More Faces of Jellystone Park

Over the course of Yogi Bear’s life, he became a permanent resident of Jellystone Park, and Hanna-Barbera’s artists took advantage of that to draw the park entrance to serve as an establishing shot for many cartoons.

For a studio that liked saving money, it’s surprising that one background drawing of the entrance wasn’t made and then put away to be used whenever necessary. Instead, layout and background artists were free to come up with a new one for each cartoon. Only one was reused, and that was in the first season of Yogi’s cartoons on the Huckleberry Hound Show.

In THIS post, you got to see a number of the drawings. I’ve gone through the remaining Yogi cartoons to let you look at the rest. All of them were broadcast on Yogi’s own half-hour show. I’m not going to comment too much on the art technique because I’m woefully ignorant about it. Anyone who can comment about it, please do.

On a few occasions, there was a pan across the background drawing but only in Do or Diet (see right) is there a vertical pan. That’s why the stone walls seem so high. Tony Rivera was the layout man on this cartoon and Dick Thomas did the backgrounds. Rivera liked isosceles triangles of green with crosses in them representing trees and had them in several cartoons. Thomas wasn’t particularly adventuresome when it came to colour but he’s added some yellow in the foreground for variation.



Rivera and Thomas join together again in Cub Scout Boo Boo. There’s a stone wall overlay on the left here to enable animation of buses to pass from right to left on the background and ‘enter’ the park.



Home Sweet Jellystone featured layouts by Don Sheppard, who spent a good chunk of time at Hanna-Barbera after a pile of stops in the ‘50s. He’s also known for something probably best left undiscussed—he worked on the Rudy Larriva Roadrunner cartoons for Format Films in the ‘60s. Whether he was freelancing at H-B for this cartoon isn’t clear; he had been working at UPA. We have squiggly-line trees here. Bob Gentle drew the background.



There’s also a Jellystone entrance on the title card to the cartoon. I understand Dick Bickenbach drew the titles. Nice silhouette. Note the blending on the blue sky.



Different shades of green and yellow try to spruce up (no pun intended) the opening shot of Love Bugged Bear. Tony Rivera and Vera Ohman Hanson are responsible for this one.



This is the only night shot of the Jellystone entrance and is from Bareface Disguise. The stick-lines-within-trees gives away that Rivera handled the layouts. Thomas did the backgrounds.



You can click to enlarge this background that was panned at the opening of Slap Happy Birthday. Lovely fall colours here from Dick Thomas. The layout is by Bick, the last he did on a Yogi short, I believe.



The entrance in Disguise and Gals looks makeshift enough to be on The Flintstones. Note the choice of colours on the background hills. Walt Clinton did the layouts here and Bob Gentle the backgrounds. This isn’t an establishing shot; it shows up about a minute into the cartoon. The right side of the entrance is an overlay.



The Jellystone entrance in Acrobatty Yogi is near the end of the cartoon. The left part is an overlay. Layouts by Dan Noonan and backgrounds by Dick Thomas.



Now a couple by Art Lozzi. He was doing some distinctive things about this time, especially with colours. See the different shades he incorporates into the trees? And he liked downward-hanging fronds, kind of like fingers.This is from Loco Locomotive. Tony Rivera handled layouts.



Here’s an establishing background panned in Yogi in the City. Art liked wrapping clouds around background hills. Can you spot the thin, black lines Art uses in the trees to give them a more vertical appearance? Tony Rivera is, again, the layout man.



Rivera laid out this background by Neenah Maxwell. Sure looks different than the Lozzi stuff, doesn’t it? It’s from Droop-a-long Yogi. The right side of the entrance and the tree in the foreground are overlays as a TV truck rolls along the road in this scene.

It isn’t only the Jellystone entrances that are different every cartoon. Ranger Smith seems to have all kinds of different stations, no two alike. And Yogi must have moved a lot because he has a new cave in every cartoon. If there’s a chance, I’ll post some shots so you can get a look at the varied art in these early Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

The Many Faces of Jellystone Park

Jellystone Park must be huge. Why? Because there aren’t just one or two different entrances to the park; there are all kinds of them.


Hanna-Barbera’s writers loved to open cartoons with a shot of a background cell to establish the setting then pan or cut to another background cell. No doubt Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera liked this, too, because the camera-work substituted for costlier animation.

When Warren Foster et al finally decided to take Yogi away from the generic woods and other places he had been living and make him a permanent resident of Jellystone Park, a favourite way to set up a cartoon was to have some opening narration and feature a cell of the park entrance. Rarely was the same cell used in more than one cartoon, providing us with interesting variations.

My non-professional observation is the writer or a sketch artist drew a storyboard and then the layout artist worked from that. Below you see a sketch by Warren Foster from the opening of Booby Trapped Bear, a third season Yogi cartoon.


Tony Rivera was the layout artist on that cartoon. Here’s how he rendered Foster’s basic story drawing:


Remember this is a background. Dick Thomas was the background artist in this cartoon, so I’m presuming he stuck to Rivera’s layouts and drew the cell, then added the colours and decided on textures.

The very first shot of the entrance to Jellystone was in Yogi’s TV debut, Yogi Bear’s Big Break. Bick Bickenbach was the layout artist and Fernando Montealegre did the backgrounds.


Here are some others from Yogi’s first season (on the first season of the Huckleberry Hound Show). Not all the cartoons have credits, so I’m relying on the not-always-accurate Big Cartoon Database:

Big Brave Bear, Bick Bickenbach and Fernando Montealegre.

Brainy Bear, Bick Bickenbach and Fernando Montealegre.

Hide and Go Peek, Bick Bickenbach and Fernando Montealegre.

Here are a bunch from Yogi’s second season on the Huck show. Warren Foster had taken over from Charlie Shows as the writer:

Bear Faced Bear, Walt Clinton and Bob Gentle.

Papa Yogi, Walt Clinton and Joe Montell.

Stranger Ranger, Tony Rivera and Fernando Montealegre.

Rah Rah Bear, Tony Rivera and Bob Gentle.

Nowhere Bear, Ed Benedict and Bob Gentle.

Snow White Bear, Bick Bickenbach and Bob Gentle.

And here’s one from the third season of the Huck show, before Yogi was replaced by Hokey Wolf in 1961:

Gleesome Threesome, Tony Rivera and Dick Thomas.

Oh, you’re wondering about the drawing of the Jellystone entrance at the start of this post. Here it is with its starring cartoon bear.


Yes, there was a Jellystone Park in the MGM cartoon Barney Bear’s Hungry Cousin (1953), directed not by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, but by Dick Lundy (who eventually ended up at Hanna-Barbera a few years after it opened). The cartoon was written by Heck Allen and Jack Cosgriff. Lundy’s layout artist was a former Disneyite named Hal Doughty. The background was constructed by Johnny Johnsen, whose 3-D-style sets opened many a Tex Avery cartoon at Warners and Metro (as well as the Bob Clampett-credited 1941 short Wabbit Twouble, set in Jellostone Park).

Whether the Barney short was the source of Hanna-Barbera’s Jellystone, or whether it was coincidentally and independently invented by Lundy’s former directing colleagues from MGM is, perhaps, something we will never know.