Hocus Pocus Focus/Muni-Mula Mix-Up

Don Messick had an odd voice that I first heard on The Herculoids. I don’t know exactly how he did it; probably by wiggling his tongue inside his mouth.

Gloop and Gleep weren’t the first Hanna-Barbera characters to have this weird, wavy voice. He gave it to the Muni-Mula robots in the first adventure of Ruff and Reddy.

Here’s one of the robots in “Hocus Pocus Focus.”

After a recap of the previous episode, where Reddy is turned into a mindless robot, just like his mechanical duplicates, Ruff chases after him. Ken Muse draws a cycle of three Ruffs, animated on twos. The Ruffs are slid over a roller-painted background (possibly by Fernando Montealegre).



Ruff chases after Reddy, who has gone with the duplicate Ruffs and Reddys into The Big Thinker’s room. After about four animation-saving seconds of a static shot, with camera shakes to simulate a fight, a robot tosses him out.



Please don’t be one of those people who asks why the garbage can is labelled in English, but the robots don’t speak it. Okay, if you’re one of those people, the answer is The Big Thinker speaks to the robots in English, so they understand it. Let’s move on.

Real Ruff pretends to be a robot Ruff to get past the guard. We know it’s the real Ruff because he winks at the audience.



Once inside, Ruff has a dilemma: which one is the real Reddy? (Yeah, I know, “Ten Little Flintstones.” Let’s move on).



The way to find out: the real Reddy won’t sound metallic when hit with a hammer. It sounds like Greg Watson or whoever handled the sound struck the side of a cowbell to make the noise.



Ruff escapes with Reddy only to be followed by a cleverly-designed (by Ed Benedict?) flying camera for which this episode is named. It transmits what it sees back to The Big Thinker, who issues a command to bring the Earthlings back to him. Reddy, still under robot control, grabs Ruff and the cartoon ends with them heading toward TBT.



Two Spencer Moore cues from the Capitol Hi-Q “D” series are heard in this one, along with something that sounds like a work part (ie., a musical effect, like a stab, a sting or a button) from the “S” series (to be honest, I’m too lazy to hunt around to see if I have it). Science fictions films of the day loved these Moore cues. L-1203 is heard in the immortal Teenagers From Outer Space.

0:00 – No music.
0:06 – L-657 EERIE DRAMATIC (Moore) – Start of cartoon.
1:52 – No music – “Don’t you know me, Reddy?...
1:58 – Musical stab (Unknown) – Camera pans down line of robots.
2:02 – L-1203 EERIE HEAVY ECHO (Moore) – “Which one of these Reddys…” to end of cartoon.

The next episode is “Muni-Mula Mix-Up.” A recap segues into Ruff demanding Reddy put him down. Remarkably, he does. Narrator Messick explains that because Reddy has a peanut brain and a thick skull “the cosmic rays [that put him under The Big Thinker’s control] bounced off like water off a duck.” Yeah, that’s the best comic analogy Charlie Shows could come up with.

Anyway. Reddy’s eyes swirl as he comes out of the spell.



What now? “Let’s get out of this creepy place,” says Reddy, though you have to wonder where he thinks he can go. There’s lots of pose-to-pose movement here without in-betweens. They try to get past a robot guard (who scratches his head in reused animation) by pretending to be Ruff and Reddy mechanical duplicates (who walk in reused cycle animation), but are again watched by the Hocus Pocus Focus.



Reddy ignores Ruff’s advice to ignore the camera and tries to swat it away. Ruff tries to “ground this contraption.” There are three seconds of a shot of Ruff with the only animation being eye blinks. Some metallic sound effects are heard, then after ten frames of Ruff in a stretch shock take, he ducks and Reddy enters the scene. There are 28 frames of Ruff, with Reddy riding the Hocus Pocus Focus on a cel pulled across the background from left to right. The only animation is three drawings of the propeller of the camera in a cycle.



Ruff tries to stop Reddy by holding onto him. Cut to a scene of the doors of The Big Thinker’s chamber. They open. But, for some reason, they don’t go into the chamber. They go past it. There’s no reason for the doors to open. Maybe that’s the Muni-Mula Mix-Up.



“Once again, Ruff and Reddy are face-to-face with The Big Thinker,” says the narrator. “Once again” gives Bill Hanna an excuse to reused some limited animation and even a dialogue track from Daws Butler.

Cut to The Big Thinker who, unexpectedly, isn’t The Big Thinker. As we hear the sound of a ceramic lid clamping down on a teapot, TBT’s head opens and closes, with a wimpy voice saying “Get me out of here." A little man with a voice like Bill Thompson’s Droopy (it’s Don Messick here) emerges and pleads with Ruff and Reddy to get him off Muni-Mula. That’s where the episode ends.



The cues:

0:00 – No music – Title card.
0:06 – TC-221A HEAVY AGITATO (Bill Loose-John Seely) – Starts of cartoon to skull explanation.
1:09 – No music – Reddy’s eyes swirl.
1:14 - L-653 EERIE DRAMATIC (Spencer Moore) – “Sometimes, it pays...” to end of cartoon.

What’s that, fans? Today is Ruff and Reddy’s birthday? The pair got mentioned in Faye “My-eyes-are-up-here” Emerson’s column of Dec. 9, 1957:

The Russians stole thunder from cartoonists Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera when they shot their dog into space. The animators had already started working on what they though was a “fantasy,” a TV serial about a dog and cat who venture into outer space. The cartoon show, “Ruff and Reddy,” debuts Dec. 14 on NBC.

This business about the Soviet Space-Pooch was raised in a news release the previous month. This was in the Miami Herald.

Cartoon Animal In Outer Space
NEW YORK, Nov. 13—NBC-TV is preparing to send a cat and a dog into outer space the latter part of December via a new cartoon program just purchased from Screen Gems. These plans were revealed immediately following the Russians' announcement of the launching of Muttnik.
"Ruff and Reddy" are the names of the two NBC space travelers. Their adventures will be depicted in a new four-minute animated serial produced in color by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, creators of the famous "Tom and Jerry" cartoons.
NBC plans to program the "Ruff and Reddy" show Saturday mornings. Each half-hour installment will consist of two episodes from the "Ruff and Reddy" adventure serial and two first-run cartoons from the Columbia Pictures library. The show will he emceed either by a human host or by Ruff and Reddy themselves.

NBC decided to go with a human host. Cartoon hosts would have to wait a year for The Huckleberry Hound Show.

The Box That Socks

No, Huckleberry Hound, it’s not a present for you, we hear in this Pixie and Dixie cartoon-between-the-cartoons. “It’s a jack-in-the-box SURprise for Jinks,” Dixie tells Huck. Jinksie grabs the box.



Jinks thinks he’s outsmarted the meeces. The jack-in-the-box will open up at the top, so he’ll duck down and his head will be beside it when he flips the latch. Wrong again, Jinks.



There’s a cycle of four drawings that fades out to end the vignette. What’s unusual about this cycle is one drawing is held for three frames and the other three are held for two frames. But it’s a different drawing held longer in each cycle. In the re-creation below, we’ve held the same drawing three times. It has been slowed down. Sorry for the TV bug.



And it’s on to the next Pixie and Dixie cartoon.

The wide mouth on Jinks above should be a give-away that this was animated by Carlo Vinci (the head moves in Vinci-esque angles when Jinks talks). I’m pretty sure the backgrounds are by Fernando Montealegre.

Tony Benedict R.I.P.

When the Hanna-Barbera studio opened in 1957, Charlie Shows was hired as the staff writer, though Joe Barbera had a lot of say about what went into the studio's cartoons.

Shows left in late 1958 and was replaced by Mike Maltese of Warner Bros. Several months later, Warren Foster was hired from John Sutherland Productions (formerly of Warners) to take over the Huckleberry Hound Show.

The studio expanded into prime time in 1960 with the Flintstones and another writer was needed. That's when Tony Benedict was tempted away from UPA.

Word has reached me this morning that Tony has passed away. I know his health had not been good for several years.

Tony started off working on Huckleberry Hound and Yakky Doodle cartoons. He was the creator of Alfie Gator; Tony loved the Alfred Hitchcock TV show and grabbed hold of a chance to parody it. He punched up gags on the half-hour prime-time shows from TV sitcom writers (non-cartoonists) to add visual elements. The Jetsons came along and Tony's legacy is the creation of Astro.

I can't imagine what it would be like to be a young guy coming into a studio and the people you have to keep up with are Maltese and Foster, two of the greatest comedy cartoon writers ever.

He made his on-camera debut in Here Comes a Star, a half-hour promotional film for TV stations about to air The Magilla Gorilla Show.

He was a man with a sense of fun and enjoyed his time with paisanos Maltese and Joe Barbera.

I had the great pleasure to talk with Tony. You can hear our conversation below.

Blu-Ray? Oh, Dear! Oh, My!

“Gee, Yowp,” says my in-box, “why aren’t you writing about these?”



Um. How can I put this delicately?

These are not great cartoons.

They are wallpaper. They’re pleasant enough and killed air time in between routines with Crazy Donkey on Channel 11 when I was a kid.

But they’re filler.

I can tell you my favourite cartoons on the Huck Show. Or the Quick Draw and Yogi Bear shows. But the plots of the five-minute cartoons (this includes Touché Turtle) are completely unmemorable. I can’t recall a single one.

Earl Kress used to joke it seemed every Lippy cartoon ended with the pair of them on a raft, with Lippy yelling “Paddle faster, Hardy,” as they escaped from who-knows-what. (None of them actually ended that way).

These cartoons, to me, marked Hanna-Barbera’s slow, downhill slide. Does any of the animation or background art in these stand out to you? Anyway, just as Hanna-Barbera would repeat plots with different characters, I am repeating myself from this post.

The best part of Wally was the theme song, which I can only assume was written by Hoyt Curtin and Bill Hanna before it was decided to take Wally out of the swamp in the opening animation. I have never been a big fan of the Golden Records’ versions of the Hanna-Barbera music, but I like their take on Wally’s theme. The low-key arrangement for the little combo is quite good, especially the piano.

For fans of Mel Blanc constantly moaning "Oh dear, oh my," the discs will be available on December 16th.

The Mad Monster of Muni-Mula

This episode of the Muni-Mula story simply moves the plot a little bit. Narrator Don Messick tells us the Big Thinker is using Ruff and Reddy to make an army of robots to invade Earth. (Well, actually, he says “robutts.” Janet Waldo recalled that she tried to get Penny Singleton to stop pronouncing the word that way on The Jetsons).

Have we talked about Messick’s narration in the early days of this series? It’s not bombastic. It’s very matter-of-fact and calm, much like Roy Whaley in the original Crusader Rabbit show, or even the anonymous voice-over man in Bucky and Pepito (also debuting in 1957), though Messick is more polished.

The footage shows a metallic Muni-Mulan stamping out a mould of Ruff and Reddy, then disposing of them down a chute as they aren’t needed any more.



The H-B sound effects library hasn’t been built up yet, so there is no clanging sound as the two sides of the mould press slam together. Mind you, no sound effect means saving time and, therefore, money. There are portions of the episode where Reddy pops from pose to pose without any in between.

The moulds are pressed.



“The real Ruff and Reddy stand by and watch helplessly as the mechanical Ruffs and Reddys are turned out like hotcakes.” I think Charlie Shows mixed some metaphors in the dialogue here. Note the silhouette drawings.



The camera pans over the painting machine. This could have come from Dan Gordon’s storyboard or Dick Bickenbach’s layouts (he said he worked on the first Ruff and Reddys).



Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera save money by having the fake Ruffs and Reddys on a cel while the background moves.



Finally, a “robot brain” is added which gives them power to obey orders of the Big Thinker.



All this does is get Reddy’s “dandruff” up. (I guess kids watching this on Saturday mornings never heard that old one before. Cecil of “Beany and” fame used the same line). Notice how the background isn’t a solid colour. The stripes (which you can’t see very well on this murky dub from cable TV) add something, though the show was broadcast in black and white. What’s with Ruff’s weird knuckles?



Headstrong Reddy zips to the conveyer belt, somehow thinking holding up his hand at a robot will stop it. Instead, he gets zapped by the robot brain helmet and turns into a robot, and begins to walk in a stiff, 12 drawing cycle by Ken Muse.



This is a pretty decent cliff-hanger, as the kid viewers are probably wondering what will happen next.

This segment originally aired on December 28, 1957.

Greg Watson, or whoever cut the sound in this, relies on only two Capitol Hi-Q cues, one by Spencer Moore and the other supposedly by Bill Loose and John Seely. It’s a sped-up version (with the same arrangement) as “Night Battle” by Joseph Cacciola on the Sam Fox/Synchro library.

0:00 – Opening title (silent)
0:05 – L-653 EERIE DRAMATIC (Moore) – Start of cartoon
2:51 – No music
3:00 – TC-217A CHASE-MEDIUM (Loose-Seely) “Hold it!” to end of cartoon
3:28 – Closing title.

High-Seas Huck

The last Huckleberry Hound cartoon to appear on TV (not including reruns) was E-195 Two For Tee-Vee. But a later one that went into production has been discovered by faithful reader Ted Watts.

We’ve posted story panels from an unfinished Yogi Bear cartoon. Ted has found layout drawings for production E-196. There’s no title on this but Huck somehow meets up with pirates and hula babes.

My wild guess is these are by Jerry Eisenberg, who provided layouts for a few Huck show cartoons in the final, 1961-62, season. You’ll notice the rotund pirate. Jerry said that Joe Barbera used to grouse that Jerry made his characters fat like him (Jerry, not Joe). And the dark-haired short pirate sure looks like a caricature of Jerry’s long-time buddy, Hanna-Barbera writer Tony Benedict.



How far along this got into production and why it never appeared on TV is anyone’s guess. Jerry’s gone now, so we can’t ask him.

There was an unmade Pixie and Dixie cartoon, too. You can see story drawings in this old post.