Huckleberry Hound — Huck dé Paree

Produced and Directed by Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna.
Credits: Animation – Ken Southworth, Layout – Tony Rivera, Backgrounds – Art Lozzi, Written by Tony Benedict, Story Director – Lew Marshall, Titles – Art Goble, Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Huckleberry Hound, Narrator, Pierre – Daws Butler.
Music: Hoyt Curtin.
First Aired: week of February 26, 1962.
Production No E-182.
Plot: Gendarme Huck tries to capture bank robber Powerful Pierre.
Title card courtesy of Scott Awley, a Hanna-Barbera artist.

This is the fifth and final cartoon where Huckleberry Hound takes on Pierre. Pierre loses every time, though he brings down his own downfall in this one. And it’s deserved, as Pierre is arrogant and self-satisfied, as opposed to the affable Huck.

The plotline in this one pretty much follows the usual drill. A narrator sets up the plot, Huck goes through a series of failures, commenting to us all along the way, and either wins or loses in the end. One difference this time is Huck doesn’t talk to the narrator.

My favourite bit comes at the end of the cartoon. “Well, that just about wraps up another case,” Huck tells us. “ ‘Cept for this here stolen money. I just got to re-turn it to the right bank. Or was it the left bank?”

The pun here is Huck is in Paris, home of the Left Bank. But anyone who is geographically challenged can still appreciate the silly play on words.

But that’s the end. Let’s go through things in chronological order because, well, it reads better than the original draught of this post which contained random musings in no particular order.

Daws Butler uses his Loopy De Loop voice over Art Lozzi’s background drawings of Paris for about 12 seconds (meaning no animation) and introduces our hero, who is a French police officer in this cartoon. Dropping Huck into Paris gives him a chance to butcher the French language while acting like an expert. “Bon jowr, mon sewers! That’s French-talk for ‘Howdy’,” he tells us in the opening.

Being in Paris evidently inspires Huck to Frenchify the lyrics for his chanson de choix.

Frère Jacques, frère Jacques,
Frere Jacques Clementine!
Frère Jacques, frère Jacques
And her shoes are number nine!

A cute bit is Huck having to remind himself he’s French in this cartoon. He picks up the police phone and says “Officer, uh, I mean Jond-army Huckleberry checkin’ in, sir.” Well, it’s kind of a police phone. Bank robber Pierre comes over and borrows it to talk to Louie at “zee hangout.” How the phone line manages to be connected to the police station, then the hangout, then the police station again is a finer point that writer Tony Benedict doesn’t worry about. It’s one of those cartoon things, I guess.



During this whole scene, Huck doesn’t clue in that the guy with the bag of money who borrowed the phone was Pierre. Nevertheless, he goes to “where most robbers holes up—77 Rue de la Strip.” It even has an awning, though it’s not triangular like the one outside 77 Sunset Strip where “you meet the highbrow and the hipster, the starlet and the phoney tipster” as the theme song says. No, at this 77, you meet Powerful Pierre, as he plays a Bugs-and-Elmer style non-recognition game where Huck reads out the description of Pierre but doesn’t realise that’s who he’s talking to until he gets the bum’s rush out of the place. “Oh, Gar-kon! That’s more French talk meanin’ ‘anybody home?’” Huck tells us.

Huck now tries to capture Pierre. He—
● crashes his bicycle into a door.
● uses his cape as a set of wings but smashes into a flagpole hanging from a building (“I guess this cape was just for looks after all.”)
● gets burned feet when he jumps through the chimney onto the roof into the fireplace below (Pierre lights the fire).
● makes a battering ram out of a log which bounces off Pierre’s stomach and sends him flying back onto the street.
● runs into a door after Pierre closes it.
● lets a rope ladder down from a helicopter to try to get in through a window, but Pierre, leaning out the window, cuts the rope (“Touché! And even Three-ché!” says Pierre in a line worthy of Mike Maltese).

Huck lands in the awning, and Pierre treats him like a tennis ball, swatting him with a racket down to the awning below, and the awning bouncing him, trampoline-style, back up to the window. Unfortunately for Pierre, he missed, Huck lands on him and the two plummet through the awning to the sidewalk below. The next to last scene has Pierre in a jail cell.

Finally, we get a reprise of the revised Clementine song to close the cartoon. Hanna-Barbera was known for short-cuts and there was one that could have been taken at the end, but wasn’t. Daws sang the same lyrics both times. The first version could easily have been used again and Ken Southworth’s animation reused. But because Daws sang the closing version a little differently, Southworth had to animate it differently to fit Daws’ mouth movements (the same repeating background drawing was used, and Huck walks past the same door four times).

I was hoping to snip together Art Lozzi’s streetscape but found the most unusual thing. The end of the background doesn’t match what’s supposed to be the same artwork at the front. You don’t notice because the buildings on the drawing are whizzing by quickly but if you look at these consecutive frames, you’ll see the green building on the left has suddenly developed two red chimneys.



Daws is solo in this cartoon, one of two Hucks this season where he handled all the voices. The music is familiar from both “Top Cat” (a good portion of the underscore) and “The Flintstones.” The cue “Working in the Gravel Pit” (aka “Slate Gravel Co.”) when Huck gets “plumb mad” and runs into the door.

Huckleberry Hound — Legion Bound Hound

Produced and Directed by Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna.
Credits: Animation – Ken Muse; Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Dick Thomas; Story – Warren Foster; Story Director – Alex Lovy; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voices: Narrator, Singer on Record, Bottle Throwing Legionnaire, Legionnaire noise, Fort Commander – Don Messick; Huckleberry Hound, Powerful Pierre, Captain on Phone, Legionnaire noise – Daws Butler.
Music: Bill Loose/John Seely, Phil Green, Geordie Hormel, Spencer Moore, Jack Shaindlin, unknown.
First aired: week of October 31, 1960 (rerun, week of April 17, 1960).
Episode: Huckleberry Hound Show K-041, Production E-110.
Plot: Foreign Legionnaire Huck sets out to capture Powerful Pierre, the scourge of the desert.

Friz Freleng made a really funny cartoon at Warner Bros. called “Sahara Hare” (1955) that featured a desert, a camel and a bad guy trying—and failing every time—to get at the hero of the cartoon inside an abandoned stone fort. It was written by Warren Foster.

Well, guess what?

Okay, this cartoon isn’t quite the same. But you can’t miss the similarities. And the thought crossed my mind that you could probably have built a pretty good theatrical series featuring a low-key Huck (much like his wolfy predecessor in the Avery cartoons at MGM) fluidly assisting a hot-headed Powerful Pierre to beat himself up. In full animation and fully scored, of course. A shame the Hanna-Barbera studio’s lone theatrical shorts were of the limited animation variety with a B-list star.

“Legion Bound Hound” is one of those Foster efforts where the plot suddenly veers off in a different direction halfway through. In the first half, Huck is ridiculed. In the second half, Pierre shows up and he becomes laughed at, while Huck becomes the hero by default. Huck doesn’t get inside the fort until the middle of the cartoon, the same as Bugs Bunny in “Sahara Hare.”

No one would mistake the first half for a Bugs cartoon. Huck casually talks to the audience, and gets abused by his underlings (unseen to save animation) but there are enough funny situations that make the cartoon enjoyable. The cartoon pans over one of Dick Thomas’ background drawings of “trackless wastes of the Sahara” to a fort belonging to the Foreign Legion. “Some join to seek excitement. And others seek to forget or be forgotten,” intones Don Messick as the camera pans across a drawing of snoozing soldiers. So far, we’ve had 21 seconds of cartoon with no animation.



Then we’re told it takes a “tough, tough, TOUGH leader” to keep the “tough, tough men” of Company B in line. That’s Huck’s cue to saunter out and have his friendly request for “drillin’ and marchin’ this morning” laughed at (a bottle is thrown through the door at Huck). Of course, Huck’s oblivious to their ridicule. He explains to us the men “come here to forget. Just like me. I come here to forget my fian-cee.” Cut to shot of Huck’s girl-friend who, like most girl-friends in cartoons, is drawn like a male character in drag. “Uh, what’s her name. Hey! I finally forgot her. I cain’t even remember her name. This calls for a celebration!” Huck turns on a portable record player and we hear Messick singing “My Darling Clementine,” accompanies by the usual electric organ in the cartoon. Turns out that’s Huck’s girl-friend’s name. So now, he hasn’t forgotten any more.



The phone rings. Company B has been asked to bring in Powerful Pierre. “Go jump in the lake” is the first response. Soldiers will always respond to a bugle call, Huck tells us. They do. They shove the bugle in his mouth. So Huck heads across the desert on his camel in search of Powerful Pierre. He’s crushed between the camel’s humps, accompanied by horn honk sound effects. The camel collapses merely for the purpose of a dialogue gag (“They call the critter like this the ‘Ship of the Desert.’ Must be because every once in a while, they sink.”) Huck unfolds a rather long road map and walks on top of it to find Pierre at the end of it. Pierre’s had a design change since we last saw him in “Ten Pin Alley” the previous season. He’s lost some weight, his chin is pointier and he’s brown (must be the desert heat). Pierre bashes Huck around a little, includes sending him skidding across sand dunes, the top of each one burning Huck’s butt (I can’t remember which cartoon used the same gag), to the wall of an abandoned fort.




So now comes Huckleberry Hound’s version of “Sahara Hare” as Yosemite Sam Pierre tries to get Huck out of the fort.

● Pierre presses a button in the wall that’s supposed to reveal a secret entrance. It reveals a cannon instead. We all know what’s going to happen. We saw it in “Sahara Hare.” It takes 11 seconds for it to happen because the cartoon has to pad for time.
● Pierre tries to catapult himself into the fort on a palm tree he’s tied down. End result is like the pole vault gag in “Sahara Hare.” Pierre flies into a stone battlement. “Missed,” notes Huck to end the scene.
● Pierre runs at the fort’s door with a palm tree as a battering ram. “Sahara Hare” didn’t use the gag but lots of other cartoons have. Huck opens the door. Pierre keeps running right through and bashes into the wall on the other side of the fort (which we don’t see. Saves money animating it). Pierre’s passed out in a pile of rubble.



Huck is granted a reward for capturing Pierre. He’s decided he wants to go to town to see his fianc-ee. “Permission granted to see what’s her name” says the Commander. “That’s the one! How’d you know?” answers Huck. Cut to a boat. Huck didn’t tell the Commander his fianc-ee lives in Cucamonga, so ends the cartoon sailing to the U.S.A. singing “Oh, my darlin’, Clem-what’s-her-name.”



This was Foster’s last tangle with Pierre, but it wasn’t the final Pierre cartoon. That came the following season when Tony Benedict wrote “Huck’ dé Paree” and the character was redesigned again by Tony Rivera.

With a few exceptions in the first season, Hanna-Barbara cartoons didn’t end with the sound engineer fading out the stock music. No matter what library was used, just about all the cues all had definite loud ends, either with a stab or a cymbal crash. Sometimes, the cutter would back-time a cue so it would be joined in progress during the cartoon and end exactly when the cartoon ended. In a couple of cartoons, the cutter simply uses only the stab at the end of the music. That’s what happens in this cartoon. To give the soundtrack a flourishing finish, the last three notes of Jack Shaindlin’s “Rodeo Day” are heard. However’s not listed in the studio’s cue sheet. The sheet is perplexing, because it is not in order, has different alpha-numerics than are usual for some of the cues and lists some where the lengths don’t match what’s on the cartoon. There are some guesses below.

The cutter picked out a bugle call, the same one that was used (sped up) in the Augie Doggie cartoon “In the Picnic of Time” the previous season. The fanfarish trumpet and brass counterpoint cue that’s heard when Huck is first seen riding his camel is also in “Missile Bound Cat” as the entrance music for Space Cat. There’s one brief spot where the cutter decides against any music and it’s really effective. It’s when Pierre smashes into the castle. Huck looks at him and says “Missed.” Having silence makes the word stand out and the gag a little funnier.

0:00 - Huckleberry Hound Sub Main Title Theme (Curtin).
0:14 - EM-147 DOCUMENTARY MAIN TITLE (Green) – Opening narration.
0:37 - ZR-127 PERIOD CHASE (Hormel) – Violence at Company B, narration, Huck walks to door.
0:54 - TC-204A WISTFUL COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Huck asks about marching, talks to audience, puts on record.
1:34 - Clementine (Trad., sung by Don Messick) – Record plays, Huck turns off record player.
1:42 - TC-204A WISTFUL COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – “Her name is Clementine,” phone rings, “Mon Cappy-tann.”
1:57 - LAF-27-6 UNTITLED TUNE (Shaindlin) – “That’s French,” Captain yells on phone, Huck at door.
2:37 - bugle call – Huck plays bugle, bugle shoved in mouth.
2:43 - L-78 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Huck blinks, pulls out bugle, talks to audience.
2:48 - LAF-20-1 triumphant trumpet cue (Shaindlin) – Huck rides camel, camel falls to ground.
3:14 - TC-432 HOLLY DAY (Loose-Seely) – Huck on camel on ground, road map, Pierre with rifle scene.
4:12 - LAF-72-2 (or LAF-2-9) RODEO DAY (Shaindlin) – Huck lifted by by rifle barrel, crashes into wall, cannon fires, Pierre smoulders.
5:12 - L-1154 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – “There is someone home…”, Pierre flung from palm tree.
5:20 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) – Pierre flies through air into wall.
5:28 - no music – “Missed.”
5:30 - ZR-48 FAST MOVEMENT (Hormel) – Battering ram scene.
6:08 - L-75 La MARSEILLAISE (Moore) – Huck/Commander scene.
6:32 - LAF-65-7 seagoing medley (Shaindlin) – Huck on boat, “in the good old,”
6:40 - Clementine (Trad.) – “U.S. of A.”, Huck sings.
6:56 - LAF-7-12 FUN ON ICE (Shaindlin) – Two notes and cymbal at end of cartoon.
6:58 - Huckleberry Hound Sub End Title theme (Curtin).

Huckleberry Hound — Ten Pin Alley

Produced by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Ed Love; Layout – Ed Benedict; Backgrounds – Dick Thomas; Story – Warren Foster; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Announcer – Don Messick; Huckleberry Hound, Pierre – Daws Butler.
Music: Jack Shaindlin, Bill Loose/John Seely, Geordie Hormel, Spencer Moore.
First aired: week of Sept. 14, 1959 (repeat, week of May 9, 1960).
Episode: Huckleberry Hound Show No. K-027, Production E-71
Plot: Huck takes on Powerful Pierre at the Final, Final, Final of the Bowling Congress.

Poor Huckleberry Hound. Nobody’s pulling for him, not even the narrator in this cartoon, the first written by Warren Foster to be broadcast. They’re all under the spell of Powerful Pierre, even when he blatantly cheats, chuckling “he’d do anything for a laugh.” By contrast, the bowling announcer is dismissive when he introduces our hero:

Announcer: And here’s the challenger, Huckleberry Hound! (muttering) My, he’s a puny one.
Huck: Not really. I’m small, but I’m wiry.

Foster comes up with an okay little cartoon after taking over from the Barbera-Shows writing team. Foster ditched (except for Yogi) the annoying rhyming pairs of words. And while his cartoons seem to rely more on dialogue, there are sight gags as well. Foster’s joined in this cartoon by another recent Warner Bros. defector, Dick Thomas, who drew a nice little background shot (re-used near the ending) to open the cartoon. Had this been Warners, the spotlight beams would have been animated but that’s a bit much for cost-pinching Hanna-Barbera. In fact there’s reused cycle animation a couple of times in this cartoon.

The two Eds worked on this, Ed Benedict and Ed Love. The designs are pretty conventional for a Benedict cartoon, though perhaps that’s because there are only two characters and the bulk of the cartoon takes place in a bowling alley and few background layouts are used. The only thing that remotely reminds me of Benedict is one shot of Powerful Pierre where his eyes look like flattened eggs. It’s a shame he didn’t go for a stylised character, like when he teamed up with Love in ‘Nowhere Bear’ where he designed a really flat version of Ranger Smith. And Benedict liked designing characters with a hump at the back of the head, though Dick Bickenbach did it on occasion. You can see the hump on Pierre.



But you can’t miss Love in this one. His limited animation style for dialogue is all over the place, including the teeth with the curly upper lip. Love moves Huck’s head up and down in at least five different positions. He also has some fine animation of Pierre bowling. He moves with balletic grace when he approaches the line and throws the ball but in between, he rolls his large butt at an angle toward the camera.








The cartoon opens with the announcer setting up the match. Pierre shows us why he’s an “international favourite” and “a great personality” by wiggling his moustache and then his ears in a bit of limited personality animation that the studio would eschew in its short cartoons not much later. Pierre then rolls his ball along his arms and deliberately allows it to land on Huck’s head. The announcer laughs “See what I mean?” So if anyone missed Pierre’s two first-season cartoons, they’ll now know Huck’s the underdog. The announcer has a dismissive tone of voice when he mentions Huck’s name and asks them to pose with the cup. Pierre bashes it on top of Huck’s head. As for Pierre’s sense of humour, Huck says (after finally pulling the cup of his head) he can take it or leave it.

The remaining gags:

► Pierre ties Huck’s fingers in the holes of his bowling ball. Huck bowls. The arm stretches and snaps back, then back and forth some more. Huck is left with a long length of a hose-like arm. “Who could have done such a dirty treek?” laughs Pierre as he pumps Huck’s other arm to bring the two arms back to size. Love engages in a little bit of animation that story directors in future would deem superfluous. The tied fingers in the bowling ball hole stiffen and point up when the arm gets stretched out as far as it can go, three sets of drawings on twos. Love’s trying to get avoid static drawings.



► Love has time to make the drawings as he reuses the animation of Huck bowling in the next scene. You can tell because his fingers are still knotted together in the ball like in the previous scene. Pierre uses his foot to slide back the boards of the lane, creating a hole that Huck’s ball falls through, missing the pins. “Ha, ha, ha. What a devil that Pierre is,” chortles the announcer.

► Pierre bowls a 7-10 split. “Sacre fooey!” No matter, he bowls again (the animation is re-used), this time using a barbell to make the split. Huck starts getting annoyed about it, but the announcer, still overcome by Pierre’s star-power, comments “This is an embarrassing display of poor sportsmanship on the part of the challenger.”

► Pierre offers his “favourite ball” as a peace offering. It’s a trick. It’s an iron ball. Huck bowls again in re-used animation. Pierre pulls the ball back with a magnet. For whatever reason, Pierre puts the magnet in his back pocket. The ball zooms into Pierre and literally bends him out of shape.



► Now comes the final gag, one reminiscent of the ones Foster wrote at Warners when Daffy tried to trick Bugs into doing something but ended up getting frustrated, doing it himself, and getting blasted. Pierre disguises a helium-filled balloon as a bowling ball and puts glue “in zee holes for zee ‘Ucklesberry’s fingers. The idea is Huck will get stuck in the ball and float away. But Huck innocently grabs the wrong ball. “Sacre stupid! Zat is zee wrong ball!” yells Pierre, who puts his own fingers in the glued balloon ball and rises out of the frame. Huck is declared the new champion by forfeit (and he rolls the ball, thanks to reused animation).

The final scene shows a silhouette of Pierre in the night sky floating over some cities. “Flash!” says the announcer. “We have just received a report that the ex-champion is passing over Wichita. We’re going to miss him. He’d do anything for a laugh.” Cut to close-up of Pierre crying, his body shaking. Iris out.

Pierre is apparently airborne for almost two years before he lands in France. He resurfaces as a crook in Huck’ déParee in Huck’s fourth and final season (it’s the cartoon where Huck, when told about a bank robbery, asks “Was that the Left Bank or the Right Bank?”).

The cartoon may be named “Ten Pin Alley” but there’s no Tin Pan Alley music in it. We get the standard stock music, with a few of the beds re-used. One difference between the first and later seasons is the sound cutter tended to use more, and therefore, shorter pieces of background music.

0:00 - THE HUCKLEBERRY HOUND SONG (Curtin, Hanna, Barbera, Shows) – Opening Titles.
0:06 - ZR-45 METROPOLITAN (Hormel) – Shot of bowling alley, pan across lanes.
0:22 - LAF-7-12 FUN ON ICE (Shaindlin) – Huck strolls past balls.
0:35 - LAF-4-1 FISHY STORY (Shaindlin) – Pierre balances ball, Huck conked with ball.
1:08 - L-81 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Huck’s eyes roll, pose with cup.
1:52 - ZR-52 LIGHT QUIET (Hormel) – Pierre presents ball, ties fingers.
2:30 - LAF-20-5 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) – Huck flies with ball, “..such a dirty trick.”
2:46 - L-1154 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – Huck with stretched arm, pumped up.
3:00 - TC 202 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Fat goose egg, Huck bowls, Pierre moves floor.
3:31 - TC-301 ZANY WALTZ (Loose-Seely) – Pierre moves back, rolls split.
3:42 - L-1154 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – Huck sorry, Pierre makes split, Huck protests, apologises, Pierre hands blue ball to Huck.
4:35 - TC-201 PIXIE COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – “It is my favourite,” Huck bowls.
4:48 - LAF-20-5 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) – Magnet scene.
5:10 - TC-202 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Shot of score sheet, balloon ball, filled, Pierre puts fingers in ball.
6:02 - TC-303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Pierre floats up, Huck bowls.
6:30 - ZR-45 METROPOLITAN (Hormel) – Pierre passing over Wichita.
6:39 - LAF-7-12 FUN ON ICE (Shaindlin) – Close up of Pierre floating.
6:49 - THE HUCKLEBERRY HOUND SONG (Hanna, Barbera, Curtin, Shows) – End titles.

Huckleberry Hound — Ski Champ Chump

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Lew Marshall; Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Art Lozzi; Dialogue – Charlie Shows; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Lawrence Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Huck, Pierre – Daws Butler; Race Announcer – Don Messick.
Music: Bill Loose/John Seely, Jack Shaindlin, Spencer Moore, Geordie Hormel.
Episode: Huckleberry Hound Show K-023, Episode E-60.
First Aired: week of March 2, 1959 (rerun, week of August 31, 1959).
Plot: Huckleberry vs. bad guy Powerful Pierre in a skiing race.

Huck dealt with two kinds of antagonists in his first season—hecklers, like Chief Crazy Coyote and Iggy and Ziggy the crows, or out-and-out villains, like Dinky Dalton or Powerful Pierre. Few of them lasted more than two cartoons. There didn’t seem to be enough gags for the heckler type or personality traits for the villain type. This cartoon was Pierre’s second of the year and he made one appearance in each of the three remaining seasons when Warren Foster took over writing (and came up with a Ten Pin Alley, similar in some ways to this one).

Huck’s character traits varied a bit from cartoon to cartoon but this one has my favourite version of his personality. He lets nothing that happens to him bother him. He’s courteous, upbeat but a little indignant when greeted with bad behaviour. He hasn’t crossed the line from naïvety into cluelessness like he did on occasion when Foster got hold of him. And he wins in this cartoon, with most of the violence happening to the bad guy.

There’s plenty that has a familiar feel in this cartoon. There are gags that recall bits from Warners or MGM cartoons. And the opening is much like what Charlie Shows came up with for Yogi Bear’s The Stout Trout earlier in the season, where two combatants are compared with Yogi coming out on the short end.

Announcer: Approaching the starting line is that incomparable athlete, top sportsman, and all-round good fellow—the champion, Powerhouse Pierre.
And, now, here’s the challenger—Huckleberry Hound. He’s small but he’s got, uh, well, actually, nothing.

You know right away that Pierre is not all that everyone thinks he is because immodestly agrees with the announcer’s assessment of him (as he tells the viewer), insults Huck (consistently calling him “Hucklesber-ree” throughout the cartoon), says he’ll win because he loves money, then caps it off by bashing Huck into the snow with his ski pole before the announcer can shout “go.” Lew Marshall does something I’ve seen in a couple of his cartoons that you’ll never notice unless you freeze-frame. It looks like Pierre’s bopped Huck on the head. But as you can see, the ski pole goes past him while Huck crumples. Marshall did this with cars, too; a car never collided with a character, it went past him for a bit then the character was down in the next frame.



Announcer: And there goes Powerful Pierre. What a sportsman! You notice he apologised when he clobbered his opponent. Huck (to camera): You gotta ad-mit Pierre’s a great sportsman.

Let’s run down the gags. They’re at a pretty leisurely pace with a lot of dialogue padding the proceedings, much of it addressed directly at the audience.




• Pierre sees Huck pass him and decides to strap himself to Huck’s skis. But the “low bridge” gag takes care of that, as Pierre twirls around a tree branch.

Pierre: Ho, ho! ‘E does not know I am hitchhike.
Huck: I do, too. But, shuckins, maybe he’s tired.

• Pierre goes into a phone booth, calls Huck in another phone booth and pretends to be Fifi, then tells him to hold the phone. Unlike the Fifi phone-booth call in the yet-to-be-released Warners’ cartoon Bonanza Bunny (1959) there’s no dynamite or violence involved here. Pierre’s intent is simply to have Huck waste time and pass him. But Pierre is thwarted (“Sacro-iliac!”) when Huck puts the phone booth on his skis and zooms past.



• Pierre emulates Wile E. Coyote or Ralph Wolf by shoving a rock from the top of a cliff onto Huck below. But the rock hits a branch, bounces back up and lands on Pierre’s head. Pierre cracks into pieces like Spike in a Tex Avery cartoon. Pierre’s facetious “Who have leaved this rock here” dialogue really isn’t necessary except to fill 15 seconds. Another eight seconds is used up as we watch the rock go up, Pierre watches the rock go up, we watch the rock come down, Pierre comments on it and gets clobbered. Avery would have had it happen quickly and unexpectedly then topped the cracking-up-into-pieces gag.




• Pierre attaches a rocket to himself and immediately zips past Huck and crashes into the middle of a tree trunk. Charlie Shows follows with a string of his patented rhyming dialogue:

Pierre: What did Pierre do wrong?
Huck: You wasn’t playin’ fair and square there, Pierre.
(Pierre grabs Huck by throat)
Pierre: And you are going to fly through the air, Hucklesberr.



• Pierre turns Huck’s skis into the rotor blades of a helicopter. Huck sails upward. Pierre skis ahead but right into a sawmill. We get another Avery gag as Pierre is emerges sawed in half and his two halves drop in opposite directions to the ground.

• Another old Warners-style gag has Pierre sawing a circle in the ice of a lake. That’s where Huck stops. But the rest of the ice falls in the water instead, and Pierre along with it.



• As Huck approaches the finish line, Pierre ties a rope to the metal pole holding up the loudspeakers. He then lassos Huck. The taut rope stops Huck, but the force brings the pole down and the huge loudspeaker lands right on top of Pierre just short of the finish line. Huck skis to an easy win.



Huck holds aloft a loving cup and tells a typical Dick Bickenbach-designed crowd “Like I said, it’s not the money, it’s winnin’ fair and square what counts. The camera cuts to Pierre, with a lump on his head, telling us “Maybe so. But Pierre, ho-ho-ho, still like the money. Yes, no. Ho-ho-ho-ho.” That’s the best Shows could come up with for a punchy ending? Sacroiliac!



Just about all the familiar Huck music pieces are here. The sound cutter adds a bit to Loose and Seely’s ‘Zany Comedy’ so it stretches to the end of a scene.

0:00 - THE HUCKLEBERRY HOUND SONG (Hanna, Barbera, Curtin, Shows) – Opening titles.
0:28 - TC-300 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Pierre and Huck introduced, Pierre loves money.
1:28 - TC-201 PIXIE COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – “It ain’t the money,” Huck swatted into snow, starting gun goes off.
1:53 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) – Pierre skis down hill, Huck passes, Pierre caught on tree branch.
2:55 - TC-202 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Phone booth scene.
4:16 - L-78 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Rock scene, rocket scene, Pierre turns Huck into helicopter.
5:15 - TC-303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Huck takes off into air, Pierre sliced in two in sawmill, Pierre drops into lake.
6:04 - ZR-48 FAST MOVEMENT (Shaindlin) – Rope around Huck/loudspeaker falls on Pierre scene, Huck crosses finish line.
6:46 - LAF-7-12 FUN ON ICE (Shaindlin) – “Correction. The winner is...”, Huck talks to crowd, Pierre talks to audience.
7:09 - THE HUCKLEBERRY HOUND SONG (Hanna, Barbera, Curtin, Shows) – End titles.