Super Bowl Bear

Since it is the Super Bowl weekend (at least if you’re reading this at the time it was posted), let us look at the work of Carlo Vinci in Yogi Bear’s football opus. Rah Rah Bear (1959).

Here’s a graceful run cycle by Carlo. Yogi lopes across the football field, waving his arm and turning his head toward the crowd. 12 drawings. They are shot one frame apiece.



Here’s how the cycle looks slowed down. Background by Bob Gentle.



“It’s a touchdown!” yells the play-by-play announcer (Don Messick). Notice Yogi and the helicopter go in front of the goal posts.



It would have made a neat shot if they went between the posts (with the one in the foreground having to be put on a separate cel) but the chopper’s too big.

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera explained to syndicated columnist Charles Witbeck how this cartoon came about:

“You know that Yogi and Huckleberry Hound don’t just belong to the kids,” Hanna continued. Grown-ups know about our animal friends.
“An example. In late November we had a special story on Yogi Bear and the Chicago Bears pro football team. When the Bears heard about it, they were delighted. George Halas, coach and owner, said we could do anything we wanted. “We first got the idea,” Barbera said, “when I saw a headline in late September on the sports pages. It went something like ‘Giants to Clobber Bears.’ I saw a football story with Yogi reading the headline and saying: ‘Us bears have got to stick together.’ So Yogi goes back and helps the burly bears win. It’s kinda cute.”

Barbera never let facts get in the way of one of his stories. The Giants never played the Bears in 1959. Or even 1958. However, the Chicago Cardinals under Jim Lee Howell opened their 1958 season on September 28th with a 37-7 home-field loss to the New York Giants. Considering the cartoon was on TV a little less than two months later, even with Hanna-Barbera’s hurried production schedule, it’s doubtful the cartoon could have been inspired so soon.

Before the era of theme parks, Hanna-Barbera’s star characters appeared in person—thanks to large costumes—starting around September 1958—at various places, including football stadiums. So it was that Honest Ed Justin booked “Yogi” to appear in Chicago at a game between the Bears and 49ers on November 15th (the Bears won, 14-3). Not coincidentally, Rah Rah Bear aired in Chicago ten days later.

Rah Rah Bear made another appearance—on record. In July 1961, Colpix released “Here Comes Huckleberry Hound” with “soundtracks” from four cartoons, including Rah Rah Bear. Huck was used as a narrator to link scenes and the original stock music from the cartoon isn’t heard.

Speaking of Yogi and football, one of the players on the 1960 Xavier University Musketeers in Cincinnati, Dick Buechler, was nicknamed Yogi Bear. It was because he was as fierce as a bear and had nothing to do with pic-a-nic baskets. (After graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in 1963, Buechler was stationed at the air field of the Naval Auxiliary in Milton, Florida).

One other Yogi-football connection can be found in the pages of the Star News-Vanguard of Sept. 30, 1961, where the coach of Hamilton High used an offensive formation against the Culver City Centaurs called “Yogi Bear.” From what I can tell from the story, it involved throwing to the quarterback in the clear. The plan was tried several times and failed miserably.

Evidently head coach Frank Cullom was not smarter than the average bear.

He's Ready to Animate Ruff and Reddy

This year (as of July 7th) marks the 65th birthday of H-B Enterprises. The studio only had one main accomplishment in 1957—it convinced Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems division to put up the money for a TV cartoon series, which the studio then convinced NBC to broadcast on Saturday mornings.

Weekend programming back then was not a huge priority for networks, so NBC had no qualms about tossing Ruff and Reddy onto the schedule after the start of the season. It debuted in December. The second and third seasons began in subsequent Falls.

The first two 13-part adventures to open the series’ third season on Saturday morning, October 17, 1959^{1 2} were copyrighted in September the previous year (Series ‘L’, Dizzy Deputies; Series ‘M’, Spooky Meeting at Spooky Rock). Presumably, they had already been finished and were sitting in cans at 1416 La Brea Avenue awaiting shipment to NBC.

The final two 13-parters were copyrighted on September 15, 1959 (Series ‘N’, Sky High Guys; Series ‘O’, Misguided Missile). By that time, Hanna-Barbera had hired additional artists to handle the load of the new Quick Draw McGraw Show and the theatrical Loopy De Loop cartoons. Also, writer Charlie Shows left in November 1958 to work for Larry Harmon, who was ready to make a series of Bozo the Clown cartoons for syndication.

The first of the 1959-made episodes was “Sky High Guys” (debuting February 12, 1960³) began with our heroes accidentally taking off in a balloon at a county fair and ending up on a desert island trying to stop two crooks (Captain Greedy and Salt Water Daffy) from stealing a treasure chest from Skipper Kipper and his parrot Squawky Talky.

13 cartoons is a little much for one animator to handle, and I’ve been able to identify two of them. Carlo Vinci starts off the series. You can spot him again in “Tiff on a Skiff.” Captain Greedy has a bar of upper teeth. Reddy doesn’t zip out of the scene in a diving exit; he uses a curved back exit that Carlo drew for other characters like Huckleberry Hound and Fred Flintstone. And he also has a particular angle he draws a straight leg with the foot up almost at a 90-degree angle. You can see this in other cartoons.



Two episodes later, in “Squawky No Talky,” there’s a different animator. Add up the signs. The bit lip on the letter “f” and individual upper teeth. He animated Fred Flintstone the same way.



The almost double isosceles triangle closed eyes.



The up-and-down dip walk with no legs. He animated Ranger Smith this way in “Bewitched Bear.” I’ve slowed down the walk in the animated .gif below. And it’s missing a number of frames because of ghosting on the internet dub of the cartoon, but you get the idea. It’s animated on ones.



The animation is by Don Patterson, who joined the Hanna-Barbera staff from Walter Lantz in April 1959. Patterson was unemployed and looking for work according to the U.S. Census taken April 29, 1950. He arrived at Lantz later in the year, animated for a bit, was made a director in 1952 and stopped directing in 1954. He was moved back into full-time animating. His Woody Woodpecker animation includes some great exaggerated takes. I get the impression that as the ‘50s progressed, studios decided wildness was passé and cartoons got tamer and tamer.

Here’s a Patterson take from “Squawky No Talky.” It’s not all that outrageous, even compared with his work at Lantz, but it’s not what you’d expect in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. You think George Jetson was ever animated this way?



It appears H-B Enterprises loved airbrushed action. Here’s some (with multiples) in a later scene.



For Patterson, as well as some of the other earliest Hanna-Barbera artists, dialogue wasn’t just a mouth or lower part of a jaw moving with everything else rigid. In the scene below, Patterson uses three head positions. The middle drawing is used whenever certain vowels are spoken. The other two positions have the mouth open and close. Bill Hanna’s timing is such that the head moves on ones, two and threes; the in-betweens aren’t the same number, which would make the animation look mechanical.



Because Charlie Shows was gone from Hanna-Barbera in November 1958, I don’t suspect he worked on this episode. If I had to guess, I think Mike Maltese may have had a hand in this. At one point (in “Tail of a Sail in a Whale”), Daffy says “I’m doin’ the diggin’, and don’t forget it,” reminiscent of Quick Draw McGraw’s “thinnin’” line to Baba Looey. And pardon my sloppy research here as I don’t recall if it’s on this adventure, but there are a couple of times where the narrator talks to the characters, which just seems like a Maltese thing.

I’m not sure about all 13 parts of this storyline, but it looks like Bob Gentle provided at least some of the backgrounds. Today’s trivia: though they graduated 3 ½ years apart, Patterson and Gentle attended Hollywood High School at the same time for a brief period (photos below are from the same page of the 1927 annual).



A final note about “Squawky No Talky,” I’d love to do a breakdown of the music, but I don’t recognise any of the music in it. It’s obviously from the same two libraries that were used in Hanna-Barbera’s other cartoons at the time, but these particular cues were exclusive to Ruff and Reddy. I don’t have a complete collection of the Capitol Hi-Q “D” series and I’m pretty sure some music that sounds like Spencer Moore’s in this cartoon comes from one of the missing discs. The second last cue, when Daffy is threatening Squawky, sounds like a Loose-Seely dramatic melody while final cue, when Daffy is being attacked by the parrot, is another of Jack Shaindlin’s sports marches. There is some familiar Moore, Loose-Seely and Phil Green music in other parts of the adventure. The last season of Ruff and Reddy seems to use a lot more music than the first one, which were content with two or three different pieces (saving time and money in editing).

Patterson was still working at Hanna-Barbera decades later, credited as an animation director on The Flintstone Kids (1988), a good 55 years after assistant animating at the Charles Mintz studio (a look at the end credits reveals a wealth of veterans, including Patterson’s younger brother Ray, and Art Davis who went back to the ‘20s at Fleischers).

Donald William Patterson was born in Chicago on December 26, 1909. After Mintz, he stopped at Disney and MGM before Walter Lantz gave him a job. He died in Santa Barbera, California on December 12, 1998. (He is pictured to the right with Lantz in front of the storyboard for Operation Sawdust).

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1 Fort-Worth Star-Telegram, Oct. 17, 1959, pg. 18. See also Feb. 6, 1960, pg. 6^↩
2 KMJ, Fresno, broadcast the show at 5:15 p.m. on Fridays. KERO, Bakersfield, also an NBC station, aired it on Saturdays at 9 a.m.^↩
3 El Paso Times, Feb. 13, 1960, pg. 8. See also Feb. 6, 1960, pg. 6^↩

Turning The Meeces Around

The anonymous artists called on to use dry brush during innumerable exit scenes at Hanna-Barbera did a marvellous job.

Here’s part of a scene from Rapid Robot, a 1959 Pixie and Dixie cartoon. Jinks tells the meeces he now has an assistant to chase them. Then they spot the robot cat off camera and hug each other for support.

This is a neat drawing. I don’t know if the director or the layout artist or the animator would indicate the positions, the multiples and the grey lines, but it would take a bit of time to ink this, far more than just an eye blink on a static character drawing like the studio started doing.

More dry-brush.

The other three drawings are on twos. This is held for four frames.

And the meeces zip out of the scene.

Besides the Little Roquefort-like ears in the last drawing being a give-away, if you’ve been around the blog for some time, you’ll recognise this as the work of former Terrytooner Carlo Vinci. He loved diving exits, and his marks are all over this cartoon, such as the wide mouth on Jinks’ during dialogue and angular leg/foot positions. Warren Foster’s story ends with a mangled cat/dog robot chasing everyone else up a tree. We reviewed the cartoon some years ago in this post from a less-clean copy.

Scooter Looter Cycle

Scooter Looter is one of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons that’s chock-full of short cuts and the kind of cartoon that never would have been made the following season.

It was produced in the first year (1958-59) when Charlie Shows was entrusted to write dialogue for the cartoons. There are some shorts where whole stretches go without it. When Warren Foster was hired to replace him, Foster not only got a writer credit, he filled cartoons with words.

In Scooter Looter, large portions of the cartoon feature nothing but Yogi riding a scooter, at times pushing a button on a horn, as he moves in cycle animation through Jellystone Park. He’s not saying a thing.

One of Carlo Vinci’s cycles is in three drawings, animated on two frames each, as Yogi and the scooter zip past Art Lozzi’s trees in the background. It takes 12 frames to get back to the start of the trees creating an endless cycle. Yogi’s head is on a separate cel.



There are several head-shake cycles in the cartoon; one is used at least twice. Another one involving Ranger Mack uses four drawings, one per frame. Carlo only animates the head. (Ranger Smith had not been invented yet).



And there are other scenes where the camera focuses on a background drawing for about two seconds of film with no animation; just the music of Jack Shaindlin or Geordie Hormel playing. H-B saved cash on that kind of easy footage. Lozzi’s background art is quite enjoyable; you can see it in our review of the cartoon in this post.