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.
Why would Hanna-Barbera leave some cartoons unseen?
I’m afraid I don’t have the answer to that one. All I know is it happened.
The last production number for a cartoon in the Yogi Bear Show was R-83. But ten years ago, I posted panels for a storyboard for R-88, a Yogi cartoon titled “Beast Feast.” It never appeared on the air and possibly could have been abandoned during production.
At the time, I wondered if there were also productions R-84, R-85, R-86 and R-87 that were not finished or did not air. It turns out the answer is “yes.”
Animation director Robert Alvarez has an incredible collection of discarded artwork from various studios. For a number of years, he has been posting and re-posting it on Facebook. The other day, he re-posted a nine-panel sheet for a Snagglepuss cartoon which I did not recognise. I checked the production number up top and it is R-86, so this is from another cartoon that either wasn’t finished, or was not broadcast.
The drawings (and lettering) look to be the work of story director Alex Lovy. Mike Maltese likely wrote the story, and it appears reminiscent of The Wabbit who Came to Supper (Warner Bros., 1942) in which Elmer Fudd gets a telegram telling him he'll lose his inheritance if he harms Bugs Bunny. That story was written by one M. Maltese.
Whether Robert has the whole board, I haven’t asked, lest I impose on him. Some time ago, he posted these two sheets. The production number is faded on the first one, but I suspect these are both from R-86. You can click on them to enlarge them.
I thank Robt. for allowing me to purloin these. Pur-lion, even.
P.S. As you know, I’m resting the Tralfaz blog. This blog is supposed to be on permanent hiatus as well, but I have cobbled together new monthly posts you’ll see through the start of December.
This ad appeared in the Los Angeles Times 63 years ago today, marking the debut of The Quick Draw McGraw Show, replacing Wild Bill Hickok in the Kellogg Monday through Friday line-up.
It seems Monday was a popular night for Quick Draw on the West Coast. Here are some other stations that aired the fastest-shootin’-est cowboy, er, cowhorse, er, horseboy on birthday night, September 28:
KJEO 47, Fresno (at 6 p.m.)
KRCA 3, Sacramento (at 6 p.m.)
KGW 8, Portland (at 6 p.m.)
KSD-TV 5, St. Louis (at 4:30 p.m.)
KAKE 10, Wichita (at 6 p.m.)
WTTG 5, Washington, D.C. (at 7 p.m.)
WVET-TV 10, Rochester (at 6 p.m.)
WNAC-TV 7, Boston (at 6:30 and 7:30 p.m.)
WRGB 6, Schenectady (at 6 p.m.)
The ad shows the first Quick Draw cartoon was “Lamb Chopped” (Production J-11), featuring the orange, bad-guy Snagglepuss. The other cartoons were “Baby Rattled” (J-14) with Snooper and Blabber, and “Million Dollar Robbery” (J-31) with Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy.
78 cartoons were created for Quick Draw’s first season—all of them written by Mike Maltese. In Lamb Chopped, Maltese borrows from Pepe LePew, Robin Hood Daffy and Rabbit Fire, while Daws Butler grabs a voice from Bert Lahr, including a stretched, vibrating “n.” (Maltese pulls off an outrageous pun. When Pepe Le Mountain Goat is amorously chasing after Quick Draw dressed as a sheep, he cries “Wait, baby girl. Two can live as sheeply as one”).
Syndicated columnists Hal Humphrey wrote a column three days before the series debuted, talking about the $56,000 it cost each episode to be made. Cecil Smith of the Times wrote about the day it debuted. The Newspaper Enterprise Association's Erskine Johnson and Don Page of the Times praised the series in November. It wasn’t “violent” like those old movie cartoons. Humphrey talked about the series “good taste.”
16mm prints of the half-show show were not struck for all stations. Some were bicycled from station to station and if you read TV listings for the third season (most cartoons were reruns), you can see that different shows appeared in different cities on the same day.
This isn’t intended as a full birthday post; instead you can read an old post on the show here.
In June 1960, a deal was being firmed up between Kellogg’s and Saperstein’s UPA. Variety reported on August 10th the two had a seven-year pact that would see $3,000,000 spent in the first year to put a half-hour Mr. Magoo show on 150 stations, the same as the cereal maker did with the Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw shows for Hanna-Barbera.
But then Saperstein pulled out. He thought he could get a better financial deal going it alone. And Hanna-Barbera was ready. Both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter told readers in their October 12th editions that Kellogg’s had agreed to sponsor a half-hour Yogi Bear show on 130 stations starting in January 1961, and Snagglepuss and Yakky Doodle would augment the new series.
Yogi’s jump to stardom should not have been a surprise. Yogi was slowly but surely taking the spotlight away from Huck as H-B’s main starring character in syndication. The studio had already decided to make Yogi, not Huck, the star of its first feature film. Yogi was appearing in person (actually, someone in an outfit) at department stores, fairs, and so on. There was plenty of Yogi merchandise in stores and he was on a cereal box. On top of that, Huck didn’t get a syndicated newspaper strip in 1961; Yogi did. And another indicator—in October, Yogi was named chairman of the 1960-61 fund raising drive of the Radio-Television-Recording and Advertising Charities of Hollywood. (What he actually did, I don’t know).
As for Yakky, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had plunked the duck in Tom and Jerry cartoons at MGM, then brought him over to their own studio as an occasional character in more than a half dozen cartoons. He was ready for his own series (the only problem was his voice actor, Red Coffey, was on tour, so Barbera hired Los Angeles kids host Jimmy Weldon). And Snagglepuss had appeared on the Quick Draw McGraw show a number of times as an orange antagonist. He was clever with funny dialogue (George Nicholas did a fine job animating him) so he had real possibilities for his own segment.
The Yogi Bear Show began showing up in syndication on the week of January 30, 1961. Not all the cartoons were ready, so some were borrowed from the Quick Draw show for several weeks. Yogi continued to appear on the Huck show until the replacement Hokey Wolf cartoons were set to air.
Hanna-Barbera’s PR guru Arnie Carr started plugging away, working the media to get some ink. Hal Humphrey wrote a pre-debut column, while UPI’s Fred Danzig and Jack Gaver both banged out reviews. I’ve found another story from the Copley News Service, published January 28, 1961.
Smarter Than Average
Extrovert Yogi Bear Syndicated Across US
BY DONALD FREEMAN
Copley News Service
HOLLYWOOD, Jan. 27— As his loyal followers always knew it would, being smarter than the average bear has at last paid off in tangible rewards for that blustering furry extrovert known to television as Yogi Bear. Forthwith, amid a fanfare from the trumpets, The Yogi Bear Show is syndicated across the land.
This freshly spawned cartoon series evolved logically and inevitably out of Huckleberry Hound the show in which Yogi Bear has played second fiddle for the last 2½ years. Now he has emerged from the wings, a full-fledged bear-type star.
At Hanna-Barbera Productions— headed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbara, two enterprisingly creative talents responsible not only for Yogi Bear and Hucklebery Hound, but Ruff n’ Reddy, Quick Draw McGraw and the Flintstones as well— the feeling had persisted for some time that Yogi Rear was ripe for bigger things.
"Consider this," said Bill Hanna, a stocky onetime engineer now the partner in a booming $10,000,000 cartoon corporation, "Huckleberry Hound" had an island in the Antarctic named for him and he was tapped as mascot of the Marching and Jazz Society in Hull England.
"BUT BRITAIN’S ENTRY in a recent International model plane race was named Yogi Bear. And a wing of our Strategic Air Command picked Yogi for its mascot.
"Also consider this," put in Joe Barbera, the darkly handsome partner who once worked in a bank and despised every minute of it, "when Huckleberry Hound ran for president last year— he didn't do badly in certain animal precincts, by the way— who was his campaign manager? Yogi Bear."
In common with most creative brains in the animated cartoon dodge, Hanna and Barbera are— well, free souls, blithe nose-thumbers at conventional procedure. For example, interoffice memos are expressly forbidden in their studios.
"If a man dreams up an idea he can barge right into our office," explained Barbera, adding pointedly that no such easygoing policy prevailed in their days at M-G-M. "By the time a producer there had got your memo and sent back his memo and you finally were permitted into the hallowed sanctum of his office, you'd forgotten what you wanted to say in the first place. So, no memos."
FOR SOME 20 YEARS, Hanna and Barbera were teamed at M-G M where their fertile imaginations gave birth to the cat and mouse cartoon series, Tom and Jerry, which brought the studio seven Academy Awards. In 1957 they turned to television writing continually expanding success story, with the new Yogi Bear show being the latest chapter.
There are times when Yogi's fans imperturbably criss-cross the thin stand dividing fancy and reality. Not long ago in a gesture of appreciation, Yogi Bear was awarded a certificate by the superintendent of Yellowstone Park— not Ranger Smith, but the actual superintendent in the real Yellowstone Park— for being “an upstanding example for bears all over the world.”
However, in his notation, the superintendent saw fit to add slyly: "But I'm sure glad that Yogi Bear doesn't live fulltime in my park."
Still, the starring Yogi jettisoned the spot gags and sight gags of the earlier Huck show Yogi. Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons were starting to become dialogue heavy, with characters standing around, with mouths moving on rigid bodies while a character being spoken to blinked his/her eyes to break the monotony. How much more interesting visually they would have been if Mike Lah (concentrating on commercials at Quartet) and Carlo Vinci (moved over to The Flintstones) were still animating the cartoons like they did when Yogi was still with Huck.
We all know that H-B characters ran past the same tree or lamp over and over and over again. Here’s an endless loop from the Yogi show. It’s from Whistle-Stop and Go, a Yakky cartoon animated by Columbia and Warner Bros. veteran Art Davis. It takes 16 frames for Dick Thomas’s background to repeat, with Fibber on an eight-frame run cycle. What I didn’t notice until I put this together is Davis slightly animates Fibber’s whiskers and top hair strands. That kind of thing would have been skipped in the later “faster, cheaper” years.
Is it possible to fairly compare cartoons made by Hanna-Barbera and the Jay Ward studios?
I don’t think so. The two studios had a different attitude and pace. The Hanna-Barbera cartoons were fairly gentle in their satire. They were twice as long as the Rocky or Peabody episodes so the pace was more leisurely. When Mike Maltese arrived at H-B, he seems to have liked quirky dialogue as opposed to the set-up/punch-line style found in some Rocky cartoons.
Differences were more pronounced when The Flintstones debuted in 1960. That series was a half-hour sitcom, so the format bore no resemblance to what Ward and Bill Scott were doing. The satire was not really direct; it was based on transposing familiar things in everyday life to what their equivalent would have been in another era.
One critic not only dared to compare them, he decreed that The Flintstones was simply not funny. Not only that, he was so intellectually lazy, he never checked his facts of the shows he was commenting on. Hanna-Barbera fans pounced on him.
Let’s give you the original story and the follow up. The following appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal of March 23, 1961. His praise for a Bert Lahr-esque lion in a Fractured Fairy Tale is particularly ironic, considering he couldn’t name the Hanna-Barbera character with the same voice from the same voice actor.
What's Adult Cartoon? 'Rocky' May Be, 'Flintstones' Isn't
By DICK SHIPPY
Journal Radio-TV Writer
Once upon a time there was a cruel lion (he talked like Bert Lahr) who ruled his kingdom and subjects with an iron paw. One day when the king — a devoted butterfly collector — chased a prize specimen into a cave, his subjects rolled a huge stone over the mouth of the cave, sealing in the cruel king.
The butterfly escaped through a small crack, but the lion remained imprisoned and everyone lived happily ever after.
The moral: "A rolling stone gathers no moths."
THAT'S a sample of the sort of tom-foolery which can be seen these Sunday afternoons on "Rocky and His Friends," an ABC-TV cartoon series.
"Rocky" is, to my notion, the best "adult-minded" cartoon seen on television. The key phrase is "adult-minded." It implies a cartoon series can contain little subtleties which will escape children but provoke a response from adults.
For the intellectuals in the crowd, I'm willing to concede any and all cartoons basically are children's fare and it's some sort of infantile regression which causes adults to watch them.
BUT WATCH 'em they do, and that's why I'm staking a claim for "Rocky" as generating the most appeal for child-like adults like myself.
I don't expect to win any converts from the "Flintstones" or "Yogi Bear" crowd. I have friends who collapse on the floor in gales of laughter when Wilma Flintstone hauls out her Stone Age vacuum cleaner (a baby elephant tied to a forked tree branch) or when Yogi sprints about Jellystone Park yelling "Exit, stage left."
I CAN only smile indulgently at such times and recall the really sly, sophisticated fun to be had with "Rocky and His Friends."
Rocket J. Squirrel bolts about the skies in a Tailspin Tommy helmet and goggles (he's a flying squirrel). His sidekick is Bullwinkle, an Elks lodge caricature of a moose who talks like Red Skelton.
Then, there's Boris Benenoff [sic], the world's most inept spy, and his girl friend, Natasha — a Charles Addams beauty.
Rocky and Bullwinkle spent many episodes battling Boris and Natasha for possession of the Flying Mountain, a piece of landscape containing a secret, anti-gravity mineral called Upsy-Daisyium.
Then, there's Peabody and his time machine. Peabody is a canine Rhodes scholar who uses his time machine to recreate significant historical events. For instance, William F. Cody was hired by the railroad on a monthly retainer to supply buffalo meat for work crews. On the first and 15th of each month, Cody showed up to collect his buffalo bill.
So much for Rocky. If you're not convinced of his adult appeal, I'll leave you to Fred Flintstone and his artless ways.
YOU CAN'T quarrel with success, but it seems to me "The Flintstones" is the most overrated show on the television schedule this season. That's a minority opinion, though, since the Hanna Barbera series is the No. 4 or No. 5 entry among the top-ranked, depending on what survey is listed.
Before Fred and Barney made their entrance last Fall, Hanna Barbera advance publicity defined the show as "an adult-aimed situation comedy in animated cartoon form."
I've watched "The Flintstones" only two or three times, but from that sample, there's little to separate it from other sappy, contrived situation comedies which can be seen on television...except for the animation. And that leaves it strictly in the children's realm.
PUBLICITY advances also termed "Flintstones" a satire on modern suburban life. If there's satire there, I missed it. Nobody ever accused Jackie Gleason of being satirical.
More recently, Joe Barbera has been quoted as saying, "We never said 'Flintstones' would be adult. That was all part of a publicity buildup. Nowhere in the format did we promise people an animated New Yorker magazine."
I'm glad he straightened that out. Some of us were beginning to think we weren't adult enough to understand "The Flintstones." I was on the verge of asking my son to explain it.
The fans had their say. Here’s what they told the paper in its edition of March 23rd.
Radio-TV Mailbag
Giving Credit to Snagglepuss
By DICK SHIPPY
Journal Radio-TV Writer
DEAR MAILBAG: After reading your column of March 12, I decided to write you a short letter to let you know that you made a slight (?) error.
You said that Yogi Bear sprints about Jellystone Park yelling "exit, stage left." That isn't Yogi. but a mountain lion named Snagglepuss.
Maybe Yogi Bear and the Flintstones are not adult cartoon entertainment, but they are a change from the westerns which seem to be on constantly. YOGI BEAR FANS.
DEAR MR. SHIPLEY: I've watched the Yogi Bear show and the mistake was Yogi does not run around Jellystone Park saying "exit, stage left." A lion named Snagglepuss does it. I agree with you about Rocky being the "adult" cartoon. BILLY PETERSON, (Age 8), Copley.
Dear Fans and Billy: I plead guilty as charged to exceedingly bad reporting. I accepted somebody's word that Yogi is responsible for "exit, stage left" without bothering to check the source of the quotation.
At the time of evening when Yogi is filching his goodies, I am usually distracted by the Texas catch-as-catch-can wrestling match which breaks out in front of the TV set each night in my home. It's a lame excuse, but the best I can manage.
DEAR MAILBAG: I never fail to read your column, and I almost always agree with your opinions. In one of your recent columns, however, you .. said you don't feel cartoon shows such as "Huckleberry Hound," "Yogi Bear" and "Quick Draw McGraw" are adult in humor.
I think that a child should scarcely be expected to understand the joke when the note in Aladdin's Lamp is signed "Genie With the Light Brown Hair," or when the bull is named "El Gorito," or when one of the announcer's lines goes something like this: "Then fickle fate inflicted a fiendish fiasco in the form of El Tobasco"...
Or when Quick Draw disguises himself as an insipid-looking cowboy and the telegram which comes the very next minute reads "Dear Insipid," or when El Kabong says he was late because he had to tune his kabonger.
True, some of the humor is not very adult, but let's give credit where it is due! I wouldn't miss Quick Draw or any of the others. MARY WILSON, Akron.
Dear Mary: To be specific, I stated "The Flintstones" was not an adult cartoon. It depends solely on the "cute" visual effect. There are no "adult" cartoons as such. All appeal first to children. Then they may throw in something, an occasional line of dialog, which would amuse adults.
In any case, I'll make this prediction: By this time next year you'll be sick of network cartoon shows in prime evening time.
Knowing television's passion for me-too programming and its low estimate of the mentality of American viewers, we'll be up to here in cartoon shows.
There was one other annoyed letter in the April 6th edition which is kind of a post-script. It would appear the columnist ended up a little battle-fatigued at the end.
DEAR DICK: I don't specialize in throwing $75 words around as your average reader wouldn't comprehend it. So I'm going to put it so simple even you can understand it.
Firstly, I wholeheartedly don't agree with your statement that the "Flintstones" is not an adult cartoon. One merely has to listen to the dialogue, similar to the obsolete "Honeymooners," to realize it doesn't sound like the hanky-panky of Yogi and Doggie Daddy. Furthermore, it's shown at 8:30 p. m. for adult viewing.
The man who thought up this refreshingly different type of entertainment has plenty on the ball. It sure breaks the monotony . . .
Thank heavens they're going to bury "White Fang" and "Soupy Sales" or I'd wind up with a pack of stuttering, bumbling idiots. If "stuttering" and sounds of inebriation and nuthouse characters is all other cartoons have to brainwash our children, I'll have to put the idiot box in mothballs . . . MRS. J. McN., Akron.
Dear Mrs. McN: 1. You're right: it was simple; 2. I have never seen so many wholehearted people; 3. "77 Sunset Strip" is shown at 9 p. m. Does that make it adult viewing?
Well, 9 p.m. isn’t 8:30, and 77 Sunset Strip wasn’t children’s viewing, which is what his argument was about cartoons. The columnist, by the way, liked the Huck series and we’ve posted his column about it in this post.
However, I don’t buy his claim that liking cartoons is some kind of regression into childhood. Funny is funny, whether it’s live action or drawn. Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera, Jay Ward and Bill Scott all knew it.
El Kabong is funny. The orange, bad-guy Snagglepuss is funny. Put them together and you have a funny cartoon. And the cartoon is even funnier if the animator is George Nicholas.
They all appear together in El Kabong meets El Kazing (1960). It’s one of my favourite Quick Draw McGraw cartoons as Snagglepuss abuses the dopey lawman through the whole cartoon until Baba Looey, as El Kapowee, swings in on a rope with his own kabongger.
Nicholas was hired at Hanna-Barbera after production ended on Sleeping Beauty and Walt Disney laid off a bunch of animators. Here’s an example of why I like Nicholas’ animation. He tries to do something with limited animation. This scene shows Snagglepuss entering the cartoon from his cave. Look at the curves he gives Snagglepuss’ arm and tail.
You know how the studio would have done it a few years later. Snagglepuss would likely peek out behind the cave overlay then enter on one drawing with dry brush speed lines toward the cave.
As in any good Quick Draw McGraw cartoon written by Mike Maltese, the off-screen narrator and the characters have a little conversation. Here’s what Nicholas does when the narrator catches Snagglepuss’ attention. The mountain lion’s head turns in five positions. Other animators would probably do three. Nicholas loved beady eyes; you can see it all through this cartoon and many others he worked on.
“You don’t look much like a nemesis to me,” opines the narrator. Snagglepuss gets indignant. Again, another fine expression by Nicholas. He tilts Snagglepuss’ head ever so slightly in six drawings.
Timing is generally up to the director, but in this scene Nicholas has some unique timing. Normally, you’d find drawings shot on twos, occasionally on ones or threes. Nicholas varies the timing here; Ed Love used to have his own timing at Hanna-Barbera as well. The second drawing is on fours, the third and fourth drawings are on threes, the fifth drawing is on twos, the sixth is shot twice before Snagglepuss starts his dialogue; only his head is animated for part of the scene, then Snagglepuss gestures with his right arm.
You can go back about six years on the blog and read a review HERE.
The layouts in this cartoon are by Walt Clinton. He would have designed the incidental characters, like the ones in the opening shot (there is a quick right pan from one pair of characters to the other). I love the bull and sheep.
By the way, I apologise for some inept masking here. One of the things that sucked valuable time making posts on this blog for years is that unless these cartoons were released on DVD, they are dubs from American cable TV. They have a station ID bug plastered on them. I’ve tried to cover the bugs with varying degrees of success. I wish I had bug-less copies of them (especially the first two seasons of the Quick Draw show) but since I don’t, you’re getting the best I can do with the time and limited skills I have.
When I was kid, you could dress up as Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear or Quick Draw McGraw and go out on Hallowe’en in hopes of getting free candy in a door-to-door windfall. Actually, mooching food would be expected of Yogi Bear, wouldn’t it?
While All Hallow’s Eve didn’t form the basis of stories in the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, they did include antagonists or adversaries you’d find on suburban streets in the 1960s on an average October 31st. Here’s a random sampling of ten cartoons that come to mind.
Ghosts
Mike Maltese came up with Harum and Scarum, two goofy ghosts, whom he planted in a pair of cartoons. The first one was with Snooper and Blabber in “Real Gone Ghosts” (1959), the second in “Be My Ghost” with Snagglepuss (1961). They were silly and, the best thing, rolled up like window shades before disappearing. Harum was played by Daws Butler. Scarum was originally voiced by Elliot Field; Don Messick took over for the second cartoon.
Quasi Ghosts
Fibber Fox pretends to be a ghost by covering himself with flour in “The Most Ghost.” The only thing that’s scary is Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s obsession with an annoying duck character. I like Fibber, but this is a weak cartoon.
Pixie and Dixie, then Mr. Jinks, pretend to be ghosts in “The Ghost With the Most” (1958). There’s a great Mike Lah shock take on Jinksie but there are several egregious errors. Whoever worked the camera on this one wasn’t keeping track of the exposure sheets as Jinks’ mouth appears in front of his hand and then disappears for a brief time.
Witches
Where else would a witch go to relax than Jellystone Park? Yogi steals her broom to filch pic-a-nic baskets in “Bewitched Bear” (1960). Ranger Smith is great in this one. He’s still in his “I’m bored just doing my job” stage of his character, which is better than the petulant, annoyed ranger he quickly became. I’m pretty sure Bob Gentle is responsible for an excellent opening shot of the witch’s house. Jean Vander Pyl is the witch.
A whole pile of old Warner Bros. cartoon ideas are mashed together by ex-Warners writer Mike Maltese in “Switch Witch” (1959). There’s a bit of “The Trial of Mr. Wolf,” where the Big Bad Wolf defends himself in court against the Three Little Pigs, and “Bewitched Bunny,” where Witch Hazel wants to eat Hansel and Gretel. Monty’s backgrounds are really great in this. Elliot Field voices the witch and Blab in this early Snooper and Blabber cartoon.
Yakky Doodle and Chopper meet up with a witch who needs one small talking duck for her birthday stew in “Witch Duck-Ter” (1961). The cartoon ends with the two of them giving the touched witch a birthday cake. Jean Vander Pyl is called into service again as the witch.
Monstahs
Maltese or Joe Barbera or someone else at Hanna-Barbera must have loved the Addams Family panel cartoons in the New Yorker as characters reminiscent of what were eventually named Gomez and Morticia Addams were plunked in several Snooper and Blabber cartoons, the first being “The Big Diaper Caper” (1959). Maltese also put them in a Snagglepuss cartoon and they were even featured in a Dell comic book. The characters aren’t as dark as Addams’ wonderful creations and the tameness turns them into one-note characters. Jean Vander Pyl uses her Tallulah Bankhead voice for Mrs. Scientist and once said it was her first role at Hanna-Barbera.
Huckleberry Hound battled a crazed monster wiener schnitzel in “Science Friction” (1961). Need I say anything more about this cartoon?
In “Piccadilly Dilly” (1960), Huck is sent to arrest the crazed title character, who is really Dr. Jikkle after drinking a potion. Joe Montell has a very nice setting at the start of the cartoon and writer Warren Foster makes fun of English accents. Huck is with Scotland Back-yard but still sounds straight out of Raleigh, North Carolina.
There are other cartoons where characters are put in horror or nightmare situations, but these ten are what comes to mind right away. They’re a mixed bag when it comes to humour, but if you’re looking for Hanna-Barbera cartoons to watch on Hallowe’en, these are as good as any.
