Creepy Creature Feature

Ruff and Reddy may have had a low budget but there were attempts at making them visually interesting. Unlike later series where every cartoon was laid out like it was taking place on a stage, Ruff and Reddy had angle shots and characters in silhouette.

In “Creepy Creature Feature,” a shot was tried that I don’t recall in any other Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Professor Gismo is asleep at the controls of his rocket ship. When he suddenly wakes up, not only does the camera move in on the artwork, it changes angles clockwise.



Whether this came from Dan Gordon’s storyboard, the layout artist (I presume it’s Dick Bickenbach), or director Bill Hanna, is your guess.

The cartoon starts with the usual 30-second recap with re-used animation. While Daws Butler repeats the final line from the previous episode, it is not the same recording; the inflections are different.

The episode revolves around the little man who emerges from The Big Thinker’s metallic head. In flashback, we learn he is an inventor atop Mount Cucamonga who has built an interplanetary rocket ship. However, the ship is pulled into a strange planet (in animation re-used from earlier episodes), where it crashes.



I’d love to paste together the pan shot of the crashed S.S. (“Space ship” not “Steam ship”) Gismo, but the on-line copies out there are 25-year-old recordings from a cable TV feed and the colour is too poor. Here are the start and end of the pan. Look at the number of different colours.



Silhouette shot as the professor explains.



The professor is locked inside a metal monster, which turns out not to be The Big Thinker at all. It would appear to be a robot TBK uses to communicate. The professor points to the actual Big Thinker on a throne. Again, we can’t paste together the right-to-left pan shot, but the background artist (likely Fernando Montrelegre) uses lots of metal arches you can see in the drawings below.



It turns out the real Big Thinker is asleep (maybe that’s how Gismo could escape; it’s never explained). Headstrong Reddy, even after a warning, destroys The Big Thinker with a little hammer that, somehow, he happened to be carrying.

Reddy does this even after Prof. Gismo warns him The Big Thinker is guarded by the Creepy Creature. And here he comes now! Reddy’s conjoined eyes look like something Mike Lah would draw, but this episode is handled by Ken Muse.



We’ll have to wait to see what the creature looks like.

The professor’s name is usually spelled “Gizmo.” It’s not in this episode.

Three Geordie Hormel cues make up the background music.

0:00 – No music.
0:06 – ZR-91B WEIRD EERIE (Hormel) – Start of cartoon, Gismo explains his space trip.
1:55 – No music – Planet swallows S.S. Gismo, camera shakes.
2:09 – ZR-91C WEIRD EERIE (Hormel) – Pan over rocket, “But what.”
2:35 – No music – Pan shot.
2:37 – ZR-53 COMEDY MYSTERIOSO (Hormel) – Big Thinker on throne, end of cartoon.