Voices! We need voices!
That was the cry at the newly-founded H-B Enterprises in 1957. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera went out and found two men who could create just about any voice that was needed in their cartoons—Daws Butler and Don Messick. Eventually, the studio had a number of actors who could fill all kinds of roles; Hal Smith, Mel Blanc, Paul Frees and John Stephenson come to mind.
It’s odd, then, that the studio would hire a man who really only did one voice. We don’t mean Jimmy Weldon, as his Yakky Doodle was a specialty voice. We mean the man who played Yakky’s cohort, Vance Colvig, Jr.
With rare exception, the son of Pinto Colvig voiced the growly Chopper. Odder still was that Vance Colvig was capable of doing all kinds of voices. I don’t know why Joe Barbera didn’t bring him in more often. Perhaps he was just too busy. By 1961, when Yakky first appeared on TV, Vance was on KTLA daily as Bozo the Clown.
He worked on one cartoon at Hanna-Barbera before the Yakky series got underway. The Quick Draw McGraw show was coming on the air in 1959 and Barbera was on the hunt for new voices. Colvig played Tombstone Jones and narrated “Bad Guys Disguise,” the second Quick Draw cartoon that aired.
Here’s a profile (and photo via ABC) of him from the May 18, 1947 issue of Radio Life, a truly wonderful publication which published feature stories on all kinds of people working in radio in Los Angeles. It gives you an idea of the talent he had, and Hanna-Barbera could have used.
What Makes a Gag Man
By Betty Hammer
THE first time we met Vance Colvig, he blew into a restaurant where we were lunching, grabbed a waitress, waltzed the her down narrow aisle between the tables, barked like a dog, told her he was burning with mad desire for her, sat down and ordered a cup of coffee. A friend introduced us. Vance leered like Dracula, grabbed our arm, twisted it around his neck and shouted, "Leave me alone, I tell you," and, turning to the other diners, "She's crazy about me—won't leave me alone!"
By the time his coffee arrived and the waitress had nimbly eluded his clutches, we learned that, naturally, Vance was a gag man and radio actor, that his father was Pinto Colvig, gag man and radio actor; and that he always entered restaurants that way. Then, taking a spoon, he dipped it in and out of his coffee, holding the handle with both hands in the manner of a man rowing a boat and bassoed, "Ai yoock neeyem, Ai yoock neeyem," in a pretty good rendition of the "Volga Boatman." He borrowed a cigarette from us with the words, "No, thank you—never touch 'em," pretended to pound it into his forehead, pulled it out of his ear, stuck it under his lower lip, struck a match and made as if to light his nose. "Been smoking all my life and they never hurt me a bit," he exclaimed as he banged his knee reflex, rose in the air about two feet and emitted a cloud of smoke and a wheeze that sounded like a ship tearing away from its moorings. We learned that he always relaxed with coffee and a cigarette that way.
Calmed Down?
Since that first meeting, we've gotten to know Vance rather well and he no longer goes through quite such an elaborate routine. Now he merely bites us on the neck, tells us we have "dan-n-n-ncing eyes" and begs us to fly with him to San Luis Obispo.
Is Vance Colvig like this because he is a gag writer—or is he a gag writer because he's like this? We're inclined to think the latter. Many a gag man is a pretty Gloomy Gus who saves his humor for a paying job. Vance throws away many a hilarious routine on a group of strangers waiting at a bus stop, merely because he feels like entertaining anyone and everyone—occasionally even when they don't want to be entertained, but that's one of the hazards of the profession.
Or maybe it's inherited. His pop, Pinto, is a well-known cartoonist, gag man and the voice behind many a weird radio and cartoon effect. When producers call Colvig senior for a part he is unable to take because of a previous commitment, he usually refers them to Colvig junior and keeps the work in the family. Recently, the two worked together on the Frank Morgan show as the voice of "Baldy" the sheep dog (Pinto) and 'Filbert" the gopher (Vance)—and in the Capitol record album, "Bozo and His Rocket Ship."
Vance has done the gags for Tom Breneman's "Breakfast in Hollywood" program for the past four years and has contributed laugh lines to the Jack Kirkwood show, Mel Blanc program, Kay Kyser's "College," and "Bride and Groom," in addition to his free-lance work. He has barked for Asta, the dog in the "Thin Man" pictures, done voices for George Pal Puppetoons, played a pig on "Gildersleeve," a dog on the Dinah Shore show, a rooster on the Sinatra show and Japanese villains on "Pacific Story," among many other strange roles.
"I got my first part when I was six months old," he told us when we asked about his career. "It was a movie for Herbert Hoover's relief mission to Belgium during the last war and it showed a poor little starving Belgian baby as contrasted with a laughing, fat, healthy American baby. I was the laughing, fat, healthy American baby." Kid roles in movies followed and Vance supplied juvenile laughs in "Mickey McGuire" and "Buster Brown" comedies.
Can't Tell How Come
How do you get to be a gag man? "I only wish I knew," is Vance's answer. Every time Breneman mentions Vance's name on the air, he receives letters from people who want to become gag men too. It makes him unhappy, because he'd like to be able to say the magic words that lead to radio, but he just doesn't know what they are.
If you who are reading this are incipient gag men, you'll say, "All right then, how did he get started?" And the not-very-glamorous answer is—working in the parking lot at NBC. He started button-holing passing comedians and selling them gags as the poor fellows rushed to rehearsals. It was Kay Kyser who finally decided that the little guy who kept the boys in the parking lot and the big time comedians laughing with his gags and antics might do the same for a nationwide audience. That's how one gag man latched on to radio and that's the only way Vance knows about.
Of course Los Angeles City College helped. Our hero took radio and dramatics courses and graced the casts of "Merry Wives of Windsor," "Romeo and Juliet" and Gilbert and Sullivan's "Gondoliers" ("I played the title role—along with eleven other guys"). He also appeared in a collegiate musical, "Zis Boom Bah!" which was so professional it was booked into the Orpheum Theater and did a bit of touring. Movie star Jeanne Crain was an obscure cast member. Glamorous threesome on the campus in those days was Vance, Donna Reed and Alexis Smith! Vance further informed us that prior to his college days, radio prof Jerry Blunt had turned out such radio talent as writer True Boardman, Elliott Lewis, and Mary Shipp, who is more widely known on the air as "Lady Esther"!
Gives Parties
Vance lives in a fascinating little house perched dangerously high up in the Hollywood hills. His front room contains shelves of books and records and a collection of original ceramics made by a prominent local artist. From the hillside he has gathered bamboo stalks and fashioned them into shades for his windows and porch. He enjoys doing his own cooking and he'll make you a wonderful cup of coffee by grinding the beans in an old- fashioned coffee grinder. He holds an almost permanent open house and is always happy to welcome a friend (or ten) to sit and trade gags for an evening. He has a party almost every Saturday night and the phone rings constantly with calls which usually say, "Vance, I'm coming up tonight but I'm with five other people, and ..." "Swell! Bring 'em up," is the usual answer. Ill-assorted or congenial, he sets them all to playing "Indications," a particularly noisy game with intellectual overtones. Everyone becomes loud and friendly. Once Vance found Fred Beck in one of his Saturday night groups, but can't remember how he got there.
He likes screwball comedy the best and particularly enjoys writing for comedians of that type. His love of music and literature encompasses all types of the two expressions. He is a superb pantomimist and enjoys that particular talent in others. He has boundless enthusiasm and is tremendously encouraging to any expression of talent. His constant companion is a slightly insane red cocker spaniel called O'Malley in honor of the fairy godfather in the "Barnaby" comic strip. O'Malley, according to Vance, loves to chase and retrieve sticks, though he plays on a hillside abounding in rabbits. "If I throw a stick into the bush, O'Malley goes after it, out jumps a rabbit, and O'Malley happily reappears with his stick. Should I try throwing rabbits?" queries Colvig.
Originally, it was cut-and-dried. The various shows had certain characters, though it appears The Yogi Bear Show was rushed into production and not all cartoons were ready when it debuted on January 30, 1961 (the same held true for Yogi’s replacement, Hokey Wolf, on The Huckleberry Hound Show; he finally appeared on the week of March 13, 1961, according to TV listings of the day).
Things started changing in the 1966-67 TV season. Mattel purchased licensing rights to the Huck show from Screen Gems and worked out a rather convoluted co-op ad agreement with Kellogg’s that meant Mattel ads on the Kellogg’s-sponsored Yogi Bear and Woody Woodpecker shows. It would appear, based on a story in Television Age of April 24, 1967, the individual cartoons were made available to stations as well.
But the half-hour Huck show carried on in one form or another into the 1970s and ‘80s. Reader Austin Kelly points out a 16mm reel of the show is being sold on eBay. The unusual thing is it does not contain a Huck cartoon. It has reruns of shorts starring Yogi Bear, Hokey Wolf and Yakky Doodle.
This mean the opening/closing animation had to change. The original from 1958 featured an assortment of Kellogg’s cereal mascots, eg. Tony the Tiger. It was reanimated to include Yakky and Hokey. It would appear the lettering card was re-used from the original closing.
Instead of Tony Junior getting his head bashed leaving the circus tent, Yakky gets the honour. Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.
There’s not a lot I can remember about these re-worked Huck mini-cartoons. The Kellogg’s rooster still appeared, even if Huck’s door is not in a circus tent any more.
Unfortunately, these frame-grabs from the mini-cartoons are a little ho-hum. Hanna-Barbera and/or Screen Gems didn’t seem to care that Pixie and Dixie weren’t in this cartoon; I couldn’t tell you if they were in the re-worked series.
Oh, the character on the Hokey Wolf title card below isn’t Yowp. It’s 1961 and Hanna-Barbera is already borrowing from itself. In the actual cartoon, some of the dog’s poses look like they came from Snuffles. While the hunter is English like Yowp’s owner, Daws Butler gave him a little faster delivery.
How many of these mini-cartoons are in the Hanna-Barbera archives is, I imagine, anyone’s guess. And I still hold out no hope we’ll ever see future volumes of Huckleberry Hound Show DVDs, including the ones featuring Hokey Wolf and the frames you see above.
Below is Yogi Bear.
Below is Mr. Jinks.
Below is Huckleberry Hound.
At least that’s who they are on this blog, and for those of you who watched the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons starting in 1958. Granted, in the earliest days, each artist drew the characters a little differently, but you knew who they were.
That isn’t what they’ll look like in a new series coming to American streaming service HBO Max.
Some readers seem to want my opinion of the new cartoons coming this week. I’m not sure why. My opinion doesn’t mean a whole lot.
I don’t have a television or subscribe to any streaming services, so I won’t be watching them.
From what I’ve seen, the character designs are not appealing to me, any more than similar design styles that are apparently popular these days. If you like them, fine. If you want to tune in these cartoons, it’s your money.
But here’s the thing I never understand when people try to bring back old characters.
I think in every instance, I hear about the love these newcomers have for the original cartoons. And in the same breath, they decide these characters they love so much have to be, as one web article put it, reinvented for a modern audience.
Why? Why do they need to be reinvented?
Why turn them into something else? Why not stick with what was appealing in the first place?
Is the “modern” viewing audience of young people really that much different today?
Huck was an “everyman,” getting into all kinds of situations. There was no end to potential plots. Now he’s married to a sitcom format where he’s a mayor and other H-B characters are given specific roles. It limits them.
No, my childhood will not be “ruined” by these streaming shorts, any more than they were by the misbegotten Yo Yogi! series. My childhood ended an awful long time ago. You can’t ruin something that doesn’t exist any more.
I’ve never bought the logic that “Oh, if young people see these cartoons, they’ll want to look at the old ones.” Why? They don’t even look like the old Ed Benedict designs. I can’t speak for specific stories and dialogue.
I am happy, though, that artists and writers found work through this new series and hope they enjoyed it. Voice actors will be waiting for those residual cheques. Good for them all. I like to see people employed.
And it could be worse, I suppose. Snagglepuss could be Tennessee Williams.
As for me, I am still quite content to watch the several hundred cartoons made in the ‘50s. They never talked down to me. Some missed the mark but there are enough good ones that I still get a smile after 60 years.
You don’t think of dramatic artwork when you think of the Flintstones comic strips. But occasionally it shines through, such as in the colour comic that appeared in newspapers on January 3, 1965 (a day earlier in Canada).
The five comics below are, unfortunately, black and white scans, but look at the composition in the long panel in the second row below. It outshines the final panel, which is a lovely piece of work, too.
Late note: Reader Keith Semmel correctly points out the last line is a play on the Tareyton cigarette commercials of the day, with the grammatically incorrect slogan "Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch" and pictures of people with one black eye.
The long panel in the second row of the January 10th comic is a nice bit of drawing as well, with a bit of perspective as the animal cases curl around on the left.
Betty appears for the second time in three weekends on January 17th; a bit of a rarity. The ending is a pun. I wonder how this would work in foreign languages.
For some reason, Fred says “That’s an incinerator!” when it’s clearly marked as such. There’s really no need to label it if he’s going to say it. I’m not sure why the eggs equate to a small fortune as it’s not set up in the comic. This is from January 24th. Is that Don Messick I hear squawking?
The month concludes on January 31st with no appearance of Dino. All five comics revolve around Fred, none around Pebbles As we’ve mentioned before, Mr. Slate was mainly a TV character. Fred had different bosses in the newspaper comics.
Click on any of the comics to make them larger.
Jurwich attended George Washington High School in South Los Angeles in the early ‘50s, drawing cartoons for the student newspaper. He wasn’t one of the H-B originals in 1957 but he was around then. In an interview with the Animation Guild, he revealed he began his career in the mid-‘50s at Graphic Films, a small commercial studio in Los Angeles run by ex-Disney artist Les Novros. His co-workers included Ted Parmelee and Paul Julian, who had both recently been at UPA. (He had called Disney about work and he was told he wouldn’t make enough to support a family). Jurwich was painting backgrounds on films for the U.S. Air Force and one on smog being made by Julian.
He bounced around freelancing at other industrial studios in the city—Ray Patin, Film Fair, Quartet Films—mainly doing layouts and backgrounds on commercials, but also found employment with Jay Ward on the Rocky and His Friends series under George Singer. Unfortunately, the drinking water in Mexico City didn’t quite agree with him and he had to return to the U.S.
Don decided he wanted a regular job and heard Hanna-Barbera was hiring, so that’s where he ended up for a time. Among The Flintstones episodes he laid out were “Adobe Dick” (1964) and “Fred’s Flying Lesson” (1965). His experience at the time was “wonderful in some ways. It [the studio on Cahuenga] was a big bull-pen with just partitioned cubicles, and you could hear everybody. And so everyone was joking and carrying on and talking and yelling across.”
Iwao Takamoto was in charge of the layout/background department then. Don said “He was another brilliant guy...never disciplined the department ever. He would correct your work but he just let everyone run crazy. It was great fun.”
Don did some more bouncing: over to Format Films to write a couple of Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons released by Warner Bros.; back to Jay Ward for George of the Jungle (he said the artists were disappointed it lasted only one season and felt ABC was out to cancel the show); and finally back at Hanna-Barbera, where he enjoyed his work on Tom and Jerry Kids and Droopy: Master Detective. (Note: This is not a post about lists of cartoons; you can read and post lists on other sites).
Jurwich revealed he was surprised to find out his duties as a producer at Hanna-Barbera involved voice directing. “I came to the office one day and they said ‘Hey, you’ve got to do a Captain Caveman today’,” and found he had to direct Mel Blanc. Don decided to ask him during a break about working with Warner Bros. and Jack Benny. Surprisingly, Mel began ranting “They never gave me a nickel! They never gave me any credit!” Jurwich cut the conversation short and didn’t ask about Benny.
In later years, Jurwich corrected storyboards and worked closely with Joe Barbera. When it came to cartoon story, “It was his life. That’s what he loved to do,” Don remembered. “For all the limited animation that we did, I think a lot of it was character-driven, and I think that worked a lot. And Joe was good at that. He could develop characters.”
The studio was pretty busy, and once the cartoon was in the pipeline, it buzzed through. “There just wasn’t the time [to make big adjustments along the way],” Jurwich recalled. “Once you got a script that was okay, you put in the storyboarding, maybe...you’d punch up the storyboards a bit; you had some time there. Then it went into layout and animation.
To give you an idea about the workload, “When I was there one season on The Smurfs, I did 13 ninety-minute shows. And a Christmas special,” he revealed. “I would have to read a lot of scripts on the weekends, but I did it usually at home because I was a single parent at that time. And the Scoobys, we used to do not just 13 half-hours, we used to do 24 half-hours. And later when we were doing the Tom and Jerry Kids show and Droopys [in the early ‘90s], I think over four years we did over 200, seven-minute cartoons. That was another grind.”
And all this was after Jurwich had recovered from a heart attack caused, he believed, by stress dealing with network people, promising them one thing then finding Bill Hanna had countermanded him without telling him.
He stayed through the sale of the company and the move from the famous building on Cahuenga Drive to Sherman Oaks and developed some cartoons with Jerry Eisenberg. One was “Stinky Stegosaurus” and another was “Yoink! of the Yukon.”
Donald Lee Jurwich was born on New Year’s Day 1934. We send our condolences to his family. You can hear the complete interview referred to above at this site.
Well, here it is December in Bedrock, and there’s no snow. In fact, there’s rain in one of the Sunday Flintstones comics in December 1964.
We get summer-time activities, too, including badminton and fishing. Plus Fred’s favourite sport, bowling.
The composition, as usual, is just great on these and the final panels are always a treat. They’re never crowded.
December 6th. Fine angles on Fred here. Betty makes an appearance. The opening panel's good, too, with Barney being rolled in mid-air by Bamm-Bamm, whose club is nearby on the ground.
December 13th. Again, the extra characters and props are a treat. I'm a sucker for volcanos. The "Game Reserve" panel has a silhouette car and dinosaurs in the background. Dig the angry creature at the end.
December 20th. A rocket-shaped Fred goes aloft when the pterodactyl grabs his fishing line. Love the fish.
December 27th. Gurp! And a swearing bird. And a sheepish Fred. All in the last panel. Admirable angle on the car in the opening panel. I think this may be Cathy's only appearance. I guess Fred's being cheap (as opposed to "cheep"), hence the egg-bowling ball.
Click on any of the comics to make them bigger.
Voices! We need voices!
