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.
Yogi Bear got into the spirit of Christmas (the secular, not religious version), though not on his TV show. A couple of storybooks with Yuletide Yogi were published in the early ‘60s. One was a Little Golden Book which we reprinted in an old post. The other was “Yogi Bear Helps Santa,” a 1962 publication by Whitman Press. The artist was Lee Branscome, who later animated Jonny Quest. It seems to me he had been an in-betweener at Warners; correct me if that’s wrong.
This music is courtesy of the late Earl Kress. He dubbed these (judging by the hiss, onto cassette) when he was working on various Hanna-Barbera music projects. It’s a little tough keeping track of what’s been posted on this blog before, but I don’t believe these have been, or appeared in commercial H-B music releases.
This has been a mixed year for early Hanna-Barbera fans. We have fortunately seen the Blu-ray release of all cartoons in the Huckleberry Hound Show. Seasons two and three had been partly hung up for years because of clearing music composed by Bill Loose and Jack Shaindlin. Unfortunately, we lost writer Tony Benedict and layout artist Jerry Eisenberg this year to failing health.
