The writers on The Flintstones developed side characters over the six seasons the cartoon series was on the air. Some were recurring, some died a natural death. But there was a one-shot character that found a home in another place.
Pop celebrity culture always came in for a gentle spoofing in animated cartoons. In the ‘30s and ‘40s, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Jack Benny and other radio/movie stars were caricatured. Catchphrases were borrowed from network radio shows.
When television animation became practical, Hanna-Barbera (and especially Bob Clampett’s Snowball Productions) lightly spoofed other television shows.
In the first season of The Flintstones, the series took gentle aim at Peter Gunn, which ran three seasons from 1958-1961 and had a terrific and the quintessential crime-jazz theme composed by Henry Mancini. Art Phillips is credited as the writer who turned Gunn into private eye Perry Gunnite, hired by Fred Flintstone to track down whoever wrote a love letter to Wilma (it turned out to be Fred when he was in high school). Gunnite was voiced, Cary Grant style, by John Stephenson. (Note the nod to 77 Sunset Strip to the left).
There wasn’t a need for a detective on the series, so Gunnite made only one appearance in “Love Letters on the Rocks” (aired February 17, 1961). However, there was a need elsewhere.
Comic books, at least at one time, needed characters besides the title ones to fill space. The best thing is they didn’t have to interact with the main characters. They could have their own stories. That’s what happened with Perry Gunnite.
He appeared in two adventures “Flintstones on the Rocks,” published by Dell in 1961. It is an excellent comic book with great art (by Harvey Eisenberg?) and some fun, single-page featurettes. It also includes a publicity photo of Joe Barbera, Bill Hanna, Warren Foster and my favourite cartoon writer, Mike Maltese. You can find it here.
Here is the first of the two Gunnite stories. You can click on each page to read it.
The TV episode was solely animated by Carlo Vinci. Fred does one of those Carlo head shakes with the rubbery nose. It is on four drawings, animated on ones.
Here is it, slowed down.
Someone will mention the Gunnite walk cycle if I don’t.
It is eight drawings. The “knee up” is held for six frames. The following drawing is used twice, the cameraman moving the background slightly to the right the second time. The rest of the drawings are on ones.
Once again, the pose is held for six frames, then the next drawing is shot twice, with the background moving very slightly in the third frame.
When you only have $2,700 to make a cartoon, you have to find ways to avoid spending cash without looking like you’re avoiding spending cash.
Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera found clever ways to do that in the early episodes of Ruff and Reddy.
The fourth cartoon in the first adventure, The Mastermind of Muni-Mula, has some good examples. It opens with a recap of the previous episode, with about 32 seconds of animation being re-used. New animation follows, with about 30 seconds of eye-blinks in the darkness, as well as a match being lit.
The camera operator then opens up the aperture to reveal Ruff, Reddy and some Muni-Mula robots. The next 12 seconds is nothing but head turns, five positions on Ruff and Reddy, some of which are held for several frames. As well, the background and control panel overlay are used in several episodes.
The metallic men take our heroes to see The Big Thinker. Ed Benedict (or whoever) designed them without feet. No need for a walk cycle. The cel with the characters stays in place while the cameraman moves the background. The only animation is eye-blinks in the first scene below.
I like the backgrounds and layouts in these scenes, which are fairly short to keep the pace going. They show off the vastness of the space ship.
Ruff and Reddy are dropped in front of a large metallic head with two faces, a pleasant one and an angry one. The pleasant face gives Daws Butler a chance to do a Liberace-type voice.
The head reveals to Ruff and Reddy why they’ve been brought to Muni-Mula. He plans to make robot duplicates of them and invade the Earth. He doesn’t give a reason, but being an evil, mind-controlling dictator is reason enough.
Here’s another of Ken Muse’s silhouettes.
Ruff and Reddy’s body proportions are stretched upwards in the scene below; they almost look like hand puppets. But this puts them in a proper place in the frame. Ruff is looking at a finger, while Reddy is looking upward to where the head’s eyes would be.
Off they go. The characters pass behind overlays, just like in a theatrical cartoon, to lend a bit of depth to the scene.
Reddy is between two halves of a pressing machine. There’s no animation here, either. Reddy is held on a cel, while the two halves of the presser are on cels that are slid toward each other.
Hanna and Barbera called this “planned animation.” The term is silly, because all animation is planned. But the way they spoke at the time, it seems they wanted to differentiate what they were doing to other TV animated series at the time, such as Crusader Rabbit or the earlier Telecomics, which were practically still drawings.
This episode aired December 21, 1957.
Three cues from the Capitol Hi-Q ‘D’ series are heard, one by Spencer Moore and the rest by Geordie Hormel.
0:00 – Title card.
0:06 – ZR-90C WEIRD-EERIE (Hormel) – Start of cartoon
0:48 – No music – “Yeow!”
0:54 – ZR-90C WEIRD-EERIE (Hormel) – “That’s my finger,” lights up.
1:10 – No music – “In case you came in late…”
1:18 – L-657 EERIE DRAMATIC (Moore) – “I never saw so many twins…” Big Thinker scenes, metal men take them out of the chamber.
3:04 – No music – “I’m just scared again…”
3:09 – ZR-93K WEIRD-EERIE (Hormel) – “…a long assembly line,” end of cartoon.
3:28 – Title card.
Many of you know that about 20 years ago, the first season of The Huckleberry Hound Show came out on DVD. Sales weren’t as good as expected, and that partially weighed into a decision not to release the remaining three seasons. There were also issues finding elements of the half-hour series but, more importantly, there were money problems trying to get the rights to use the Jack Shaindlin and Bill Loose cues as they had returned to the composers’ heirs.
This, evidently, has been worked out. The Huck show, in its entirety, will be available on Blu-ray next month.
The Warner Archive news release contains the following:
To faithfully present these episodes as originally aired, you’ll be able to enjoy each show containing original bumpers and bridges, as well as rarely seen vintage commercials featuring the characters from the series.
This means all the Huck, Pixie and Dixie, Yogi and Hokey Wolf cartoons that appeared on the show (Yogi, of course, was spun off and some of his cartoons appeared exclusively on his show).
You can read more in this release.
Hanna-Barbera may have ended production of new Huckleberry Hound cartoons in 1962, but he was still deemed a big enough star that box ads were taken out in newspapers that year for his half-hour show.
Here are a few. These chatty ones are for a TV station in Indianapolis.
This is one for a station in Amarillo. I think. The ad doesn't mention a station or channel.
Flint, Michigan to the left; Roanoke, Virginia to the right.
Cincinnati.
It is only appropriate that Huck is seen and heard in North Carolina, where his accent should be familiar to viewers.
Portland, left; Tulsa, right.
Sioux Falls, above; Atlanta, below. They had trouble spelling Huck's name in South Dakota.
This is for Miami, Nov. 29, 1962. Whose brilliant programming idea was it to run Huck opposite The Jetsons? Maybe it was "Bobb."
There are other ads, but this is good enough for now.
If Huck wasn’t on your TV set, you could get your blue hound fix at home by watching him on a Give-a-Show projector by Kenner. It wasn’t a home movie like, say, a Super-8 of Woody Woodpecker. It was a strip of slides. That had to suffice for us kids in the ‘60s. There was no sound so we could practice our impressions of Daws Butler doing Yogi. Look at the price!
Jon B. Knutson in Olympia had a wonderful blog with links to Give-a-Shows he had put together with Capitol Hi-Q music in the background. We had linked to it here in 2010, but it seems to have died the following year. Too bad. There’s so much on the internet that has disappeared. We are still here, however.
The Yowp blog is supposedly on hiatus, but we do have some new posts that will appear periodically (closer to monthly instead of weekly), we hope, through to Christmas, which has been our traditional H-B music post.
This blog was begun for the purpose of identifying the background music in the original Hanna-Barbera cartoons. The first music employed by the studio came from the Capitol Hi-Q library, started in 1956. John Seely was manager of Capitol's film music library service, while composer Bill Loose was hired in February to run studio operations in Los Angeles.
When we began Yowping in 2009, you could not find any of the cues on-line. Though the late Earl Kress arranged for a handful (by EMI’s Phil Green) to be released on Rhino Records about 30 years ago, reels and discs with the cues were in the possession of collectors.
The internet has evolved and, over the years, library music fans who were into Hi-Q have shared their bounty with others. We’ll gloss over an involved and thorny story to remark that, very recently, a generous individual has digitised a number of the library’s D (“Dramatic”) series discs that were not in circulation.
Ruff and Reddy was H-B’s first series for television, debuting December 14, 1957. A decision was made to pay for library music rather than go to the expense of scoring each cartoon individually. Someone, and I’m not certain who, picked cues from the D series and either Greg Watson or Warner Leighton cut them onto the sound track. (Jack Shaindlin’s Langlois Filmusic library was also heard in the studio’s cartoons starting in 1958).
Thanks to the anonymous person mentioned above, some of those cues are now available. We pass them along. The first cue is by Spencer Moore (and is from reel S-4), the other five are by Geordie Hormel in D-32. I believe all of them were heard in the Muni-Mula storyline; certainly the Hormel music was.
We’ve written about the two cartoons seen on the first show, so here’s a little bit about the third cartoon in the Muni-Mula adventure, The “Whama Bama Gamma” Gun, which opened the second show on December 21, 1957.
Narrator Don Messick begins the cartoon with an animation-saving recap from the last episode. Ruff and Reddy seal themselves in a space ship control room to get away from two metallic robots, but the flying saucer begins to drop.
The new adventure begins with the space ship seemingly under control, with braggart Reddy at the helm. Though there are no credits, the mouth shape on Ruff below shows the episode was animated by Ken Muse.
Speaking of mouths, there are times the lower lip goes past Reddy's jowl lines, though it likely wasn't noticeable on TV.
As in the earlier episodes, there are silhoutte drawings. I presume Dick Bickenbach was the layout artist; he claimed to have been working on Ruff and Reddy while still at MGM with Hanna and Barbera. Thought went into this scene, as the two characters are framed by the metal arch.
One of the robots burns a hole in the door, but Reddy manages to swat its gun away and holds the two of them.
Outer space weightlessness kicks in and everybody starts slowly rising. Ruff pulls on a lever that opens a hatch at the top of the space ship and the robots float up into space.
Gravity returns. Note the dry brush.
The space ship is pulled into a hole that opens up on the planet Muni-Mula.
Messick urges us not to miss the next episode (which will follow after the live-action host and an exciting Columbia/Screen Gems cartoon).
The music (the final cue is from reel L-4):
0:00 – Title card.
0:06 – ZR-91C WEIRD-EERIE (Hormel) – Recap.
0:22 – ZR-91B WEIRD-EERIE (Hormel) – Saucer starts tipping, “I feel kinda empty.”
2:07 – No music – Ruff floats up.
2:12 – ZR-91C WEIRD-EERIE (Hormel) – Ruff grabs lever.
2:44 – No music. Ruff on top of Reddy.
2:50 – ZR-53 COMEDY MYSTERIOSO (Hormel) – Saucer flies to Muni-Mula, end of cartoon.
Let us add a bonus cue, not heard at Hanna-Barbera. In 1958, Warner Bros. contracted with John Seely to use music from the Capitol Hi-Q library. The reason we've been told over the years is a musicians strike, but I have found nothing about it in any trade publication. Seely got screen credit but he was an executive at Capitol so I doubt he actually clipped together the cues to write a score.
You will hear an edited version of this cue from the D series during the mouse-running part of Hip-Hip-Hurry! It is also by Geordie Hormel.
The writers on The Flintstones developed side characters over the six seasons the cartoon series was on the air. Some were recurring, some died a natural death. But there was a one-shot character that found a home in another place.
Art Phillips is credited as the writer who turned Gunn into private eye Perry Gunnite, hired by Fred Flintstone to track down whoever wrote a love letter to Wilma (it turned out to be Fred when he was in high school). Gunnite was voiced, Cary Grant style, by John Stephenson. (Note the nod to 77 Sunset Strip to the left).
