Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, I’m sure, didn’t mind it when writer Warren Foster opened a cartoon with a slow pan over a background painting. No animation was required, which saved a buck or two.
Show Biz Bear (1959) starts with Don Messick’s narration over two backgrounds, one dissolving into another. The camera movement takes up the first 14 seconds of the cartoon.
Here’s the first background of Jellystone Park snipped together.
The background is by Dick Thomas, perhaps best-known for his work with the Bob McKimson unit at Warner Bros. He had been Bob Clampett's background artist when Clampett was still making black-and-white Looney Tunes.
The plot of the star-struck civilian being suddenly put in front of film cameras and getting physically abused was a little shopworn, but Show Biz Bear is still a fun cartoon. No Boo Boo, no Ranger Smith, no pic-a-nic baskets.
Here are the frames of Yogi taking a long step and zipping into the scene. The director has those isosceles-triangle closed eyes Patterson liked to draw.
The animation in this cartoon is by Don Patterson, who directed some cartoons for Walter Lantz in the early '50s, then was demoted to animator when Tex Avery was brought in. When Tex left, Patterson directed Flea For Two (released in 1955) which, judging by the production number, was doubtlessly started by Avery. Lantz then hired Alex Lovy and Patterson never directed again for Lantz again. Too bad. Both Patterson and Lovy ended up at H-B Enterprises in 1959.
Patterson settled in for a long career at Hanna-Barbera, animating on The Flintstones, Top Cat, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest and then into the Saturday morning TV era.
We’ve talked about how the early Hanna-Barbera characters went from one pose to the next without in-betweens. We’ve also mentioned in a previous post that Mike Lah animated movement in his cartoons at the studio that way, and with in-betweens when necessary.
Here are a couple of examples from the debut cartoon of that loveable character, Yowp, Foxy Hound-Dog.
Below are two consecutive frames of Yogi Bear and the little fox. The positions are quite different but action doesn’t look abrupt on the TV screen.
Lah had Yogi run in place in a little cycle of two drawings, shot for two frames (see the first drawing above)
Here’s an in-between as Yogi leaves the scene. Just having him disappear in the next frame would look odd. Some animators, including Lew Marshall earlier in this cartoon, take out the characters in the following frame but have drybrush lines or swirls instead.
Here’s another example from the same cartoon. The first two frames are consecutive, there’s a two-drawing run-in-place cycle, followed by some in-betweens, also animated on twos.
I like this scrambly Yogi.
You’ll notice Lah will draw Yogi in profile or close to it. This enables him to animate various mouth shapes on the face and hold the rest of a character on a separate cel.
To get Yowp to yowp, Lah animates the head. (The legs are on a separate cel and are animated when Yowp walks into the log).
Fernando Montealegre is responsible for the backgrounds. The one with the trees and hills gets a lot of use in this cartoon, and there are several shades of green to avoid monotony. His backgrounds never overshadow the characters, and are simple yet stylish.
This is from Yogi’s first season on the Huckleberry Hound Show. I like these early Yogis before he got yoked to the Boo-Boo/Ranger Smith/Talk-in-Rhyme-All-the-Time format in the show’s second season.
