Run and walk cycles in front of a repeating background was not something unusual in cartoons. The theatrical studios used them. It’s no surprise Hanna-Barbera would have them.
The number of drawings depended on the cycle. Some were four, some were six, some were eight. I’ve even seen three and five in some H-B cartoons.
Here’s a cycle of the Sheriff of Nottingham by Ed Love from the Huckleberry Hound cartoon Nottingham and Eggs (1959). It has four drawings and Huck returns to the same spot in the same position after 16 frames. We’ve slowed it down.
This is as close to the speed you see it on screen as we can get.
The background is by Joe Montell, whose stop at Hanna-Barbera wasn't long. He decided to work for Jay Ward, supervising at Gamma Productions in Mexico City. Walt Clinton drew the layouts from Warren Foster's story.
Ed's beaver-tooth mouth makes an appearance.
And, as you can see above, this is the cartoon featuring a naked Huck.
Ed told Harvey Deneroff that everything he did at Hanna-Barbera was freelance. His first cartoons on the Huckleberry Hound series showed up in 1959, and he seems to have an animated a bunch of commercials featuring the studio's characters, as well as the little cartoons between the cartoons on both Huck and Quick Draw McGraw.
He was at Disney (making $4,900 a year) and lived two doors down the street in Van Nuys from cartoon producer Paul Fennell. He was let go after the Disney strike, ended up in the Tex Avery unit at MGM before being fired by Fred Quimby (who tried to rehire him, but Love had gone to work for Hugh Harman), and spent several years during a real glory period at Walter Lantz. When that studio closed down, he went to work as a manufacturer's agent, before animating commercials for most of the 1950s.
