cartoons was Bear For Punishment, which first aired on the Huckleberry Hound Show on the week of November 30, 1959. The studio added background painters that year, as it added the Quick Draw McGraw Show to its workload. Fernando Montealegre, Bob Gentle and Art Lozzi were joined by Dick Thomas and Joe Montell. Thomas had originally been Bob Clampett’s background man at Warners and eventually left the studio in the mid-1950s to work for Disney. Montell’s first job was with Tex Avery at MGM and, when the unit was disbanded, he ended up (with Warren Foster, who wrote this cartoon) at John Sutherland Productions.

Montell is responsible for the backgrounds in this cartoon. After a shot of cars (on a cel being moved to the left) over a woodsy, repeating background, he came up with this for the second scene.



Bill Hanna then cuts to another background drawing, which is panned to the right. There has been no animation yet. That begins when the shot stops on Yogi and Boo Boo, and they begin snoring. The heads are the only things that are animated.



The next cut is to a long, repeating background. Notice how the bare pine and right-leaning whatever-it-is tree on the left of the painting are the same as on the right.



This background gets a good workout as cel overlays with cabins (as well as the animation) are placed on top. Here’s an example, just after Hanna cuts away from Yogi and Boo Boo. The cave is placed over top of the tree slanting to the left and the fir next to it. There are two overlays, one of the left half of the cave entrance and the other of the right, allowing the two bears to leave the cave. Below, you can pretty much see where the right overlay is placed.



Montell’s style is pretty easy to spot. He loved dots. See the dots he has next to branches or on top of stems? And dots he uses for rocks? That’s Montell. You can see the same thing in some of his cartoons for Avery and at Sutherland.

The animator of this cartoon is Gerard Baldwin in his first go-around at Hanna-Barbera. He started his animation career at UPA in the 1950s, and moved to Sutherland where he has an animation screen credit on that studio’s magnum opus, Rhapsody of Steel (1959). He has an odd way of drawing the bear, with two roundish parts to his muzzle in certain views, a little loop for a mouth, and sometimes with a stretched neck with his nose up. We’ve shown some examples in this post about the cartoon.

Here’s a bit of Baldwin dialogue animation. When Boo Boo (in one of many close-ups in this cartoon) asks “Why don’t we eat nuts and berries like other bears?”, Yogi responds with “Nuts and berries? Yechhh.” The drawings below are on twos.



My wild guess is the studio would not have used this many drawings in later years. It would go from profile, two in-betweens, front view, then the mouth-only animated to say “Nuts and berries? Yechhh.”

Both Baldwin and Montell left the studio for Jay Ward Productions before the season was finished. Montell ended up in Mexico supervising the work of Gamma Productions. Baldwin returned to H-B some years later and garnered some Emmys. He (and a number of others) never got screen credit on the end titles of the Huck show in the 1959-60 season but Montell did.

The blog profiled Montell some time ago and you can read that post here.