Run, Carlo, Run

Re-use animation cycles?

Not Carlo Vinci. At least in some early Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

In Big Bad Bully, there’s a lot of chasing and running going on, as Yogi Bear tries to get past a bull to reach a honey-filled bee hive.

The first Yogi run cycle takes up four drawings, in full animation. Carlo loved high legs. He also had a geometric preference for a leg drawn at a 45-degree angle when running; you can see that in a number of the H-B cartoons in the ‘50s.

The clenched fists are a bonus.



Notice something else. The bull’s run cycle takes up three drawings. There are other bull run cycles later in the cartoon. Carlo and director Bill Hanna could have simply used the same cycle over and over, but they didn’t. The cycle below is on five drawings.



Here is the cycle slowed down.



Actually, this cycle is reused. When the bull runs at Yogi from the opposite direction, the inker simply flipped over Carlo’s drawings and traced them.

We’ve pointed out the stomping exit cycle Carlo liked to use. Here’s an example of Boo Boo doing it.



There’s a variation Carlo employed at Hanna-Barbera and Terrytoons when the character does a horizontal dive out of the scene.

The music behind these cycles is the appropriately named “On the Run” by Jack Shaindlin. It came from the Langlois Filmusic library. I’m pretty sure I’ve posted comments to a trade publication by Shaindlin that most of the hundreds and hundreds of cues he wrote for the library were never copyrighted. You won’t find this cue in the ASCAP or BMI copyright listings.

The cue name was discovered by Earl Kress, who vainly searched for a clean copy of it. The Langlois library was ubiquitous in the 1950s, especially on industrial films and the gratis-to-stations TV series Industry on Parade, but 78 rpm discs or 16mm sound film with the music has proved to be extremely elusive. Perhaps some collector has them and would be willing to make them available for people who enjoy the old H-B cartoons and Shaindlin’s musical handiwork.