How’s this for an in-between?
I’ve mentioned before I’m not a big Ruff and Reddy fan, but some of you reading this are, so here are some frames from Surprise in the Skies, the tenth cartoon from their first adventure.
Professor Gizmo tells Reddy their spaceship needs a push to get off the planet Muni Mula. Reddy dashes away to go outside. These are the basic drawings, although Gizmo’s left arm on the lever is on a separate cel than the rest of him. The arm moves. The rest doesn’t.
The Ruff and Reddy cartoons didn’t cut corners altogether. You’ll notice in the shots that show the three characters inside the space ship control room that the same background art isn’t used. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera could have saved some money by using the same background, but didn’t.
On the other hand, there are run cycles taking up footage. One doesn't even show Reddy's feet. Reddy simply bobs up and down in four drawings for eight seconds. When narrator Messick says Reddy thinks his pals "are a couple of skunks," skunk tails simple pop onto the back of the characters, who are immobile through the scene.
Whether they came from Dan Gordon's story sketches or from the layout artist (likely Bick Bickenbach), I don't know, but silhouette drawings make things visually interesting in the first Ruff and Reddy cartoons. The animation is limited in this scene; only Gizmo's moustache moves in four drawings. No need to animate a mouth!
Hanna and Barbera also use overlays in this cartoon. The Muni Mulas are behind whatever the ragged purple thing is.
Even though the cartoons originally aired in black and white, the background man goes for different shades of purple, as well as outlines in both white and black. You can see green vines that are sponged onto the painting and wispy white clouds. This is exactly the same as you’d find in an MGM theatrical, which would have had a larger budget.
In this scene, the clouds are on an overlaid cel.
The battered S.S. Gizmo II shooting through the stratosphere after bashing through the metal planet, Muni Mula. The rocket is on one cel, the smoke coming out of back is on a three-cel cycle, and some of the clouds are on an overlay.
The team at H-B Enterprises tries to make up for the lack of animation by making this science fiction adventure visually interesting. I like the interiors in this one. This one of inside the space ship can't look much more 1950s in design.
Here's an example of simulating animation. The Muni Mula army is on a cel, moved up from behind the front of the space ship, which is on an overlay. Director Bill Hanna doesn't maintain the same shot. He cuts in closer to the same cell-under-overlay movement.
The Muni Mulans have Don Messick's tongue waving voice that you heard on The Herculoids.
This cartoon aired with The Creepy Creature on January 5, 1958. I can’t find any TV listings mentioning the Columbia theatrical short also seen on the show.
Greg Watson or Warner Leighton or whoever the sound cutter was only uses two piece of Bill Loose/John Seely music from the Capitol Hi-Q "D" series on this cartoon.
0:00 – no music – spinning title card
0:06 – TC-217A CHASE MEDIUM (Loose-Seely) – Ruff, Reddy, Gizmo run into spaceship; need a push.
1:31 – no music – “A push?”; Reddy zips out.
1:33 – TC-219A CHASE MEDIUM (Loose-Seely) – Ruff pushes to end of cartoon.
Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera apparently weren’t altogether content with having Daws Butler or Don Messick do all the female voices in falsetto on the first season of the Huckleberry Hound Show. They put up the cash to hire women for two different cartoons.
Judging by the production numbers, the first was June Foray in Bear on a Picnic (Production E-28) and the other was radio actress Margie Liszt in Robin Hood Yogi (Production E-55).
Hanna-Barbera expanded their schedule in 1959 when the Quick Draw McGraw Show was sold into syndication. Barbera was quoted in the papers as saying he wanted new voices for his shows, but it was difficult finding actors who weren’t overexposed.
Among H-B Enterprises’ hirings that year were two women. The first was Jean Vander Pyl, whose first cartoon was the Snooper and Blabber creepy tale Big Diaper Caper, Production J-8, and the other was Julie Bennett, who played Sagebrush Sal opposite Quick Draw McGraw in Masking For Trouble, Production J-10.
I don’t need to tell you Bennett is best known at Hanna-Barbera for the role of Cindy Bear. Bill and Joe had worked with her before they started their own studio. Keith Scott’s researches found she plays the female roles in the Tom and Jerry cartoon Busy Buddies, released by MGM in 1956. The Hollywood Reporter on Nov. 22, 1955 mentioned Hanna and Barbera had hired her and Daws Butler to voice Mr. and Mrs. Q in Tom’s Photo Finish. She was in four Metro cartoons before the cartoon division was closed in 1957. (One columnist on the East Coast in Feb. 1955 called her Tom and Jerry work a “waste of a pretty puss”).
Keith has also discovered Julie lent a voice to one of the cartoons on the Boing-Boing Show on CBS. “Nero Fiddles” included Bill Scott, John T. Smith and the voice of Charlie the Tuna, Herschel Bernardi.
Very little seems to have been written about her cartoon work, but it’s included in an NBC Feature news release dated December 4, 1964 which promoted two network shows.
THAT SCREAM YOU HEARD ON 'TONIGHT' CAME FROM JULIE BENNETT
Redhaired Julie Bennett has played everything on television from Charlie the Tuna's girlfriend to a talking box of detergent, neither of which allowed the viewing audience to catch a glimpse of her spectacular redhaired good looks. On NBC-TV's "The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo" she has played the voice behind Maid Marian (when Magoo played Robin Hood) the voice of Snow White, Sagebrush Sal and the sultry voice of Pepe LePew's girlfriend. It took the "Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" to summon Julie back on camera with her own face showing. She was a guest on the Thursday, Dec. 3 show (NBC color-cast, 11:15 p.m.-1 a.m. EST) and proved conclusively that when it comes to selling, Julie is a topnotch saleswoman of her own attractive personality.
Actually, Julie Bennett's television career harks back to the days when, as a teenager, she appeared on numerous live TV productions done by Albert McCleery, Fred Coe and the other "greats" of early TV. (Her first "Philco Playhouse" starring role was done when she was 15.) Fiercely ambitious as a youngster, and extremely busy in television, radio and in various short-lived Broadway plays, Julie went to the West Coast for a brief vacation and made the discovery that "there is more to life than just working." She never returned to the radio serial drama on which she had a running role. ("The fellow who played my husband could have killed me, because they had to write him out once they killed me off.")
Julie continued to work in television, now in the filmed variety, appearing on such programs as "Dragnet," the Donna Reed and Bob Cummings shows, and various other series. She played everything from neurotic wives to femmes fatales. At one point, her voice was dubbed in for James Stewart’s "four-year-old grandson" in "The FBI Story." The use of her voice alone opened a new career to the versatile actress and she entered the field of commercial television. This led her to such jobs as providing the voice of Cindy Bear in the "Yogi Bear" films and to essaying the aforementioned talking detergent box.
As she told Johnny Carson on "Tonight," the speaking voices of many sultry appearing brunettes in cosmetic commercials are often high, squeaky and afflicted with Brooklyn accents. So while the films show an alluring girl, her equally alluring voice is courtesy of the redhaired Julie.
Mister Magoo’s "Snow White" chalked up a first on "Tonight" when she responded to a request to demonstrate the kind of scream with which she won roles in "Dragnet." She raised Carson, Ed McMahon, guest Bill Cosby and half of television-watching America a foot off their chairs with her blood-curdling rendition. Remarkable girl, that Julie.
Julie did some other work for UPA, notably in a supporting role in Gay Purr-ee. By then, she managed to create a place in the world of cartoon voice acting, appearing in a number of Warner Bros. shorts in the early 1960s, mainly for Bob McKimson. You can find lists of her cartoons on other sites, though we note Mark Evanier once mentioned that she voiced three cartoons in a session for Jay Ward when June Foray had a conflict and was working with Stan Freberg.
She was still appearing on camera, too. In August 1960, Miss Bennett had completed several 4-Way Cold Tablet spots and was about to record TV commercials for Burlington Mills. It sounds as if that was more satisfying than being Cindy Bear, judging by this story in Sidney Fields’ “Only Human” column in the New York Daily News of July 25, 1964. For the record, she did appear in one Pepe LePew cartoon, Louvre Come Back to Me (1962) as a female cat.
Gal Behind the Voice
For some time now Julie Bennett's wail has been: "I started out straight, but I'm winding up as a cartoon."
Julie is most often unseen but frequently heard on TV in a variety of voices. Among them Cindy Bear, Yogi's girl friend; Minnie on Mr. Magoo; Sagebrush Sal for Quick Draw McGraw; and the skunk with the French accent on Bugs Bunny.
"When they do see my face it's behind a commercial," Julie says with a pained pout. "Oh, well, I do enjoy the dough very much."
And she adds without any false modesty, that between voices and commercials she manages to make from $50,000 to $100,000 a year. "It's closer to $100,000," she says.
Part of the take comes from her dramatic efforts as the voices in movies, too. Her latest is the full-length film, "Hey There, It's Yogi Bear," which descends on us next Wednesday.
She's been everything from hens to women in movies. When Judy Garland played a cat in "Gay Paree," Julie was her mistress. She was the voice of Brigitte Bardot in "La Parisienne," and of Jimmy Stewart's grandson in "The FBI Story."
No Movie Residuals
"They had an adorable kid playing the part," Julie explains, "but when the picture was finished no one understood a word he said. So I did over everything he said."
What's the difference between doing a voice for TV and for the movies?
"No residuals from a movie. I do about 100 commercials a year and some can go on for two or three years paying lush residuals."
Julie is a bachelor girl and always has been one, but still hopeful, now that she concedes she's no longer a starry-eyed ingenue exclusively determined to be the big actress.
"Men are sometimes scared off by a career girl," she says. ''Success doesn't always work for you."
Radio Dialectician
Julie records Hollywood as her birthplace, claims she mastered 26 different dialects before she was out of her teens, got her first job when she was 12 in radio and hasn't stopped driving since. In her radio days she was a regular fixture on the weekly "Sherlock Holmes" show with a standard British accent, and on another radio opus played Mongolian twins.
"It was a crazy script," she recalls. "I talked to myself for six pages. It got simpler when one of the twins killed the other. For what? For a man. What else?"
About the only thing she seems to have missed is what she says she wants most—to be seen as an actress. Not that she didn't try.
She was in a play called "Balloon," which got punctured before it reached Broadway, and at one time worked on most of TV's comedy and dramatic shows.
Wrong Studio, Right Script
"I'm being sidetracked from what I want to do," says Julie. "It's the story of my life. I stumbled into the wrong studio one day and was handed a script to read with a dozen other girls. I was picked. It was a cigaret commercial. My first one."
At her fees, her inner conflict can't be too painful.
She keeps an apartment in Hollywood, just settled in a second one in New York three weeks ago, already has done three commercials and may soon be working in a new cartoon series as the voice of a penguin.
"Who knows what a penguin sounds like?" Julie asks. "But I'll find out."
While here she is also studying singing because the figures in her business a girl can never know too much. She's still studying dancing, too.
"The more you know the more jobs you get," Tulle says. "And who knows? Maybe one day I'll get the right one."
Bennett had a Walt Disney connection as well. She appeared on the Feb. 1, 1956 episode of Disneyland entitled “A Day in the Life of Donald Duck.” One role she turned down that year was on NBC’s Playwrights ‘56 when she was asked to play a stripper.
It would seem she never found that right role. She disappeared from acting and created a new career as a personal manager under the name of Marianne Daniels. She was 88 when she died during the Covid epidemic in 2020.
