A Part of the Life of Joe Montell

It’s a nice surprise to stumble across anything that tells us something about people who worked in animation once upon a time. We’re fortunate historians managed to interview some of them before it became too late (over and over again, in Chuck Jones’ case) but many others fell through the cracks because they became out-of-sight/out-of-mind.

Joe Montell fell through the cracks. Unfortunately, Joe is amongst the many who worked in the early days at Hanna-Barbera who can’t be interviewed because he has passed away. Three years ago today, in fact, so I’m using the occasion to post a couple of notes about him.

Montell was born June 24, 1925 in Porterville, California. He apparently was a medic in the U.S Navy during World War Two and afterwards studied art in Italy on the G.I. Bill., leaving from New York in 1949 and returning with his new wife Grazia in 1951. How he got into animation is a mystery to be uncovered but his name first appears on credits at MGM in the Tex Avery unit, where Johnny Johnsen had been the long-time background artist. He worked on three cartoons, all released in late 1954: the unfortunate Farm of Tomorrow, The Flea Circus and Dixieland Droopy.

The 1950s was a flourishing time in Hollywood for industrial and commercial animation houses. One of the biggest producers of industrial films was John Sutherland Productions, where top talents like Bill Scott, George Gordon and Carl Urbano were paid to ply their trade to aid Corporate America. The Sutherland cartoons are well animated and designed and it’s a shame so few of them are available for viewing. Montell constructed the backgrounds on probably my favourite of the lot, 1956’s Destination Earth, designed by Vic Haboush and Tom Oreb. Since not all of the cartoons are in circulation, it’s difficult to say how many others he worked on, but his name is in the credits of Your Safety First (also 1956).



So, with a bit of a gap, that brings us to Montell arriving at Hanna-Barbera in 1959. The company had expanded to add The Quick Draw McGraw Show and the theatrical Loopy De Loop cartoons to its production schedule and Montell and Dick Thomas (from Disney, ex-Warners) were hired as background artists. To the great annoyance of anyone interested in knowing who worked on what, the credits have been shorn from many of the individual cartoons in the 1959-60 season, including all the Quick Draws and almost all the ones on The Huckleberry Hound Show. However, the available credits on cartoons in the Yowp vault show Montell was the background artist for Papa Yogi, Heavens to Jinksie, Big Top Pop (Augie), Masquerader Raider, Motor Knows Best and Monkey Wrenched (all Snooper).



You’re out of luck if you expect some kind of critical analysis of his artwork at Hanna-Barbera, or a comparison of his stylistic choices to those of colleagues like Monte, Art Lozzi or even the fairly conservative Dick Thomas. That’s simply not my forte. However, I’d love to read comments from anyone knowledgeable in that realm. I noticed one thing in a couple of Montell’s cartoons, though. He placed little dots at the tops of trees or bushes in both Papa Yogi and the Augie cartoon. Whether that is something that comes from the background artist or is indicated in layout, I don’t know.

Despite the continued expansion at Hanna-Barbera, Montell left the studio that year. Both he and Gerard Baldwin went to work for Jay Ward on the Rocky and Bullwinkle series. And the two of them were among several Americans who ended up in Mexico toward the end of the year overseeing the slowly-improving output from Val-Mar/Gamma Productions. Historian Keith Scott reveals Montell became head of the layout department after a management change on August 31, 1962. Montell stayed with Gamma to oversee Ward’s Hoppity Hooper series (1964-65) and The Beagles (1966-67), an obscure product of Total Television Productions. And, with that, it appears Montell’s animation career ended and he moved back to the United States.

Art wasn’t Montell’s only talent. He was an inventor, a writer and an accomplished rug maker, and managed to combine all talents into one. The Los Angeles Times of May 19, 1968 featured an article by Felice Paramore about a product by Montell Design Enterprises. It began:

The Go-Go-Go Needle
Thanks to a new hooking needle developed by designer-painter Joe Montell of Newport Beach it is now possible to make a plain or sculptured 4-by-6-foot rug in 12 hours of hooking time. This is just a fraction of the time taken by former methods of hand hooking. Wall hangings pillows hassocks and chair coverings are some of the other decorative and useful items that can be created with the needle.

Montell wrote two books, The Art of Speed Tufting (1977) and Rug Crafters Catalog 1979 (1978) and was granted three parents for inventions involving yarn and rug making.

And so we lose sight of Montell until 2007, when this little biography appeared on a web site. Montell had moved to the retirement spot of Patagonia, Arizona, population 825. It reads:

Jude Weierman and Joseph Montell
Dog lovers both, they've got three, with a combined weight of more than 250 pounds, Jude and Joe "immigrated" to Patagonia via Laguna Beach, CA eight years ago. Jude retired from the California Parks District in 1994 and now spends his time hiking up Red Mountain and walking the three "kids." He's also active in the Santa Cruz Singers, the Friends of the Patagonia Library, and his homeowners association. Joe was an art director on the Rocky and Bullwinkle show, and is a trained weaver who has lived in both Italy and Mexico. Today, he's painting and sculpting his way through retirement.

Perhaps appropriately considering Montell worked on Yogi Bear cartoons, Jude was a ranger.

Joseph John Montell died Friday, January 18, 2008, age 82.

But that’s not quite the end of the story.

Montell apparently wrote another book in 2000 under a nom-de-plume; at least, web searches turn up his name as the author. It is Lotus on a Dung Heap: Memoirs of a Gay Artist and reviews indicate it tells the story of a navy medic in World War Two who comes out, moves to Italy, returns to the U.S., is sent to Mexico by a film company that employs him, returns again to the U.S. and eventually heads to San Francisco where he volunteers at an AIDS Centre help phone then as a compassion buddy for men dying from the horrible syndrome. I can’t say whether it’s an actual autobiography or a story using parts of Montell’s life as a starting point because I haven’t seen the book. But it did get a favourable on-line review from an anonymous reader in Patagonia.

Regardless, Joe Montell was a part of early television animation history and it’s appropriate, on this date, to remember his contributions.

Yogi Bear — Papa Yogi

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – George Nicholas; Layout – Walt Clinton; Backgrounds – Joe Montell; Story – Warren Foster; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Lawrence Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Yogi, Dad 2 – Daws Butler; Boo Boo, Dad 1, Ranger Smith, Picnic Emcee, Pie Eating/Sack Dad – Don Messick.
Music: Jack Shaindlin, Bill Loose/John Seely, Geordie Hormel.
Episode: Huckleberry Hound Show K-030, Production E-70.
First aired: week of October 26, 1959 (rerun, week of May 30, 1960).
Plot: Yogi and Boo Boo enter the games at a Father-Son Picnic at Jellystone Park to make off with some food.

The word “satire” was used a fair bit in the late ‘50s to describe the Hanna-Barbera cartoons and this one is a great example why. Warren Foster’s absolute cynicism about parenting and marriage is what drives the plot of this cartoon. It features a bus-load of fathers who have absolutely no interest in taking their sons to a picnic because they know the end result—they’ll spend their time making food for their bottomless-stomached boys and they’ll all get sick. They’ve resigned themselves to doing what they think fathers in the 1950s are supposed to do, living out some kind of pre-determined domestic script of life.

Boo Boo: Are those fathers over there?
Yogi: Could be. They look pretty miserable to me.
Dad 1: How many hot dogs we gotta make, George?
Dad 2: About a million of ‘em.
Dad 1: Who dreamed up this father-son picnic?
Dad 2: The mothers. Who else?

And Foster puts a little more emotion into Boo Boo in this one, too. He’s not a lemming or a conscience. He’s got a mind of his own. At the beginning, he gets excited about the prospect of a picnic while Yogi tries to bluff that he can read the ‘picnic’ banner on the bus. And, even better, he’s absolutely pissed off at Yogi for trying to con him into entering a sack race. Look at the pose at the bottom right.



The animation here is by George Nicholas who came up with the best Yogi cartoons in the second season of the Huck show, meaning he did the best Yogi cartoons ever. Don Patterson and Ed Love did stellar Yogis that year, too, but there’s something about Nicholas’ work I like. He crafts some funny poses and Yogi’s always attractively drawn. Nicholas gave Yogi a big mouth with a floppy tongue (and did the same with Fred in the first season of The Flintstones). In a Nicholas cartoon in this season, Yogi’s nose crinkles when his mouth is wide, too. All three animators are helped by the fact Foster hasn’t chained Yogi to the familiar ‘beat Ranger Smith’ formula which limited the character instead of expanding him. There’s a ranger in this cartoon but he doesn’t hover over the whole plot; the real focus is on Yogi in the various events at the picnic.

Joe Montell handled backgrounds in this one and joins with fellow ex-Avery unit guy Walt Clinton in giving us some effective fall colours of browns and greens. I like the two and three-tone trees in the opening as the rented school bus makes its way to the park. And I don’t know whether Clinton was responsible for this in layout, but this cartoon also features trees in the background that form kind of a hump shape (see below right). They have dots for leaves at the top of bare branches. You can see this in other cartoons too, like ‘Nottingham and Yeggs.’ The shape makes the background a little more interesting.

The cartoon begins with the aforementioned bus followed by a long shot of Yogi and Boo Boo watching it go by, Boo Boo reading the ‘picnic’ banner, the bears moving in for a closer look and watching the forlorn dads you read about above. Then they move in to do some mooching (“Who’s kid is he?” asks one dad of the other, referring to Boo Boo). Nicholas doesn’t let Yogi just stand there bobbing his head. He gives us a pose.



One of the dads offers Yogi an olive. The bear is indignant. He reaches for the strawberry cake in close-up (Daws loved changing the word to “strawmberry”. Huck says it in ‘Little Red Riding Huck’). We get a series of funny hand-violence drawings. One is to the right.

Ranger Smith shows up to warn Yogi about the rules against feeding the park bears. Yogi vibrates to a stop when the ranger calls him. The bear lies that the dads were trying to force-feed him. After expressing remorse, Yogi gives a hammy exit off-stage, pledging to “melt back into the forest.” The camera shakes, then pans to Yogi smashed against a tree. “The forest was closer than I estimated,” he tells us.



Yogi now engages in a tactic that became familiar: he tries to get around the ranger’s order by taking it literally. Since the picnic is for fathers and sons, Yogi steals clothes from some campers so he and Boo Boo can pass as a father and son. Let the contest gags begin.

Yogi easily wins the pie-eating contest, then has a little difficulty exiting out of the scene when the ranger spots him.



Boo Boo doesn’t win the sack race because of Yogi’s instruction to load up the sack with goodies. Instead, a father brings the Boo Boo-in-a-sack back to Yogi. “Keep him away from the picnic table, huh? We don’t want the kids getting sick.”

Finally, it’s the peanut rolling contest. Yogi rolls the peanut right up Ranger Smith’s body to his nose. The bear makes yet another quick exit from the scene and camera shake follows. Yogi smashes into a tree. But this time, it falls on the picnic table to end the afternoon for the fathers and sons. “Double the guard at the games!” yells the ranger into a phone. “Get out the bloodhounds. I want that bear!” Even Ranger Smith gets a big open mouth that Nicholas liked drawing in his early cartoons at Hanna-Barbera.



So we’ve reached the final scene where the bus now leaves through the gate to Jellystone. Cut to a close-up of weary dads and sleeping boys.

Dad 1: I had 12 hot dogs and the kid had eight. Plus ten bottles of sodie pop. Ohhhhh.
Dad 2: So what? I had 15 dogs, three bags of chips, four bags of peanuts. And the kid had more’n me. Oh, I feel awful.

The camera pans to Yogi and Boo Boo in the back seat. Yogi is hunched in to fit.

Boo Boo: Do you think we’ll ever get back in the park, Yogi?
Yogi: What’s wrong with being a human being? They never stop eating. Boy, oh boy, oh boy!

And we get a Yogi slurpy tongue to end the cartoon, another sign that George Nicholas has been at work. He did the same thing in ‘Hoodwinked Bear.’



Some friendly, familiar music greets you during the cartoon. The sound cutter tosses in a fast Hormel cue for the peanut roll, which helps accent the pace.

0:00 - Yogi Bear sub main title theme (Curtin). 0:25 - LAF-21-3 RECESS (Shaindlin) – Bus goes into Jellystone, Yogi and Boo Boo behind tree.
1:11 - LAF-10-7 GROTESQUE No. 2 (Shaindlin) – Fathers at picnic table, Ranger lectures Yogi, Yogi hits tree.
2:51 - TC-300 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Yogi and Boo Boo borrow clothes.
3:19 - LAF-4-6 PIXIE PRANKS (Shaindlin) – Pie eating contest, sack race.
5:01 - LAF-7-12 FUN ON ICE (Shaindlin) – Boo Boo begs to quit, Yogi rushes to enter peanut racing contest.
5:27 - ZR-47 LIGHT MOVEMENT (Hormel) – Peanut race, Yogi rolls peanut up ranger’s body.
6:00 - TC-201 PIXIE COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Ranger yells at Yogi, tree falls on picnic table, ranger yells in phone.
6:32 - LAF-21-3 RECESS (Shaindlin) – Bus leaves Jellystone, Yogi and Boo Boo in back seat.
7:09 - Yogi Bear sub end title theme (Curtin).

Mike Maltese, a Dear Man

If I had to pick one person who has had an effect on my sense of humour, it’d be Mike Maltese. One of my quirks as a young cartoon viewer was staring at the credits at the start or finish of each cartoon. And pretty soon, I realised just about any cartoon with the name ‘Michael Maltese’ on it was going to be funny.

Maltese’s work was silly, corny, pun-filled and inventive. Who else would come up with the gag of Bugs Bunny baking a cake just so the Sheriff of Nottingham could land face first in it (Rabbit Hood, 1949)? Or a faux Guy Lombardo record that’s a square shape (Real Gone Woodpecker, 1954)? Or the simple premise of “the butler did it” and turn it into an escalating heap of accusations built on its own twist of logic (Daffy Dilly, 1948)? Or Snagglepuss’ pun-laden mock-theatric declamations (“Don’t foreclose the mortgage! Five-close, even”)? Or have characters call themselves by the way they might be described in a theatre’s playbill (ie. “typical helpless western rancher’s daughter”)? Maltese’s odd slant on things extended into his home life. He owned the head of a stuffed “jackalope” and a 1950 home photo shows him with a rooster that laid an egg.

A long time ago, I bought a copy of Joe Adamson’s Tex Avery, King of Cartoons and may have more excited to find it contained an interview with Mike Maltese than one with Avery himself. Maltese explained how he arrived at the Schlesinger studio on the Warner Bros. lot in 1937, more or less because of his wife, was hired at $20 a week as an in-betweener, and then moved into the story department in August 1939. Mike Barrier’s exhaustively-researched Hollywood Cartoons reveals Maltese wasn’t shy about looking out for his own career. He craftily overcame the BS thrown at him by the old boys’ network in the story department (story head Bugs Hardaway left the studio not long after losing the showdown). He didn’t wait for Warners to dump him when it announced in June 1953 it was closing the studio until further notice. The same day, he was hired by the Walter Lantz studio; no doubt he put out feelers two months earlier when the studio laid off the McKimson unit. The closure lasted six months; Maltese came back 14 months later with a raise negotiated by Chuck Jones (what his union thought of that is anyone’s guess). And his departure from Warners a few years later seems equally sudden. Robert J. McKinnon wrote in his book Stepping into the Picture: Cartoon Designer Maurice Noble:

For the Jones unit, the departure of Michael Maltese was a particularly striking blow as his contributions had been integral to the team’s success for so many years. In late 1958, Maltese was hired by the Hanna-Barbera studio to write for their new limited animation television cartoons featuring characters like Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound and The Flintstones, all of which became highly successful. Noble recalled his arrival back at WB after his second stint at Sutherland: “I went into the studio and looked in Mike’s room, and found he was gone. When I asked Chuck about it, he told me Mike had left the studio, along with some others [such as layout man Bob Givens]. There was no big farewell or anything like that. It was kind of sad.”

Maltese’s influence extended beyond the story room. He appeared on camera in You Ought to be in Pictures (1940). He lent his voice to several cartoons, apparently including the Snafu short Rumors (1943). And he appeared in caricature in Wackiki Wabbit (1943) and Rocket-Bye Baby (1956) as the immortal Captain Schmideo.

Just as Maltese flourished at Warners, especially in the Jones unit, he flourished in the early days at Hanna-Barbera. Jones himself noted in the book Conversations, with Maureen Furniss:

When Mike Maltese was my writer, he did one picture every five weeks. When he went to Hanna-Barbara, he was asked to do a half-hour show a week. I don’t know how you multiply things like that, but it’s murderous.

Maltese worked up stories for 78, seven-minute cartoons for The Quick Draw McGraw Show—and that was just for the first season. Despite that, the cartoons are still funny. Viewers got Quick Draw, who couldn’t figure out when to shoot and when to blow the smoke from his gun barrel, Snooper locating a Snow White who shouted about calla lilies in bloom and Doggie Daddy commenting on the cartoon in progress to the people at home.

The story department was a perfect place for Maltese. He was never noted for his adept drawing skills—Bob Givens once said he’d take Maltese’s raw drawings and work them up into something more usable to animators—but Noble told this story:

“Mike and I regularly went out to lunch together outdoors, sometimes browsing for antiques. During one of our lunch hours, I happened to have my paints with me and a small piece of black matting board. After he had eaten, Mike sat down and painted a charming abstract which he signed and later left on my desk. When I went in to thank him for it and tell him how interesting I thought it was, with that twinkle in his eye, he said ‘I had fun! I just wanted to show you I was an artist.’ I treasure that little painting.

Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna both praised Maltese in their autobiographies and in some media interviews at the time the cartoons was made. And one reporter actually interviewed him, a rarity considering the relative anonymity of people who worked on cartoons and the short shrift (and hostility, in some cases) non-Disney animation received from critics and reviewers until some time in the mid-‘70s. I posted this on the GAC forum three years ago but want to re-print it here. It’s from the New York Herald-Tribune Syndicate for newspapers of January 3, 1960.

Crosby's TV and Radio
The Man Behind McGraw
By John Crosby
Mike Maltese is a cartoonist who started in animation in Hollywood about 20 years ago. He’s never heard of Feiffer and probably never heard of Low or Mauldin either. He’s a West Coast boy who can mimic almost any voice he’s ever heard, can actually make a line drawing of himself by sheer will power and native acting talent, and is now a very successful cartoonist for television.
He draws three frames simultaneously for his cartoon strip “Quick Draw McGraw” which my kids rarely miss. This is a kiddie strip but it’s satiric and adult enough to make me laugh. “Quick Draw McGraw” is also fairly significant in that it is typical of cartoons that are drawn entirely for television. Most of the cartoons on television originally (and still) were drawn years and years ago for theatre audiences which, of course, are largely composed of adults.
Where the Money Is
MALTESE explains, “The reason so many cartoonists are now working for television is that that is where the money is from. Movie exhibitors couldn’t afford to pay enough for cartoons because of the double features and all. But working for theatrical cartoons I worked much less. I wrote eight cartoon features a year. Since I’ve been working for television, I’ve done in seven months about eight years worth of stories. This medium eats the stuff up.”
According to Maltese, animated cartoons began orignally as picturized nursery rhymes for the movie houses. When they came on, adults would excuse themselves and go out for a smoke. In order to keep the adults in their seats, the cartoonists started doing their own stories including satire, which would be over the kids’ heads without losing them.
A Long Way
“I’ve been in the cartoon business for 25 years and, I’ve been in every department. Animated cartoons arrived with Walt Disney and they’ve come a long way since that. Until recently the only cartoons on television were old ones done for the movie theatres.
“Hanna and Barbara, the outfit I’m with, were the first to come out with products which have all the crispness and technical finesse you’d find in theatrical cartoons despite the handicap of supplying so much more than theater use.
“In filling the schedule, they were forced to work out a technique of animation that would be faster, actually faster than that used in theatrical cartoons. In TV animation we have to do about 300 feet of animation a week, as opposed to about 25 feet for theatrical cartoons. Some are a little jerky but, on the whole, they’re expert jobs.
Learned from Chaplin
“As a boy I was a great fan of the silent pictures. In 1913 I saw Chaplin and I came alive.” It still shows in his work.
“I went home and I made up as Chaplin. There isn't a film of his I haven’t seen over and over. He showed me how closely humor is to tragedy.
“And the original ‘Mark of Zorro’ with Douglas Fairbanks with its chases and its humor depended very much on the sort of action and pace cartoons use now. I’m going to draw Quick Draw as Zorro one day.”
An Exclusive Club
“In the cartoon business,” says Maltese, “no one can take the credit for the finished product. One hand washes the other. The beautiful part of animated cartoons is that, even though we may all hate each other, everyone is working for the same thing. You can’t tell where one animator leaves off and the other begins.
“No, I don’t mind the anonymity. We animators are a sort of exclusive club and none of us would want to do anything else.”
Then he sighs and adds: “Except—I might have been a comedian in pictures.”

Despite the workload, Maltese had time for side jobs. Of course, he had done comic book work while still at Warners. And, local newspapers published this announcement, dated March 3, 1961:

Michael Maltese and Florence Maltese, husband and wife, as joint tenants, are now conducting an animated cartoon writing business as co-partners at 6315 Ben Avenue, North Hollywood, California, under the fictitious firm name of FANFARE PRODUCTIONS.

Evidently, Mike and Florrie moved their business later that year. Their new abode made news in the Desert Sentinel of June 15, 1961:

Noted TV Writer Builds Home Here
Mr. and Mrs. Michael Maltese will soon occupy their new home at 66-938 Buena Vista which was designed and constructed by Lindley C. Richardson, local building contractor.
Mr. Maltese is a TV and screen writer and expects to do a great part of his work in the relaxing atmosphere of Desert Hot Springs.

Maltese managed to live long enough to see the beginning of research into—and appreciation of—the shorts he had worked on years earlier that had received the kind of exposure on television they never could get in theatres. The research manifested itself in fanzines and books, then exploded with the internet. Ed Benedict’s death several years ago never would have received the same amount of coverage had it happened in 1981, when Maltese passed away. But 1981 was long enough for Maltese to merit a separate on the Associated Press wire:

Roadrunner cartoonist dies at 73
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 23 (AP) — Michael Maltese, who created several cartoon characters and helped create the Roadrunner and the Coyote, has died at age 73 following a six-month bout with cancer.
Maltese, who died yesterday at Good Samaritan Hospital, shared several awards for his writing and animation, including Academy, Emmy and Annie awards.
He was the creator of the French skunk Pepe LaPue [sic] and while with Hanna Barbera Productions helped create and write for such cartoons as the Flintstones, Jetsons, Augie Doggie, Quick Draw McGraw and Tom and Jerry.
While with Warner Bros., he worked on Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Yosemite Sam cartoons.
He worked with Chuck Jones to develop the Roadrunner and the Coyote.
Maltese began his career working on Betty Boop cartoons at Max Fleischer’s studio in New York City, where he was born. He moved to Hollywood in 1937.

Mike Maltese is even part of the social media he never could have dreamed of. Family members have set up a Facebook page for him. It’s HERE.

We’ll leave the final words on Mike Maltese—of course, you can post yours in the comment section—to Warners co-worker Maurice Noble’s biography:

“We were so fortunate to have Mike Maltese, who had a ‘pixie’ quality—by this I mean a twinkle in his eye, a wonderful sense of humor, and a zany slant on things. Full of ideas,” said Maurice. “There was never a written script at Warner Bros. The writers had to draw their ideas. Of course, Mike’s drawings were not as refined or beautiful to look at as Chuck’s or the animators.’ But that’s not what he was there for. His rough drawings were there to develop the story and, believe me, Mike’s storyboards were often very, very funny. And he’d write dialogue to go with the drawings, which Chuck would ultimately nail down. If Mike wanted to put over a gag, he had to lead up to it with the situations he created in his drawings, until there was a payoff.”...

Maurice would often look in on Mike at work on a story and say “So, you’re throwing another bomb,” challenging him to abandon a violent gag and come up with a more interesting solution to a situation. “I can still see Mike hiding his face in mock shame when I’d catch him using a violent gag, which we both knew was the ‘easy way out.’ Mike could make such a rich storyboard in terms of gags and special touches. Chuck sometimes couldn’t get it all in the picture. And he knew how important his contributions were to so many pictures, yet never had an inflated ego. He was a marvellous, talented individual, an indispensable part of the unit, and a dear man.”

Snooper and Blabber — Wild Man, Wild!

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Ken Muse; Layout – Ed Benedict; Backgrounds – Bob Gentle; Story – Mike Maltese; Story Director – Alex Lovy; Titles – Lawrence Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Snooper, Blabber, Professor Schloompf – Daws Butler; Narrator, Gubba-Gubba – Don Messick; Hazel, Eloise – Jean Vander Pyl.
Music: Jack Shaindlin, Phil Green, Harry Bluestone-Emil Cadkin.
First Aired: week of March 14, 1960 (repeat, week of Sept. 19, 1960).
Production: Quick Draw McGraw M-026; Production No J-75.
Plot: Snooper and Blabber are hired to find Gubba-Gubba, who escaped after being brought to North America from the jungle.

With Mike Maltese and Ed Benedict on board, you’d expect a stronger, funnier cartoon than this. Benedict provides a pre-Flintstone, loinskin-wearing character and Maltese has a great ending (showing why reviewers kept calling the show “satiric”) but the rest of the cartoon really lacks punch. It’s too bad, because Maltese might have taken parts of the storyline of Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942) and stirred in the bumbling detectives to make a great parody. This was the fourth-last of 78 cartoons put into production in the 1959-60 season and Maltese may have been running on fumes considering the workload. Tony Benedict, a clever writer who arrived at Hanna-Barbera some time in 1960, wrote on a web-site not too long ago:

Mike Maltese deserves a great deal more recognition. Besides everything else he did, Mike wrote an entire television series for Hanna Barbera (Quick Draw McGraw) including every bit of dialogue, story and staging. No script, just storyboards. This happened before the tv networks discovered the gold in them thar cartoon hills. The shows were extremely cheap to produce and the networks could not get enough of them fast enough. Script approvals were not in place yet. Mike only had to please Joe Barbera with his stuff and it went straight into production. From 1960 to 1966 was the sweet age of tv H&B cartoons before it was sold thanks to Mike Maltese.

So, you can’t blame Maltese for a weary misstep along the way.


It takes awhile for Snooper and Blabber to do much in this cartoon. They don’t even appear at the beginning as we focus on the Explorers Club (different than the Adventurers Club that Maltese invented for the Snagglepuss cartoons). First, Professor Schloompf (which is how TV listings show his name) announces to a motley group of explorers he is going to civilise Gubba-Gubba, a wild man from some unnamed jungle where blonds apparently reside. The term “Gubba Gubba” is close enough to Charlie Shows’ baby-talk in the Yogi Bear cartoon Bear on a Picnic from the previous TV season.



After Gubba eats a banana peel and a watch, the professor opens a window to show the wild man civilisation. The noise scares him and he jumps out the window and runs away on a rooftop past the same fire escape three times. So we’re two minutes into the cartoon and we haven’t heard much of Maltese’s famed off-beat dialogue yet.



And we haven’t really reached the plot, either. We have a little diversion now as Snooper launches into what was becoming an increasingly common routine—dialogue between Snoop and his secretary Hazel via radio. The device served a few good purposes. It gave Maltese a place to toss in some dialogue gags that didn’t have anything to do with the plot. It also gave Maltese a chance to have Snoop work off another character than just Blab to freshen the series. And it gave the animators easy footage because Hazel was never seen; all they had to do was animate a cycle of dashes or lines from a background drawing of a car radio speaker.

Maltese doesn’t come up with a gem this time:

Hazel: Hazel to Snoop. Hazel to Snoop. Come in, Snoop. Come in, Snoop.
Snoop: Snoop to Hazel. Snoop to et cetera. Uh, go ahead, et cetera.
Hazel: Hey, Chief. This is Hazel. What’s this “et cetera” stuff?
Snoop: “Et cetera” is Latin for “telephone gal.”

Hazel sends them off to the Explorers Club on their latest case. Blab looks out the window and all he sees is “a nice-looking TV repairman.” There’s a shot of Gubba on a TV antennae. “Eureka, Blab. I think you’ve spotted our quandary,” says Snoop, who dispatches Blab with a violin onto the roof to sooth the savage beast “into a pair of handcuffs.” Even Maltese is wearying of his own puns:

Blab: I’ll play ‘Humoresque.’ Maybe it’ll humour him.
Snoop (tiredly): Oh, boy.

And, indeed, Blab (well, perhaps someone hired by Hoyt Curtin) does start to play Anton Dvořák’s famous piece. Off-camera, Gubba smashes the violin over Blab. “It’s a good thing I wasn’t playing a piana,” opines Blab.

Maltese doesn’t even give us a “Stop in the name of...” pun. We get a dull “Stop in the name of the law” from Snoop. Let’s go through the other gags.

• Snoop corners Gubba at the edge of the roof and whips out a match. “It’s fire. You are paralysed with ignoramus fear,” cries Snoop. Gubba whips out a cigar. You know what a cigar means in a cartoon. Kaboom.



• Blab is dressed as a blond wildman to befriend and trap Gubba (“here’s where the thick plottens,” says Snoop). Gubba instead grabs the mouse and runs off with him into a laundry. Gubba sees Snoop, drops Blab and jumps into a washer. (“Maybe he’ll come clean and give himself up,” giggles Blab).



• After more jokeless dialogue, the professor arrives at the laundry. Blab opens the top of the washer and Gubba floats up and out of trap door of some kind on the roof. Gubba’s hair has been fluff-dried into a curly mass which, for reasons of cartoon comedy, gives it a helium quality.

As hard as it is to believe, the cartoon’s just about over. We’ve reached the final scene where Snooper and Blabber are driving through the middle of downtown wondering about the fate of Gubba-Gubba, who they gave up chasing a year earlier. (“The only blotch on me brilliant et-scutcheon,” says Snoop). But suddenly, downtown turns into a suburb where our heroes spot Gubba in a Hawaiian shirt mowing the lawn. Gubba’s forlorn explanation is interrupted by his henpecking wife, who has the same head design as he does. “She captured me,” he moans. “Did you finish the lawn? Did you beat the rugs?” she nags as she tells him to take the triplets to the playground. Then comes the best line of the cartoon:



Snooper: Isn’t it great what civilisation has done for Gubba-Gubba, Blab?

Yes, a woman has done what the professor could not: turn a wild man into the typical, average, modern, North American husband. Cartoon style.

Eloise: Don’t let the children get dirty.
Gabba: Yes, dear.
Eloise: And pick up the groceries.
Gabba: Yes, dear.
Eloise: And blah, blah, blah, blah.
Gabba: Yes, dear. Yes, dear. Yes, dear. Yes, dear.

In case you were wondering, Mike and Florrie Maltese had a long, happy marriage that ended only with his death in 1981. They wed (in New York?) before he arrived at Warners in 1937.

The sound cutter actually has a piece of ‘Humoresque’ on the sound track. Snippets of classical music weren’t generally used as gags at H-B. The little hoppy music when the professor opens the windows is actually the introductory bars to Jack Shaindlin’s piece that reminds me of happy, frolicking squirrels heard in several different series at that time.

0:00 - Snooper and Blabber Main Title theme (Curtin).
0:25 - GR-74 POPCORN (Green) – Shot of Explorers Club, Schloompf takes the stage.
0:42 - CAPERS (Shaindlin) – Gubba-Gubba in cage, drops professor.
1:12 - CB-85A STEALTHY MOUSE (Cadkin-Bluestone) – Gubba eats banana and watch.
1:40 - jaunty bassoon and skippy strings intro (Shaindlin) – Professor opens window, Gabba jumps off flag pole.
2:00 - LFU-117-2 MAD RUSH No. 2 (Shaindlin) – Gubba runs on rooftop.
2:12 - GR-58 GOING SHOPPING (Green) – Snoop and Blab in car, Hazel dialogue.
2:58 - GR-93 DRESSED TO KILL (Green) – Snooper talks to professor, Gubba on antenna, Blab walks with violin.
3:36 - HUMORESQUE (Dvořák) – Blab plays violin, instrument crushed.
3:40 - GR-76 POPCORN SHORT BRIDGE No. 2 (Green) – Blab ‘piano’ line.
3:45 - LFU-117-2 MAD RUSH No. 2 (Shaindlin) – Gubba runs away, stops at edge of roof.
3:57 - GR-457 THE ARTFUL DODGER (Green) – Fire/cigar scene.
4:28 - GR-456 DOCTOR QUACK (Green) – Blab pretends to be wild man, grabbed by Gubba-Gubba.
4:52 - ASININE (Shaindlin) – Gubba runs off with Blab into laundry; jumps into washer, “come clean.”
5:17 - GR-456 DOCTOR QUACK (Green) – Snooper on phone to professor, Gubba floats into the sky.
6:00 - LFU-117-1 MAD RUSH No. 1 (Shaindlin) – Snoop and Blab in car, Gubba mowing lawn.
6:22 - GR-90 THE CHEEKY CHAPPIE (Green) – Snoop calls to Gubba, wife nags him to take triplets to playground. Gubba starts walking with kids.
6:57 - rising scale music (Shaindlin) – Wife nags Gubba about children, groceries, etc.
7:09 - Snooper and Blabber end title theme (Curtin).