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.

Plugging Huck

Hanna-Barbera may have ended production of new Huckleberry Hound cartoons in 1962, but he was still deemed a big enough star that box ads were taken out in newspapers that year for his half-hour show.

Here are a few. These chatty ones are for a TV station in Indianapolis.



This is one for a station in Amarillo. I think. The ad doesn't mention a station or channel.


Flint, Michigan to the left; Roanoke, Virginia to the right.



Cincinnati.

It is only appropriate that Huck is seen and heard in North Carolina, where his accent should be familiar to viewers.


Portland, left; Tulsa, right.



Sioux Falls, above; Atlanta, below. They had trouble spelling Huck's name in South Dakota.


This is for Miami, Nov. 29, 1962. Whose brilliant programming idea was it to run Huck opposite The Jetsons? Maybe it was "Bobb."

There are other ads, but this is good enough for now.

If Huck wasn’t on your TV set, you could get your blue hound fix at home by watching him on a Give-a-Show projector by Kenner. It wasn’t a home movie like, say, a Super-8 of Woody Woodpecker. It was a strip of slides. That had to suffice for us kids in the ‘60s. There was no sound so we could practice our impressions of Daws Butler doing Yogi. Look at the price!


Jon B. Knutson in Olympia had a wonderful blog with links to Give-a-Shows he had put together with Capitol Hi-Q music in the background. We had linked to it here in 2010, but it seems to have died the following year. Too bad. There’s so much on the internet that has disappeared. We are still here, however.

The Yowp blog is supposedly on hiatus, but we do have some new posts that will appear periodically (closer to monthly instead of weekly), we hope, through to Christmas, which has been our traditional H-B music post.

Not So Magical Bear

Yogi Bear tries a magic trick in one of those cartoons-between-the-cartoons on the Huckleberry Hound Show.

Alakazam, Alagazoom
Come out, little bear, wherever you ere, are.



“Hiya, Yogi,” says Boo Boo, after popping out of the hat. He then jumps off stage. “Hello, there, Boo Boo,” Yogi responds, waving at him.



But that’s not the end of it. Yogi’s magic has conjured up another Boo Boo. And another. And another (in recycled animation).



“I goofed somewheres,” he says to the TV viewing audience. But he writes it off when the director cuts to a closer shot. “But you’ve gotta admit, it’s a pretty slick trick.” Iris out.



Yeah, it’s not hilarious, but it’s a pleasant enough interlude. Kids probably liked the idea of multiple Boo Boos just popping up (with assistance from the Hanna-Barbera sound effects library).

Then it’s on to a commercial for Kellogg’s, the Best to You Each Morning....

Bear For Punishment Backgrounds

One way of getting into a Yogi Bear cartoon was a pan over a long background while Don Messick, as narrator, sets up the plot.

One of those cartoons was Bear For Punishment, which first aired on the Huckleberry Hound show on the week of November 30, 1959. The studio added background painters that year, as it added the Quick Draw McGraw series to its workload. Fernando Montealegre, Bob Gentle and Art Lozzi were joined by Dick Thomas and Joe Montell. Thomas had originally been Bob Clampett’s background man at Warners and eventually left the studio in the mid-1950s to work for Disney. Montell’s first job was with Tex Avery at MGM and, when the unit was disbanded, he ended up (with Warren Foster, who wrote this cartoon) at John Sutherland Productions.

Montell is responsible for the backgrounds in this cartoon. After a shot of cars (on a cel being moved to the left) over a woodsy, repeating background, he came up with this for the second scene.



Bill Hanna then cuts to another background drawing, which is panned to the right. There has been no animation yet. That begins when the shot stops on Yogi and Boo Boo, and they begin snoring. The heads are the only things that are animated.



The next cut is to a long, repeating background. Notice how the bare pine and right-leaning whatever-it-is tree on the left of the painting are the same as on the right.



This background gets a good workout as cel overlays with cabins (as well as the animation) are placed on top. Here’s an example, just after Hanna cuts away from Yogi and Boo Boo. The cave is placed over top of the tree slanting to the left and the fir next to it. There are two overlays, one of the left half of the cave entrance and the other of the right, allowing the two bears to leave the cave. Below, you can pretty much see where the right overlay is placed.



Montell’s style is pretty easy to spot. He loved dots. See the dots he has next to branches or on top of stems? And dots he uses for rocks? That’s Montell. You can see the same thing in some of his cartoons for Avery and at Sutherland.

The animator of this cartoon is Gerard Baldwin in his first go-around at Hanna-Barbera. He started his animation career at UPA in the 1950s, and moved to Sutherland where he has an animation screen credit on that studio’s magnum opus, Rhapsody of Steel (1959). He has an odd way of drawing the bear, with two roundish parts to his muzzle in certain views, a little loop for a mouth, and sometimes with a stretched neck with his nose up. We’ve shown some examples in this post about the cartoon.

Here’s a bit of Baldwin dialogue animation. When Boo Boo (in one of many close-ups in this cartoon) asks “Why don’t we eat nuts and berries like other bears?”, Yogi responds with “Nuts and berries? Yechhh.” The drawings below are on twos.



My wild guess is the studio would not have used this many drawings in later years. It would go from profile, two in-betweens, front view, then the mouth-only animated to say “Nuts and berries? Yechhh.”

Both Baldwin and Montell left the studio for Jay Ward Productions before the season was finished. Montell ended up in Mexico supervising the work of Gamma Productions. Baldwin returned to H-B some years later and garnered some Emmys. He (and a number of others) never got screen credit on the end titles of the Huck show in the 1959-60 season but Montell did.

The blog profiled Montell some time ago and you can read that post here.